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if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on him


Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens.
                                                                                    Psalm 119:89
If a man digs a pit, he will fall into it; if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on him.
                                                                                    Proverbs 26:27 

            According to Prof. Bart Ehrman (University of NC at Chapel Hill) there are more textual variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words.[1] If you accept what he says without thinking and investigating, you'll likely join him in thinking that the Bible is unreliable, that Psalm 119:89 is a lie.
            One of the reasons that there are so many textual variations is that there are so many manuscripts. There are 274 Uncial[2] manuscripts, 2555 Miniscule[3] manuscripts and 2280 Lectionary manuscripts. There are 10 thousand non-Latin translations  and 8000 Latin translations (Vulgate). In addition, there are more than a million quotes in the writings of the Church patriarchs. Some of these date back to the second century. In comparison, there are 643 manuscripts of Homer's the Iliad, the earliest of which was copied 500 years after the original.
            The professor concludes that because there are so many variations (one writer claimed half a million) it is impossible to know what the New Testament originally said. The first problem with this claim is that it doesn't account for the types of variations involved. Many of them are as simple as spelling changes, transpositions of letters or words, omission of a word because the words around it either begin or end similarly or other unintentional copy errors that do not change the meaning of the text. The second problem with this claim is that because we have so many manuscripts, we can compare them and build "family trees" with them, this allows us to watch the changes take place. We can follow them back as geneticists the human genome and determine that some of us of European stock have Neanderthal heritage.
            Very few of the variations are described as substantive and meaningful. They do not change the meaning of the text in a way that changes any major doctrine. When you read a study Bible, you may find notes on some passages saying something like "This passage is not included in some early manuscripts."

            At this point, we have no reason to say that it's impossible to know what the original manuscripts said. We have strong reason to believe that we know what the vast majority of the text said, and where there is question, we can know there is question. The reason we have that strong reason is precisely because of his claimed reason we should doubt it.
            To those who wish we had the originals, Daniel B. Wallace (a leading expert on ancient Greek) suggests that it is a good thing we don't, because it's likely they would be treated as relics: venerated but not examined.
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Birthday of Adolf Hitler


[1] Ehrman, Bart, Misquoting Jesus:The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible and Why. (San Fransisco, Harper San Francisco, 2005) p.10.
[2] capital letters only
[3] capital and lower case letters

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