Textual variants in the New Testament

Textual variants in the New testament are the subject of the study called textual criticism of the New Testament. Textual variants in manuscripts arise when a copyist makes deliberate or inadvertent alterations to a text being reproduced. Some common alterations include the deletion, rearrangement, repetition, or replacement of one or more words when the copyist's eye returns to a similar word in the wrong location of the original text. If their eye skips to an earlier word, they may create a repetition (error of dittography). If their eye skips to a later word, they may create an omission, or they may resort to performing a slight rearranging of words to retain the overall meaning without compromising the context. In other instances, the copyist may add text from memory from a similar or parallel text in another location. Otherwise, they may also replace some text of the original with an alternative reading. Spellings occasionally change. Synonyms may be substituted. A pronoun may be changed into a proper noun (such as "he said" becoming "Jesus said").

Origen, writing in the 3rd century, was one of the first who made remarks about differences between manuscripts of texts that were eventually collected as the New Testament. He declared his preferences among variant readings. For example, in Matthew 27:16–17, he favored "Barabbas" against "Jesus Barabbas" (In Matt. Comm. ser. 121). In John 1:28, he preferred "Bethabara" over "Bethany" as the location where John was baptizing (Commentary on John VI.40 (24)). "Gergeza" was preferred over "Geraza" or "Gadara" (Commentary on John VI.40 (24) – see Matthew 8:28). At Hebrews 2:9, Origen noticed two different readings: "apart from God" and "by the grace of God".

John Mill's 1707 Greek New Testament was estimated to contain some 30,000 variants in its accompanying textual apparatus which was based on "nearly 100 [Greek] manuscripts."Eberhard Nestle estimated this number in 1897 as 150,000–200,000 variants.Bart D. Ehrman has estimated that there are "between 200,000–400,000 variants [in] several million pages of manuscripts," and in 2014 Eldon J. Epp raised the estimate as high as 750,000. The most recent estimate puts the number of non-spelling variants among New Testament manuscripts around 500,000.

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