Page 70 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible Student Textbook

Words were misspelled, omitted. Sometimes whole phrases were omitted.

Harmonization occurred: Ex., Eph. 1:2 in Greek says: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ whereas Col 1:2 in Greek says: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
Sometimes a scribe would miss a phrase when it was being read, he would realize he has left the phrase
out, so rather than throw away a very expensive piece of Vellum and loose his work to that point, he
would add the missing word in the margin.

Other scribes would make personal comments about a verse or passage or write a parallel passage in
the margin. That manuscript would then be sent to another scriptorium hundreds of miles away and be
used as the mother script. When a copyist would come to a marginal note, word, or phrase, most often
it was added into the text (better safe than sorry). As a result, later copies of the Bible became “fuller”
or longer.

Here are some examples of marginal notes appearing in later manuscripts as Scripture. They are not
present in any of the older manuscripts but are included in our Bible. Most of the time, you will see a
note telling you that they were not included in the older manuscripts.

Mark 16: 9-20 – Conclusion of Mark
John 7:53 – 8:11 – The woman caught in adultery
John 5:4 – The angel stirring the water

Problem of pietism: When the Catholic Church became the majority church of the Middle Ages, monks
and scribes began inserting more descriptive phrases. For example, in the place of the name of Jesus,
“Lord Jesus Christ” was often inserted. The later Byzantine manuscripts have the “Lord Jesus Christ”
occurring in 86 places in the New Testament, where the older manuscripts have it occurring 61 times.
Most of the time, Jesus is replaced by Lord Jesus or Lord Jesus Christ.
Does this mean that the copy of the Bible we have today is laced with errors and discrepancies? NO!
Here is why:

98.33 % of all the manuscripts agree 100%. That means that the copyists were careful not to change the
text throughout the ages of time. Also, there are really only 400 variants that affected the sense of the
passage, and only 50 of these have doctrinal significance. We have over 5,300 copies ancient
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manuscripts, some back to the 2 Century. By comparing the various manuscripts, we can pretty much
see when a variant was introduced and why. This process is called the science of textual criticism.
Illustration: If we had 10 people in the room make a copy of our church constitution by hand, then
compared them all, we would find differences, but we won’t find the same differences in all 10 copies.
We can use the majority to check the difference of one.
As we study the thousands of manuscripts and the differences between them, they fall into families of
manuscripts or text types. The manuscripts are catalogued by their age, the region they were copied,
the style of printing, the paper on which they were printed, and the manuscripts to which they are
related. While the lines between manuscripts are sometimes blurred, four text-types are evident and
named for their region of origination. They are:

th
The Alexandrian text-type (most papyri) most manuscripts from 2 – 9 century
The Western text-type (later Greek and Latin)

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