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100 Reasons to Believe New Testament History
9. Manuscript Variations
Although the agreement between New Testament manuscripts is quite substantial, it is wrong to believe they are word-for-word identical. They are not. Among the thousands of extant manuscripts are variations in the spelling of certain names, obvious slips of the pen, and the transposition of certain words (for example "Jesus Christ" in one manuscript might read "Christ Jesus" in another.)
Such variations show us that these documents were being copied over a wide geographical area independently from each other. In other words, the variations we see in the New Testament manuscripts make it clear that there was no early attempt to edit the text in order to make it conform to some standard A. The story appears then, not to be some contrived account, but history accurately preserved for us today B.
9. Manuscript Variations - Notes and References
A. "The interesting and important thing about the late-second-century text is this: at that early date there was already a wide diversity of variants. These variants were of course mostly quite minor in character, but they show that there had been no recent systematic editing of the documents to make them conform to some standard version." John W. Wenham, "Christ and the Bible", Downer's Grove, Ill., 1973, p. 178
B. "Not a single teaching of the Christian faith is affected by these variations, nor is any major historical aspect of the Gospel narratives or early Christianity affected." Alister E. McGrath, (Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University and Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, consulting editor at "Christianity Today"), "In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture", Anchor Books, a Division of Random House, N.Y., 2001, p. 242
"The real text of the sacred writings is competently exact, nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost, choose as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design, out of the whole lump of readings." Charles Fremont Sitterly, "Text and Manuscripts of the New Testament," in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Chicago: Howard-Severance Co., 1915).