Posted on by Joelendil · 5 Comments

“Did God really say…”

Earlier this week, I said I would probably follow up on my post about reading through the Greek New Testament and looking at all the listed variants. Well, here you go!

If you listen to certain skeptics, they will tell you that there are thousands upon thousands of differences between ancient New Testament manuscripts and that this means we have little to no idea of what the original text actually says. While they might be technically right about the thousands of variant readings, the vast majority of those differences are simply variations in spelling that have no impact on how a given passage is understood or translated (think: honor vs. honour or night vs. nite). These and similarly insignificant variants do not appear in the apparatus of the edition I read, but the more significant ones that were listed (and there are still hundreds of them) are still not of a nature that calls into question the message of Scripture. As I read through them, almost all fell into one of these broad categories:

  • Which title(s) of Jesus or God are used in the passage and in which order do they occur? (e.g. Lord vs. God / Jesus Christ vs. Christ Jesus vs. Lord Jesus Christ)
  • Does the writer use the first person or second person plural? (i.e. we vs. you – which are one letter off and sound virtually identical in later dialects of Koine Greek)
  • Is the wording in parallel passages (e.g. in the synoptic Gospels) identical or merely similar (but virtually identical in meaning)?
  • Which conjunction or preposition (most of which are very flexible and heavily overlap in meaning) is used to connect clauses?
  • Is the subject or object implied or explicitly stated? (e.g. He said vs. Jesus said vs. Jesus said to him)
  • A little more rarely, but a bit more impactful: Which verb tense/voice/mood (or noun case/number/gender) is used? (e.g. we have peace with God vs. let us have peace with God)

In many instances, it is easy to determine which reading is original with a high degree of certainty (based on age, character, and geographic distribution of manuscripts as well as an understanding of scribal practices). However, even when this is not the case, the nature of these variants is not such that it radically alters or calls into question the meaning of the text.

There are a few variants that are a verse long, and two that are longer than a verse (the longer ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery). Most of these are easily resolved by looking at the textual evidence, and none of them contain a teaching whose presence or absence changes a teaching of the faith (unless you are “snake-handler,” but that practice is a gross misapplication of those verses anyway).

This is kind of “pet topic” of mine, so I’m trying to refrain from babbling on or going into a lot of technical jargon. Short version: personally looking at all the variants listed in the UBS5 Greek New Testament confirmed/increased my confidence that we do indeed have a highly reliable, absurdly well-preserved New Testament.

Posted on by Joelendil · 2 Comments

NT in Koiné

Title: The Greek New Testament (GNT)
Edition: United Bible Society, 5th Edition (UBS5)
Genre: Sacred Scripture
Pages: 886 (plus indices etc.)
Rating: 5 of 5

For my Bible reading this year, I decided to read the New Testament in the original Koiné Greek. Because it’s been 10+ years since my last seminary class, I used the electronic Logos software edition where tapping on an unfamiliar word provides its gloss & parsing (I used this feature a lot in Luke, Acts, Hebrews, & 2 Peter).

Reading Scripture in the original language doesn’t give it some sort of magical power boost, nor is each Greek word brimming with extra-deep insights unavailable to the uninitiated. However, as with reading any work in its original language, you do get a better feel for the flow of thought, vocabulary choices, and idiosyncrasies of the individual writers…and there is a certain thrill to reading the words as read by the original recipients unmediated by someone else’s translation.

But, how do we know that what we’re reading almost 2,000 years later hasn’t been corrupted (on purpose or accidentally) over generations of hand-copying? Well, we have thousands of hand-written manuscripts containing all or part of the New testament, with dates ranging from early 2nd century through about the 16th, and they overwhelmingly agree with each other. Obviously, some minor differences between manuscripts occur, but in scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament (like the UBS5 I read) there is an apparatus at the bottom of each page the notes significant variations between manuscripts and lists the evidence for each possible reading (the Nestle-Aland 28th Edition (NA28) lists more variants, but most of the additional ones are of little interest/importance for translating the text).

As I read, I looked at each of the variants recorded in the UBS5, often consulting Bruce Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament which provides a scholarly rationale for which reading is deemed most likely to be original (and the level of certainty). In college and seminary I was always taught that most variants have little to no effect on the meaning of the verse in which they occur, and none of them affect a major doctrine of the faith. After this read-through, I have to agree with that assessment…not that I really doubted it, but I wanted to see for myself. I’ll post more on this later in the week, but right now I’m too tired to go into it.

For now, I’ll end by saying that this was a great experience, and if you’ve had enough college/seminary classes to be comfortable with it, I highly recommend trying to read through the whole GNT (examining each variant not necessary…that’s just my own interest in textual criticism popping up).