How can the Bible be inerrant if it contains a variance? Some people would say this way. How can the Bible be inerrant if we know it has errors?

I don’t use that word errors because that insinuates that there is something that’s incorrect. There are variances, differences between the manuscripts, but that does not make them errors.

In Bart Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus,” he claims that the Bible cannot be the inspired word of God since it’s filled with variants. Does 2 Timothy 3:16-17 still hold true? Do we have a reliable copy of the Bible, yet filled with these variances?

When we compare ancient copies we have of manuscripts of the New Testament, a lot of people don’t realize that we don’t have the original copies of any New Testament book.

As a matter of fact, that’s something I think is important for us to tell our young people, to tell our high school students, and to tell our college students before somebody else tells them in a way that is deceptive. We need to make sure that they know that you know that we don’t have an original book.

For example, if you wanted to know what the original constitution of the United States said, you could very easily go to the Washington, DC museum where the constitution is sitting under glass and you could read the original manuscript, the original document, to see if it says what you’ve been told it says. But you can’t do that for any New Testament book.

There is no original gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Book of Acts or any of the letters of Paul. We don’t have the originals. These things were written on materials that deteriorated pretty quickly and as a result, we don’t have an original copy.

What we have are copies years later and these copies, when we compare the copies to each other, the oldest manuscripts we have, we discover that there are differences between the manuscripts.

A lot of Bible versions, as well as the original KJV, have footnotes showing where some manuscripts vary from others. Often there is an editor note as to why the translators chose a particular wording. There are scribal changes and the textual variants that we see in the manuscripts. Maybe you’re not even aware of it.

A lot of Christians weren’t aware of it until people started writing popular books like the book “Jesus Interrupted” by Bart Ehrman. This book shook a lot of people who were Christians for their entire life because they weren’t aware of the presence of some of these textual variants and their first contact was Bart who basically showed them these things in this book. Now

Bart’s an interesting guy. He’s a professor of religious studies and is one of the foremost textual scholars. He went to Moody Bible Institute. He grew up in the church. He was a young Christian, went to Moody. He also went to Wheaton College. Then he did his graduate work at Princeton. He studied underneath one of the greatest biblical scholars in history. Bruce Metzger.

During that time he became less and less confident, more and more agnostic. And today I think you would probably say he’s an atheist, yet he’s considered to be one of the foremost in New Testament scholars. And he writes books and he talks about why and what shook him as a new Christian.

Bart Ehrman says, “There was an obvious problem with the claim that the Bible was verbally inspired down to its very words. As we learned at Moody in one of the very first courses in the curriculum, we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament.” We have our copies of these writings made many years later, but that was troublesome for him.

He is right that none of these copies is completely accurate. Since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and or intentionally changed them in places. All scribes did this. So rather than actually having the inspired words of the autographs, the originals of the Bible, what we have are the error written copies of the autographs.

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have the copies of the copies of the originals or the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals.

That sounds troublesome, doesn’t it? What we have our copies made later much later. In most instances, they’re copies made many centuries later and these copies all differ from one another in many thousands of places.

Skeptics jump on these variances to claim the Bible is not reliable. I’m not sure how many of us would even be able to respond to some of these charges or how we might feel if we heard them for the first time.

One such “variant” is found in John 6:58.

John 6:58 in the KJV (King James Version) says, “This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.”

The ASV (American Standard Version) says, “This is the bread which came down out of heaven: not as the fathers ate, and died; he that eateth this bread shall live for ever.”

But the ESV (English Standard Version) says, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”

Notice, the ESV has bread 3 times. The KJV has bread twice, but the third bread is replaced with the word manna. The ASV removes the middle bread. So the ESV and the KJV seem to agree, while the ASV is different.

The word the bread is removed. That doesn’t really impress me as a really big deal. Does that strike you as a big deal? There are some copies in which the bread is missing, but it still says the same thing. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the fathers ate and died.

It appears that some scribe along the way inserted the word bread, or manna, for clarity. Or it may have been inserted accidentally. Then copies of that copy would be copied and the word is now in there in late dated manuscripts.

I don’t know how it got there, but there are some texts that have this variant, but this isn’t the only variant in this chapter of John.

How about this one? In the KJV, John 6:59 says, “These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum.”There are some early versions of this that don’t the word Jesus instead of the word “he.”

Some Christians will get all worked up over something like this, claiming that translators are taking the name of Jesus out of the Bible when it isn’t the translators, it is the manuscripts they are working from.

Skeptics see this and say the Bible has errors, or that we can’t know what the Bible said when it was written because of the differences in the manuscripts we have. Technically you could argue that there’s a variant in the text, but is it an important variant? I think it’s a meaningless variant, but we have to at least admit there is a variant in the text.

We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament. They are copies of copies of copies of copies. These were hand-copied, no printing press, no computer. Some words can be accidentally omitted. Some words can be added for various reasons including for clarity or just copying the same line twice. Sometimes editors notes in the margin of copies got inserted into the text of later copies. We should expect to see variances.

I don’t have a problem with this. But I’ll bet for some Christians even seeing these kinds of variants could be troublesome.

If you’re not aware of these things, if you’re college-age students or you’re a high school student and you are confronted with this many alterations on just any page of scripture, this much red ink, you might be troubled by it.

We have literally thousands of manuscripts to support the New Testament, but among them, they have more variants than there are words. Most of the variants are just misspellings and minor things that do not affect the text at all.

Other times, scribe notes in the margin would become part of the text as the next copiest did not know if the margin note was something left out, or just a note,

Now for a lot of young people, this could be troubling. Number one, they never knew that we didn’t have an original manuscript. Number two, they didn’t realize that when we compare the manuscripts there are differences.

