The vast majority of these differences are completely unimportant, immaterial, insignificant, and don’t matter for a thing, other than to show that ancient Christian scribes could spell no better than most people can today. Most scholars think that there are some 300,000 or 400,000 differences among these copies.
We don’t know how many differences there are among our surviving copies – by last count we had some 5560 copies in the original Greek language of the New Testament – but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. All of these surviving copies are different from other another, giving different wording for this verse and that verse, up and down the line, page after page over the entire New Testament. That in itself is not a problem, apart from a related circumstance. The vast majority of our copies are from many hundreds of years after the originals. But none of our copies are the originals or copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the originals. We have thousands and thousands of later copies of the New Testament. In the case of the New Testament we have a highly ironic and problematic situation on our hands.
#DAN WALLACE FAVORITE TEXT NOT IN THE BIBLE HOW TO#
It does not refer to any study of “texts.” It is specifically the study of how to establish what an author wrote if we do not have his or her actual writings, but only later copies of them. The term “textual criticism” is a technical term. I have known Dan for over thirty years, since we were both graduate students interested in similar areas of research: my field (at the time I too was an evangelical) was textual criticism, the study of the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and of what they can tell us about the “original” writings of the New Testament his field was the grammar of the Greek New Testament. He is also the author of several books, including Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus. On February 1, I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Daniel Wallace, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar who teaches at that bastion of conservative dispensationalist theology, Dallas Theological Seminary.
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