The 400,000 Variants Problem

Ad Fontes, Lesson 3 of 4. Previous lesson: Luther, Erasmus, and why* ad fontes *is our instinct, not our enemy.

Now we have to talk about the number that haunts every conversation about textual criticism. You’ve heard it. Maybe from Bart Ehrman directly, in his bestselling book Misquoting Jesus.¹ Maybe from someone quoting Ehrman without knowing they were quoting him. The number is 400,000 — sometimes 300,000, sometimes 500,000 — variants in the New Testament manuscripts. More variants, the line goes, than there are words in the New Testament itself.

That number is, broadly speaking, accurate. And the way it’s typically deployed is, broadly speaking, dishonest.

What counts as a variant

Here’s why. A “variant” in textual-critical terminology is any place where the manuscripts differ from one another, in any way, including ways that don’t affect translation at all. If one manuscript spells a name with an extra iota and another doesn’t — that’s a variant. If one manuscript has a definite article in front of a name and another doesn’t (Greek does this a lot, and it changes nothing in English) — that’s a variant. If a scribe accidentally wrote a word twice and then crossed it out, or skipped a line and a later scribe corrected it in the margin — variants. The number gets large fast, because every spelling difference, every word-order shuffle, every minor accident over fourteen centuries of hand-copying counts.

So when somebody tells you “there are 400,000 variants in the New Testament, more than there are words,” what they are not telling you is that the overwhelming majority of those variants are nothing. They are spelling differences and definite articles and word-order changes that wouldn’t even register in any English translation. The scholar Daniel Wallace estimates — and this is widely accepted across the field, including by people who otherwise disagree with each other — that fewer than one percent of variants are both meaningful and viable.² That is, fewer than one percent are places where the variants actually change meaning and have a serious claim to being the original reading. We are talking about a few hundred genuinely consequential variants in a New Testament of nearly 140,000 words.

And here is the part that should give you confidence, not anxiety. Of those few hundred consequential variants, not one of them — not one — overturns a single Christian doctrine. Not the Trinity. Not the deity of Christ. Not justification by grace through faith. Not the resurrection. Every doctrine of the Christian faith is taught in passages whose text is not in dispute. The places where we have to make textual decisions are real, and the book spends chapters on the most important ones, but the gospel does not rise or fall on any of them. The gospel is solid.

Why so many variants? Because so many manuscripts

I want to push this one step further, because it’s important. The reason we have so many variants is that we have so many manuscripts. This is the part nobody tells you when they wave the 400,000 number around. If we had ten manuscripts of the New Testament, we would have very few variants — and we would also know almost nothing about what the original text looked like. We would be at the mercy of those ten copies. But we have nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts, plus thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other ancient versions, plus over a million quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the Church Fathers. The flood of evidence is what produces the catalog of variants. It is also what allows us, with high confidence, to reconstruct what the apostles actually wrote.

Compare this to any other ancient document. Caesar’s Gallic Wars survives in about ten manuscripts, the earliest from nine hundred years after Caesar wrote. Tacitus’s Annals — eight or nine manuscripts, the earliest seven hundred years out.³ Nobody throws their hands up and says we can’t know what Caesar or Tacitus wrote. The New Testament has hundreds of times more manuscript evidence, with manuscripts coming within decades of the originals. The textual situation of the New Testament is the best of any ancient writing, by an enormous margin. Our anxiety should be calibrated accordingly.

Next lesson, the series finale: Confident on Better Grounds — the ending of Mark, and why all of this should leave you more confident in your Bible, not less.