Textual Variants

The standard Greek New Testament of today has 138,162 words. It is a simple fact that out of the 5,745 biblical manuscripts that we have through the end of 2006, we find all sorts of variations between them. These variations are called "variants," which are "any place among the manuscripts of the New Testament where there is not uniformity of wording." How many textual variants are there? The best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 variants between the numerous manuscripts. That number sounds daunting and discouraging to the believer and enthralling to the skeptic and atheist. Indeed, it is disturbing to many believers to see such instances of differentiation but they do exist. Because they do exist, we must deal with them. We can not afford to "stick our head in the sand" and pretend the variants do not exist. In the pages of this document, we will look at the issue of variants and discover how variants came to exist in biblical manuscripts and what they mean for the reliability of Scripture.