Why the variety in Bibles, and is that a problem?

A brief analysis of the different philosophies for editing the Greek New Testament.
By Nate Wilson, 2012, for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS (updated in 2024)

If you have read my sermon transcripts on the church website, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been footnoting differences among the ancient manuscripts of Biblical texts. I was reminded of this issue when I got an article in the mail from a pastor friend today about the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts, so I thought I’d write about this.

The books of the New Testament, which were written by the apostles in the first century, were hand-copied for over a thousand years until the invention of the printing press which allowed for mass-production of standardized versions. Now, anything that gets hand-copied is likely to be a little different from the original, and scholars have found thousands of these hand-copied Greek New Testament manuscripts dating all the way back to the second century, so the variants between these copies from one century to the next can be compared. If you plot the number of manuscripts per century, you find that the closer you get to the present day the more manuscripts were copied – which stands to reason, as the population of Christians grew over time. However, it is important to note that the variations between these manuscripts is vanishingly small. To put it into perspective, the differences between the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are far smaller and fewer than the differences between our different English translations of the Bible.

Now, in the present day, there are four basic Greek New Testament editions being printed – each with their own sets of varieties: 1) the Byzantine text (also known as the Patriarchial text, which is what the Greek Orthodox Church uses), 2) the Textus Receptus (which was compiled by a Roman Catholic scholar in Germany named Erasmus, who lived at the time of Luther), 3) the Majority text (which compiled the New Testament according to which wording has the most manuscripts supporting it, which is thereby weighted in favor of the Byzantine texts because that's when the most copying went on), and 4) modern Critical editions developed since 1800 in the West in response to newly-discovered manuscripts which are older than the Byzantine era.¹

Erasmus used only a few Byzantine-era manuscripts to compile the Textus Receptus, but he didn’t have a complete Greek manuscript of the book of Revelation, so he back-translated that from the Latin Vulgate. Thus the Textus Receptus is almost identical to the Majority and Byzantine editions of the Greek New Testament except for the book of Revelation. Because it was printed in Europe during the Enlightenment when there was a revival of interest in classic texts in their original languages, the Textus Receptus was used by protestant reformers as the most accessible alternative to the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate, and it is this Greek text from which the King James English Bible was translated in the early 1600’s.

In the 1800’s, however, some Greek manuscripts of the New Testament dating back to second, third, and fourth centuries (called the Alexandrian text) were discovered by European scholars who compared them with the traditional Greek New Testament manuscripts and compiled what are known as Critical editions, which gave preference to these newly-discovered, older manuscripts in the few cases where they differed from the Byzantine Majority. There are multiple Critical editions, each based upon the manuscripts its editors deemed most authentic. The NASB, NIV, ESV, and other more recent English translations are based on Critical editions.

Adherents to the traditional Textus Receptus criticize the Critical editions for a variety of reasons, some of which I think are invalid: The charge that modern versions omit words in the KJV (and its underlying Textus Receptus) is not reasonable because it could just as well be argued that scribes added these words in the Textus Receptus, and nobody is going to get anywhere with that argument. Next, the charge that the modern versions ignore the vast majority of Greek manuscripts also fails to be convincing because the majority of manuscripts are a thousand years removed from the original, and the smaller number of Greek Manuscripts only a hundred years or so from the original are of considerable interest. The argument that the Textus Receptus was “received” by certain Protestant reformers doesn’t prove much, because it’s not like there were other editions of the Greek New Testament that they had access to. (And the argument that it was “authorized” by an English King who persecuted Protestants is even less compelling!) It has also been argued that since some of the scholars who discovered the oldest New Testament manuscripts in the 1800’s and 1900’s were non-Christians, their research should be dismissed out-of-hand, but I think that, while we should be on guard against error being introduced by non-Christians, nevertheless, non-Christians are capable of honest research in the science of manuscript dating and textual analysis, and their work should be considered. The only argument against the Critical editions that might be plausible to me is the claim that they were rejected by their copyiers because there were too many mistakes in them, so they were stored in a vault and never used in the churches, and that is the source of the Alexandrian manuscripts that were discovered. I have yet to find conclusive evidence for or against this claim, but it seems odd to preserve mistakes so carefully and it is hard to imagine why such expensive animal skins and scribal work would be wasted rather than corrected into a usable form.

The most convincing argument, in my opinion, against the Critical editions used as the basis for modern English translations of the New Testament is the fact that the Byzantine text is all that the Eastern Christians had access to for over a thousand years, and the Textus Receptus is all that most Western Christians access to for hundreds of years. I believe that God would not have allowed an essentially corrupt edition of His word to exist unchallenged like that. God tells us that he will preserve His Word for us from generation to generation (Psalm 12:7, 119:89,152-160, Isaiah 40:8, Matthew 4:4, 24:35, John 10:352 Tim. 3:16-17) and that adding to or taking away from His word is forbidden (Deut. 4:12, 12:32, Prov. 30:6, Rev. 22:18-19).

I do not believe it is wise to fight against the traditional editions of the Greek New Testament; I think they are good enough. However, I still think that continuing study of the ancient manuscripts is worthy of scientific and academic inquiry and may provide further instruction to Christians as we attempt to emphasize what is clear and interpret the less-clear things by the more-clear ones. The truth concerning the documents on which our Bible are based is nothing to be afraid of. God has spoken the truth, and science never has, nor ever will disprove it.

Now, any variation among Bible texts would be very troubling to me if it weren’t for one very important thing: the more I’ve investigated the variants among the different Greek manuscripts, the more I’ve been convinced that they can generally be characterized as synonymous wordings which do not change the meaning or doctrines of the Bible. (The only exceptions are the long, alternate ending to the gospel of Mark – found in the NASB, the story of the woman caught in adultery, and the trinity statement in the KJV of 1 John 5:7, and even in those cases, there is no contradiction to the rest of the Bible, even if manuscript support is questionable.) When we see the way that Jesus and the apostles quote the Old Testament scriptures in the New Testament, we find that they are not always exactly the same as the Hebrew source. I think this is because they had a full knowledge of the original wording and of what it meant and of their contemporary language and how God wanted it applied in their day, and they accordingly wrote out those Old Testament paraphrases in a way that was absolutely faithful to their meaning and to God’s will. Two thousand years later, I think it is therefore the best part of wisdom for me not to change them, but rather to render them as absolutely word-for-word as I can, unless I know for sure that I have latitude to go beyond a word-for-word translation – take, for instance the Greek word “Idou,” translated “behold” in the KJV, which I think can faithfully be translated, “Look” or even “Check this out!”

In my sermon preparation, it is absolutely astounding to have chased down variant after variant week after week, year after year, and in every single case find no basic change of meaning or contradiction to other Biblical teachings. It is truly amazing what God has done to preserve His word, despite slight variations in copies. I don’t care whether you translate the New Testament from the Byzantine, Textus Receptus, Majority, or Critical editions (as long as their committees don’t go off the deep end in a future edition), you have a well-preserved copy of what the apostles wrote, and if you have an English Bible that was translated from one of those by honest Greek scholars (which would rule out dishonest translations like the New World Translation or the work of the Jesus Seminar), then you have a Bible you can trust is truly the word of God.