happypeppie said:
I've been following another post. Read this one:
http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=21005761&postcount=49
Here's a quote:
So if this is true, why do some of the versions not have Matthew 17:21?? If there is that much preparation, and if one mistake is made the whole paper is destroyed and reprinted, why is there that verse missing. And if it was added in, why didn't they attach it to another verse instead of having the other versions missing a number???
I spent several years studying for my major in textual criticism, and one thing that I know I can state as categorically true is that your citation is NOT true when it came to the copyists of the New Testament in the first several centuries of the Church. Many of the copyists couldn't even read what they were copying, they were acting more like an early copy machine. They would duplicate, to the best of their drawing ability, what they saw on the manuscripts that they were given to copy.
Many of the variant readings are the result of this simple truth. There weren't that many people around who could read and write to keep up with the demand for copies of the manuscripts. Later, as there were more copyists who were better, but not greatly trained, there were different variant readings that you can see creeping into the text. I can't recall the designation of the text, but there is one variant reading where the copyist wrote in the margin of the text he was working on, "My back is killing me." Later copies of this family text that complaint was included as part of the text for at least two generations before someone realized what was happening and dropped the phrase from the next copy.
Then there was the stage where the copyists began to take it upon themselves to add things to the text because they felt that something needed clarification or that something had been left out. This period gave us the greatest number of variant readings among the Greek manuscripts.
Lest you think that the Bible we have today is untrustworthy, consider this, with the more than 5,300 extant Greek manuscripts there are slightly more than a quarter million variant readings. Now I know that on the surface that would seem to say that, absolutely not, we don't have a trustworthy Bible. But, the majority of those variant readings are spelling errors in names. And a variant isn't counted just once, it is counted for each time it appears in later copies. So if Yakov made a mistake in spelling a word, and 2,300 copies were made with that same variant, that one variant counts as 2,301 variants. Makes that quarter million variants seem a lot smaller doesn't it.
Then we have the variants where a word may have been dropped accidently, or a word doubled, or even whole phrases copied in the wrong place because the copyist was getting tired and was working from the light of a candle in a windowless room. When you consider all of the variant readings 99% have absolutely NO effect upon the Bible at all. That final 1% that does have some significance still changes NOT ONE doctrine. The whole KJV vs. NASV vs. NKJV debate is a waste of time, because not one thing of any true importance has been affected by the variant readings. Almost all of the variants have been studied and explained as to how and when they actually entered the text families that they were found in.
In my own Church I preach and teach from The Biblia Hebraica or my UBS Greek Testament translating on the fly as I go. When I am teaching and preaching in another church, Bible College or Seminary I always ask what the preferred version of the majority of the listeners is, and I use that version. Why? Because the most important thing is that we are teaching the Truth of G-d and it is there in most of the Translations. I will even use the NIV if necessary, and it is the only modern translation that I have some serious issues with. But I don't really want to get into that here.
