SOME CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING MANUSCRIPTS AND MANUSCRIPT VARIANTS


To date, there are over 5,000 different manuscripts, fragments, of manuscripts, ancient versions of the Bible, and translations into ancient languages, many of which date from as early as the second century of Christianity in regard to the NT, and with regard to the OT from as early as the fourth century BC.

Some of these manuscripts, versions, and translations were made with great care, some manifest theological biases, and some simple copying mistakes.  Some form of evaluating these manuscripts must be determined in translation and research.

Most critical Greek and Hebrew texts today include footnotes relating to the textual variants and punctuation problems encountered in the manuscripts.

1. The date of the manuscript is important and must be considered, but early date does not necessarily predict accuracy!  Other factors must be considered in connection with the date of the manuscript.
2. The care in copying the manuscript must be considered.  This can be determined by careful comparison with other manuscripts and by careful study of the manuscript itself.
3. Manuscripts fall into what we call families.  By text families we refer to manuscripts that manifest a “genetic” relationship, having been copied in one locality, or being the descendents of one source of manuscript.  Several such families are identifiable.  We speak of the Koine or Byzantine family, the Syrian family, the Western text family, etc.  Each of these families can be located by a variety of means to certain localities or influences. 
   Some families manifest careful transmission, while other families manifest textual peculiarities that have to be evaluated.
4. A general principle is to adopt the more difficult reading where differences in a manuscripts occur.  Sometimes a particular reading or word in one manuscript or family of manuscripts appears to be out of agreement with the same expression or word in other manuscripts.  Textual scholars sometimes prefer or adopt the more difficult reading in such cases since some ancient textual copiers (scribes) were known  to “smooth out” problem words or expressions when the reading did not agree with their theology, or a problem in the text was observed.  The natural tendency would be to smooth out the reading than make the reading more difficult.
5. In some cases scholars are able to compare a reading of a text with an early translation into another language.  This helps in being able to compare the text at hand with an early reading or understanding of a text.

What we learn here is that textual scholars today have a vast resource of manuscripts and early translations (called versions) to work with in seeking to determine the most reliable or precise reading of a text. (As mentioned above, scholars now have over 5,000 manuscripts and versions of the Bible to work with.  What is notable in this comment is that Desidarius Erasmus, who most consider to be the “father” of the Greek New Testament (1516), and the translators of such great Bibles as the Geneva Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, and King James Version had very few manuscripts to work with, some of which were very unreliable.  Desidarius Erasmus (1516) worked primarily with 6 or seven manuscripts, some of which were incomplete, and the Textus Receptus, which text type we find in the King James Version, was built on approximately 20 manuscripts which were not very old or ancient.  In spite of this, the translators of these great early English Bibles did a magnificent job of preparing reliable English translations.)