What would you say to someone who told you the New Testament isn’t reliable?
What if he told you there were more variations in the existing New Testament manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament?
What if he was right?
According to Robert Stewart, associate professor of philosophy and theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, believers need to “separate the facts from the interpretation of the facts.”
People often tout that there are 138,000 words in the New Testament and somewhere around 300,000 to 400,000 variations between manuscripts. When you say it that way, it sounds like a huge problem, Stewart said.
But talking about variants that way is “somewhat deceptive,” he said. There are around 100 million words in the New Testament when the total number of words from all the manuscripts is counted in the same way that the variations are counted.
“The result when counting apples to apples is that less than 1 percent of the text of the New Testament is problematic in any way,” Stewart said. “Do you see how the way you present the data influences people?”
Why are there so many manuscripts of the New Testament with variants anyway?
“Because Christians were copying these books like mad,” he said. “They were under persecution, and they wanted as many copies as possible because they (the manuscripts) were important.”
As a result, errors were made by the scribes — spelling and nonsense errors, mistakes due to poor eyesight, short-term memory errors and errors in judgment.
It wasn’t because someone was trying to edit the manuscripts for content, Stewart said.
“Nobody controlled the process,” he said, noting that anybody and everybody were copying the texts. “This means there were errors, but it also means that nobody had the control to take out unpopular doctrines that Jesus taught from the texts.”
Christians can have a high degree of confidence in the Greek text of the New Testament as we have it today, Stewart said. The presence of variants in the texts shouldn’t affect that, he said.
And the errors made by scribes don’t affect the inerrancy of Scripture either, Stewart said.
“Inerrancy refers to the text as originally given (from God),” he said. “Inspiration relates only to the biblical authors, not to the thousands of scribes who copied their work.”
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