Textual Criticism and Scholarship
Noting that there is not a single manuscript collection in which the word of God has been infallibly preserved does not undermine our confidence in the preservation of the word of God. When we approach this subject, we must remember that we can be confident that the majority of variants–in both the Old and the New Testament–are scribal errors of nothing more than a single letter. Robert Dick Wilson, in his Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, has helpfully noted that the majority of textual variants in the Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts are merely variants involving the vowels w and y. He wrote,
“An examination of the Hebrew manuscripts now in existence shows that in the whole Old Testament there are scarcely any variants supported by more than one manuscript out of 200 to 400, in which each book is found, except in the use of the full and defective writing of the vowels. This full, or defective, writing of the vowels has no effect either on the sound or the sense of the word.”2
The Masoretic text was also that from which the Septuagint (i.e., the Greek translation of the Old Testament) was translated. The differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint exists largely on account of the misunderstanding on the part of the LXX translators. As John Skilton has explained,
“The great majority of the variations between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text arise from the fact that the translators supplied different vowels to the consonantal text from those which the Masoretes employed. In numerous other instances the translators had before them the same text as that of the Masoretes, but mistook it, misunderstood it, or interpreted it differently. At times it is clear that the translators were not at all sure what the Hebrew text before them meant and it is quite possible that at some other times, when they did feel sure of the meaning of the text, they were mistaken.”3
Regarding New Testament variants, Skilton helpfully observed:
“There are many variant readings in the extant manuscripts of the New Testament. Although these variants are very helpful in textual criticism, in enabling us to form judgments about relationships among documents and about the merit of different individual manuscripts, and of groups and families of manuscripts, the great majority of them are trivial.”4
Citing Westcott and Hort, Skilton continued,
“Dr. F. J. A. Hort, who with Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, published an excellent reconstruction of the original text of the Greek New Testament in 1881 and who prepared for their edition the most important treatise on textual criticism that has ever appeared, says of our New Testament text in that treatise that ‘the proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism.’ Hort is of the opinion that ‘the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text.’5
