Illustration of Bible text manuscript tree
and variant readings
The following diagram illustrates manuscript corruptions in the biblical texts that are produced, for whatever reason, and copied down to later manuscripts. The purpose of the illustration is to show how copy errors in the Bible are transmitted from one manuscript to another, how they are counted, and how we can determine which is the correct reading.
In this example, of the 26 existing manuscripts (represented by solid black and red sheets), nine of them have a textual problem where a phrase was incorrectly copied. Therefore, in this illustration, we would have a total of nine variants in 26 manuscripts.
However, manuscripts can be categorized in family trees by analyzing their location of discovery, jars found in, type of papyri written on, type of ink used, style of writing, etc. Therefore, daughter manuscripts can be matched very accurately to father manuscripts.
In this example we see that the word "only" was omitted from a 3rd century document and copied in subsequent, daughter documents. All we need to do is to take a look at the manuscripts - and even though we see nine variants here, we can tell that there is only one error which has been copied several times. Also, we can accurately determine which is the correct reading by looking at the oldest document. Generally, the oldest documents are the most accurate.
With this type of method the New Testament documents can be
reconstructed with an incredible accuracy. Furthermore, the
New Testament is approximately 99.5% textually pure. This
means that of all the manuscripts in existence, they agree
completely 99.5% of the time. Of the variants that occur,
most are
easily explainable and very few have any effect on the meaning of
passages. In all, no New Testament doctrine is affected by
any variant reading.
So, the New Testament is extremely reliable and can be
trusted without hesitation.
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