Who Cares??? Do the Variants in the Manuscripts Matter for Anything?
Ever since I wrote Misquoting Jesus readers have asked – these are usually conservative Christians with a high view of Scripture, but not always – whether any of the differences in the manuscripts of the New Testament actually *matter* for anything. I have often pointed out that there are hundreds of thousands of differences among our surviving manuscripts. We don’t know exactly how many because no one has been able to count them all. Are there 200,000? 300,000? 400,000? We don’t know. But what we do know, as I’ve repeatedly said (as was first pointed out to me by no less an authority than my mentor, Bruce Metzger), there are more variant readings in the manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. But do any of the variants actually *matter*? This has become an issue with some of the readers of the blog over the past week or so as I have been devoting a thread to the question of whether it makes sense to talk about the “original” [...]