Has God Preserved His Word?

by Daniel B. Wallace

An axiom of orthodoxy is that Christians must base their faith on the word of God. Sola scriptura, as the Reformers put it. The only problem is, we no longer have the original documents that comprise the Bible. We have copies of copies of copies of the original, but not the autographs. And no two copies agree completely. In fact, the two closest ancient copies of the New Testament differ as much as ten times per chapter. This raises an important twofold question: How can we go about recovering the wording of the original and what is at stake in the textual variants?

Let's consider the case of the New Testament manuscripts. On the one hand, we have more manuscript copies of the New Testament than any other ancient literature. There are about 20 copies of the average ancient Greek author's writings. The New Testament, on the other hand, has over 5,600 manuscripts in Greek alone, plus thousands of copies in Latin, Coptic, Syriac and other ancient translations.

Altogether, the manuscripts of the New Testament are approximately 1,000 times more plentiful than the copies of the average ancient Greek writer. The New Testament manuscripts stand closer to the original and are more plentiful than any other Greek or Latin literature. Whatever doubts are cast on the wording of the New Testament must be cast 100-fold on any other Greek literature. The real problem in determining the wording of the original New Testament text is not lack of data but an embarrassment of riches.

At the same time, as we have noted, those manuscripts disagree with each other — a lot. There are, in fact, between 300,000 and 400,000 textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts. That's approximately two to three times the size of the Greek New Testament itself. But this statistic is far less sensational than it sounds. The variants can be grouped into four categories: (1) spelling differences, (2) differences that do not affect translation or involve mere synonyms, (3) meaningful variants that are not viable and (4) meaningful variants that are viable. We will briefly look at these issues, then summarize the findings of experts at the end of this paper.

Spelling Differences. The majority of textual variants belong to the first category. For example, one of the most common variants is whether the letter nu belongs at the end of a word. Much like "an" vs. "a," this movable nu was not consistently applied in the manuscripts. But it changes nothing: No doctrinal issues are impacted, no interpretive or translation issues are affected. And this is the largest category of variants.

Differences that do not affect translation or involve mere synonyms. The next largest category involves differences that do not impact the meaning or translation of the text. For example, Greek uses the definite article "the" before proper names at times (e.g., "the Mary"), while English does not. Whether that article is present or not does not make any difference for the translation. Or consider the fact that Greek is a highly inflected language. Word order is far more flexible because subjects and objects can be determined by the inflected endings of the words. But there is no appreciable difference between saying "God loves you" and "you loves God" in Greek, since in each instance "God" is the subject and "you" is the object.

Meaningful but not viable. The next largest category includes those variants that do impact the meaning of the text, but their poor pedigree destroys their chances of being the original wording. The wording that is found in a few late medieval manuscripts, or one highly idiosyncratic manuscript, though meaningful, simply has no claim to authenticity. For example, a lone manuscript written in 1847 A.D.  gives the title of the book of Revelation as "The Revelation of the all-glorious Evangelist, bosom-friend [of Jesus], virgin, beloved to Christ, John the theologian, son of Salome and Zebedee, but adopted son of Mary the Mother of God, and Son of Thunder."1 Obviously, a scribe almost 18 centuries removed from the original text is not going to somehow record the original wording while the hundreds of other scribes somehow let it slip through their nets! Although this is a meaningful variant, it has nothing to do with the wording of the original text.

Meaningful and viable. The smallest category by far is the meaningful and viable variants. These constitute about one percent of all the textual variants. Whether Paul said, "we have peace with God" or "let us have peace with God" in Romans 5:1 (in Greek, the difference involves only one letter) certainly affects the meaning. But the larger question is, do such variants affect basic doctrines? Remarkably, of the hundreds of thousands of variants, there is not a single viable one that alters a fundamental of the Christian faith. Why, if we didn't know better, we might be tempted to think that God's providence was somehow involved!

The deity of Christ is affirmed in the earliest manuscripts just as it is in the later ones; He rises bodily from the dead in all the Gospel manuscripts; and salvation is always by grace alone. We may not know the original wording in every place, but we can have confidence that no fundamental truth has been tampered with. In spite of those who make outlandish claims otherwise, the evidence is all on the side of the truth. What you have in your hands today is essentially what was written back then.2

1 Cited in Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 662.

2 For a detailed examination of the claims of The Da Vinci Code that the New Testament text has been tampered with, see J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: What The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don't Tell You (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, not yet published).

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