Page 50 - Bible Doctrine Survey I- Student Textbook

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Codes Sinaiticus from the early 4 Century

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Around the late 9 Century, copies of the Scriptures began to incorporate a new style called minuscule
where words were divided by spaces and lower-case letters were utilized. Here is a minuscule of Luke
1:1-6 from AD 1292. We have literally thousands of copies of these texts, most dating from 1000 AD or
younger. Many are quite ornate and even utilize color.

There are not hand-copied manuscripts that are 100 percent exactly
the same. You will find hundreds of differences between
manuscripts that are directly related. Why? Because they were
hand-copied by fallible human beings.

The differences between manuscripts are called textual variants.
They may be differences in spelling between words, differences in
word order, new or omitted words or phrases of words. There are
over 200,000 variants in the New Testament alone among the over
5,800 manuscripts we have discovered, probably more. Although
much care was taken to prevent the introduction of variants, they
are numerous. Let’s see how they crept into the copies of the
scripture.

During the first 300 years of Christianity, the Church was under
terrific persecution. Many in the church had to worship
underground in isolated pockets. Copies of the letters of Paul or Luke were scarce and were all made by
hand by people whose profession and training had nothing to do with copying Greek Scripture. A great
percentage of the textual variants were introduced in the first 300 years of copies.

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