Equipping University

The very phrase textual criticism conjures up an abstract academic exercise which leads many to remain unconvinced of the need to learn of this science. Pastors are ignore the subject for fear that church members will find it boring, overly technical, impractical, or that their faith (their own and the congregations') may be undermined in the process. Pastors fear the fallout of church members learning of the many variants that exist in the previously understood "golden tablets" of the New Testament manuscripts. While it is true that textual criticism can be technical and can be communicated in such a way as to threaten people's faith (see Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus), it need not be the case. The average church member can grasp the material. Furthermore it is a far more dangerous thing to leave church members uneducated of the history of their Bible. Opponents of the faith know this information; so should the people of faith.

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 Scri

It is amazing that we know anything of the New Testament. The early church had no great libraries or sanctuaries in which to store its books. Persecution began early and continued for a few hundred years. During the first three hundred years of persecution and the years after of freedom, the New Testament was continuously copied and recopied as believers held fervently to the only thing that could sustain them ��� the revealed Word of God. A study of the transmission of the Bible during this time period reveals much of how we got the Bible that we have today. Read of the amazing number of ancient manuscripts that have been discovered so far. Learn the names and characteristics of the more famous and important of these ancient manuscripts (with pictures of sample pages).