Some variants appear in only a single ( late) manuscript, and thus the chances of them being in the original text are extremely low.įrom those two options, we can create a list of four types of Textual Variant. These Textual Variants have a decent chance of having the wording of the original document. For example, if one manuscript said “Jesus was happy” and another says “Jesus was sad”, that’s a meaningful variant because it changes the meaning of the text. These textual variants have an impact on what the text means. □ We can broadly class all Textual Variants into two classes. What “Textual Variants”? How bad are They?įortunately, they just aren’t that bad. When two copies disagree with each other, you have a variant in the text between two documents: this is ( unsurprisingly) called a “Textual Variant”. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the scribes who did the copying occasionally made some mistakes. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press in the early-mid 1400s, everything was copied by hand. So what we have are copies of copies of the original ( sometimes many generations of copying deep). Those copies were copied, which were copied, which were copied, which were … However, the originals were copied many, many times. They were originally written on either papyrus ( essentially paper) or possibly parchment ( animal skins) which have long since degraded with time and use. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but we don’t have the original documents that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and other New Testament writers wrote. A “textual critic” is not someone who criticizes the Bible, but someone who tries their best to reconstruct the original text. The practice of Textual Criticism is not “ criticizing the Bible“, it’s trying to recover the Bible’s original text. The study of the copies of a written document whose original ( the autograph) is unknown or non-existent, for the primary purpose of determining the exact wording of the original. Here is an excellent definition of Textual Criticism from Dan Wallace, who is one of the most respected Textual Critics in the world today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |