Equipping University

If you are a distinguishable Christian, you will engage in conversations about Christ and the Bible. What will you say? It is doubtful any of us could remember all the material presented in the previous eight chapters. However, there are four items you can present that will go a long way in disarming the skeptic, atheist, agnostic, Muslim, or any other critic of the Bible.

No matter how much we may desire the opposite, the manuscripts with their variants do exist ��� "in black and white," as it were. It is a childish faith of the highest order to pretend they do not exist. So, what do we do with them? Enemies of the faith make much of them. Those who would love to see the Bible destroyed latch onto one or two variant readings and make sweeping statements about our "corrupt" Bible. A veritable cottage industry has emerged in television networks and publishing houses to discredit the Scriptures. Church leaders must do a better job of training their people. Wallace bemoans that "we've been dumbing down the church for so long [that it] is just a crime and now people are panicking when they hear about this sort of thing." You need not panic ��� you know the facts and how to dig even deeper. In this chapter, we will examine a few of the more famous (infamous?) passages and discover what the evidence has to say.

In "Misquoting Jesus," Bart Ehrman writes of the variants in several familiar passages (none of which is new material) but curiously leaves out much important information. Ehrman does not discuss the manuscripts behind the passages and gives the impression that there is mass confusion over the readings. While quick to count the manuscripts and variants, nowhere does he weigh the manuscripts or give information of their trustworthiness. It would almost appear that Ehrman has an agenda to leave his readers in serious doubt about the authenticity and reliability of the Bible. We will look deeper into Ehrman's book in a later chapter. For now, in this chapter, we will examine the external and internal evidence for each of the passage listed above and a few others. There is nothing to hide and nothing over which the believer should be worried. However, before we do that, we must familiarize ourselves with the tools we have at our disposal for such a study - the fourth edition of the Greek New Testament produced by

The very phrase textual criticism conjures up an abstract academic exercise which leads many to remain unconvinced of the need to learn of this science. Pastors are ignore the subject for fear that church members will find it boring, overly technical, impractical, or that their faith (their own and the congregations') may be undermined in the process. Pastors fear the fallout of church members learning of the many variants that exist in the previously understood "golden tablets" of the New Testament manuscripts. While it is true that textual criticism can be technical and can be communicated in such a way as to threaten people's faith (see Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus), it need not be the case. The average church member can grasp the material. Furthermore it is a far more dangerous thing to leave church members uneducated of the history of their Bible. Opponents of the faith know this information; so should the people of faith.

The standard Greek New Testament of today has 138,162 words. It is a simple fact that out of the 5,745 biblical manuscripts that we have through the end of 2006, we find all sorts of variations between them. These variations are called "variants," which are "any place among the manuscripts of the New Testament where there is not uniformity of wording." How many textual variants are there? The best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 variants between the numerous manuscripts. That number sounds daunting and discouraging to the believer and enthralling to the skeptic and atheist. Indeed, it is disturbing to many believers to see such instances of differentiation but they do exist. Because they do exist, we must deal with them. We can not afford to "stick our head in the sand" and pretend the variants do not exist. In the pages of this document, we will look at the issue of variants and discover how variants came to exist in biblical manuscripts and what they mean for the reliability of Scri