Chapter 9: The Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament
What we have
The original New Testament documents, the autographs, have not survived, and nor have the autographs of any ancient work. What we have are copies. The number is very large. The standard register (the Gregory–Aland list) records well over five thousand Greek manuscripts, ranging from small papyrus scraps to complete Bibles. There are also many thousands of manuscripts in early translations (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and others), and thousands of quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the church fathers, so many that the New Testament could be reconstructed almost entirely from the fathers’ writings alone (Metzger and Ehrman 2005). No other ancient book comes close to this wealth of evidence. Many classical works that no one doubts, such as the writings of Tacitus and Caesar’s Gallic War, survive in only a handful of manuscripts, and the oldest copies are separated from the author by centuries (Bruce 1984; Kenyon 1939).
The earliest manuscripts
P52, the John Rylands fragment, a papyrus scrap about the size of a credit card with words from John 18:31-33, 37-38. It is dated to around AD 125, within a generation or two of the Gospel’s composition, and it was found in Egypt, far from Ephesus where tradition says John was written.
The Chester Beatty papyri (P45, P46, P47), from the third century, preserve large portions of the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, and Revelation.
The Bodmer papyri (P66, P75), from about AD 175–225, preserve most of John (P66) and large parts of Luke and John (P75).
Codex Vaticanus (fourth century), held in the Vatican Library, and Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century), which Constantin von Tischendorf found at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844 and 1859 and which is now largely held in the British Library, are the two oldest nearly complete Bibles. Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) is also in the British Library.
The gap between the writing of the New Testament and our earliest copies is thus measured in decades, not centuries, which is far better than for any other writing of antiquity.
Why the manuscripts differ
All handwritten copies contain slips. Scribes misspelt words, skipped lines when the eye jumped between similar endings, repeated a phrase, or occasionally tried to smooth a difficult passage. Counting every variation across all manuscripts gives a very large number, on some counts several hundred thousand, because the count adds up each variation in each manuscript (Metzger and Ehrman 2005). But most of these are trivial: spelling differences, changes of word order, and differences like the use of a name where another manuscript has a pronoun. Only a very small percentage affect the meaning, and of those, scholars can usually determine the original reading by comparing manuscripts. Westcott and Hort, whose 1881 edition shaped modern textual criticism, judged that the text still genuinely in doubt was only a small fraction of the whole. No major doctrine of the Christian faith depends on a disputed reading (Metzger and Ehrman 2005; Wegner 2006).
Textual criticism, the discipline of comparing manuscripts to recover the original wording, is therefore not an enemy of faith. It is a tool, used by believers and sceptics alike, which has led to a very strong confidence in the text.
The Textus Receptus and the critical text
The first printed Greek New Testament was published in 1516 by the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who worked quickly from a small number of late medieval Greek manuscripts. His text, revised by Robert Estienne (Stephanus, 1550) and Theodore Beza, became the basis for the Protestant Reformation translations, including Luther’s German Bible, Tyndale’s English New Testament, and the King James Version. A 1633 printing by the Elzevir publishers advertised it as the text “received by all,” from which came the name Textus Receptus (“received text”).
From the nineteenth century, scholars had access to far older manuscripts that Erasmus never saw (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and the papyri). Editions based on these, such as that of Westcott and Hort (1881) and today’s Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies Greek New Testaments, are known as critical texts. Others favour the Majority Text, the reading found in most of the later manuscripts.
Christians hold differing views on which approach is best. Those who prefer the Textus Receptus or the Majority Text emphasise God’s providential preservation of the text in the churches’ continued use. Those who prefer the critical text emphasise the evidence of the oldest manuscripts. Both sides agree that the manuscript tradition is, in all that matters, intact. Both can read their Bibles with confidence.
The disputed passages
Honest readers should know of the few longer passages about which the manuscripts are divided:
Mark 16:9-20, the longer ending of Mark, is missing from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus; many early fathers knew it, and it is found in most manuscripts.
John 7:53–8:11, the woman taken in adultery, is absent from the oldest Greek manuscripts and appears in different places in later ones.
1 John 5:7, the “three that bear record in heaven” in the King James Version, is not found in any Greek manuscript before the late Middle Ages. It was not in Erasmus’s first and second editions and appeared in his third (1522). The doctrine of the Trinity never depended on it: it is taught plainly in many other passages (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14; John 1:1, 14; Acts 5:3-4).
Many modern Bibles mark these passages in notes; the King James Version prints them in the text. The reader should neither ignore the question nor fear it. These passages affect no doctrine, and the church’s confidence in Scripture stands on the weight of the evidence as a whole.
The promise stands
The manuscripts are human, but the promise is divine. “The word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Peter 1:25). The Lord who inspired the Scriptures has also kept them across the centuries through scribes, churches, and translators, and has brought to light, at the right time, the manuscripts that confirm them.
Summary. The New Testament text is the best-attested text from the ancient world. The existence of variant readings does not undermine its reliability. The careful work of comparing manuscripts has produced a text on which we can rely.