Even Bart Ehrman, an atheist, would say these differences do not impact the nature of Jesus or any Orthodox position of Christianity. But clearly, a claim like there are more variations between the ancient documents than there are words in the New Testament would shake the faith of most young people who had never heard that before.

If we see there are variations between the text, how can we say that this is the inerrant word of God? And number two, more importantly, how do we even know what the original said? How do we know what the original said if all we have are later copies and these copies don’t agree? Well, of course, there’s a process that we use by comparing the manuscripts.

As a matter of fact, the fact that we have so many manuscripts makes this complaint about variations between manuscripts a nonargument because we’re able to identify where they are, and then remove them and return these copies to the inerrant original version of the text.

Here is an example. Many of the copies of manuscripts were made in scriptoriums. In the scriptorium, a reader would read the Gospel or Epistle and scribes would write down what was said.

Naturally, there would be errors caused by fatigue or hearing something incorrectly and other reasons. Other times, an individual would copy a part of the Bible, the letters and books on hand. Sometimes these were professional scribes, other times it was just church members that wanted their own copy.

Errors and corrections could enter in there. These copies would be copied, and misspellings, additions, notes and other changes, accidental or purposeful, would be passed on.

Let’s go to our bookshelf. We pick out a book, say a short story by Mark Twain. We assemble 20 college students. Ten of the students will write down the story as it is read to them, as in a scriptorium. The other ten will copy the story direct from the book. Shortly we will have twenty copies.

The copies will have differences. Some words may be spelled wrong. Some words may be replaced with a similar-sounding word if our listeners did not hear correctly or our reader mispronounced or mumbled a word. Some lines may be missing when a copiest inadvertently skips over it. We will have 20 copies, but all will have errors or variants.

We now give the copies to an individual or committee, who have never heard or read Mark Twain’s short story. he copies all have variants, but our committee will have no problem restoring the story to its original form. Why? Because although there will be mistakes or changes by the copyists, the copyists will not make the same changes.

Now, let’s say we repeat the process, but make twenty copies of each of the copies in the same manner. We now have 400 copies. Mistakes made in the original copies will carry into the new copies, but with so many copies, our committee can easily restore the story.

This is the beautiful dilemma we have as Christians because we have this kind of depth of manuscript to compare one to the other. If you look at the number of manuscripts that we have compared to manuscripts of the secular or non-Christian literature, ancient literature, there is no comparison.

There is much more manuscript evidence and older manuscripts than any other piece of ancient literature. We have the number of copies needed to get this job done.

Now you’ve seen both what the variants are, the nature of the variance between manuscripts and you’ve also seen the nature of how we remove variance.

How do we deal with variants in a way that it returns us to the original? We do that of course by comparing manuscripts. And so every translation you have a committee coming together and looking at manuscripts from various sources.

These are copies or later in history than the original, but these are the earliest copies we have. And if we compare them to each other, we can identify where these variants are and we can start to remove them, return to the most reliable original words we find in the text.

That’s important, but even more important, I think that the question could be asked, if you’re looking at manuscripts that date to the second or third century, how do you know if the claims weren’t changed in the first two or 300 years?

Isn’t it possible before we have an existent copy of the scripture? What if major changes took place and now all we have is a copy with alterations.

This is where the church fathers can actually do us a service. Here’s what I mean by that. It turns out that the original eyewitnesses who wrote down scripture, say for example the apostle John, had students.

John had people that he shared what he knew about Jesus with them. And these folks became leaders in the local churches at the time and wrote their own letters to congregations. In other words, we can capture the teaching of John related to Jesus by reading the non-canonical ancient letters by his students.

These are not in your Bible, but they are ancient letters are written by the students of John in which they talk about what John taught them. So if you’re wondering if the virgin birth or the deity of Christ or the fact that he worked miracles and ascended into heaven were in the originals or added later, we have other sources to collaborate the stories.

It turns out that all of these claims about the foundational truths of Christianity and the foundational truth of Jesus are repeated by the students of the Gospel authors.

You can do the same thing by the way if for example, using Clement, when he writes about what he learned from Paul. These are all very early documents. So we know that the claims themselves, the overarching story of Jesus, his deity, his supernatural nature, that’s not added later in history.

Those are from the very beginning because the students sitting at the feet of the eyewitnesses and the Gospel authors are repeating these claims.

With all the evidence for the accuracy of the Gospels, we wonder why everyone is not a believer. Can’t a person just study out how the Bible was preserved by multiple copies and restored by competent textual critics bring them to saving faith in Christ?

It turns out there are more than simply the facts and the evidence is that play into this kind of thing. It is where your heart is inclined to. What you want to be true sometimes will override what is true.

Many have cold hearts and will dismiss the Bible and the claims of Christ no matter what evidence is made available. But as Christians, we can be confident that the Bible we hold in our hands are the words of God and that we have what the Lord wants us to know.

When we say we have an inerrant Bible, we mean that the original copy, the original manuscript, the autograph, not a copy, the autograph, the original written by Matthew written by Mark, written by John, these original documents are the inerrant word of God.

But we’ve got a process in place that allows us to return reliably to the inerrant original. So when I say I know from the facts, from the evidence, that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, what I mean is we have the manuscript evidence and the intellectual ability to return reliably to the inerrant original document.

There is no doubt we have what the original authors wrote and what God wants us to have. And part of the beauty of the Bible is the way God has preserved it for his people.

If we only had one copy. One complete Greek manuscript, no other copies, no variants, we could not know for sure we had a correct copy. We could not know if one person had taken the original story and rewrote it, making major changes.

Because we have so many copies from so many regions, and even early translations into other languages, we can be quite confident that we have the original message passed on to us accurately.

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