Even though there are textual variants, they do not significantly change the meaning of the text

Yes there are many textual variants, but these do not significantly change the meaning of the text.

Types of variants

Textual Variants arise when copyists make intentional or accidental changes to a text they are reproducing. Accidental:

1. Misspelling
2. Change in spelling
3. Repetition of words
4. Deletion of words
5. Rearrangement of words
6. Synonyms are substituted
7. A pronoun will be changed into a proper noun (such as “he said” becoming “Jesus said”)
8. add text from memory from a similar or parallel text in another location
9. Changing of spellings
10. corrections from better exemplars
11. harmonizations
12. ideologically motivated

Note: Deletions or repetitions of words can occur when the copyist’s eye returns to a similar word in the wrong location of the original text. If his eye skips to an earlier word, he will create a repetition (error of dittography). If his eye skips to a later word, he will create an omission.

By the far, the vast majority of these are accidental errors made by scribes are easily identified as such. For a list of variant examples see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Testament

Number of variants

John Mill estimated the number of variations in the New Testament text at 30,000. Eberhard Nestle estimated this number as 150,000 to 200,000.^[1] Bart Ehrman talks about 200,000 to 400,000 variations. “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament” ^[2].

There are a large number of variants but it is a product of the large number of manuscripts. For instance consider that the four Gospels contain a total of 64,000 words, and we have about 2,000 manuscripts of the Gospels. Suppose there is a mistake every 1,000 words (99.9% accuracy). This would equal 128,000 variants (64,000 x 2,000 x 0.001).

Changing in Meaning

“To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.” ^[3]

“The changes [the scribes] made – at least the intentional ones – were no doubt seen as improvements of the text, possibly made because the scribes were convinced that the copyists before them had themselves mistakenly altered the words of the text. For the most part, their intention was to conserve the tradition, not to change it.” ^[4]

References

Source:

Response:

There are 200,000 to 400,000 variants among the New Testament manuscripts, more than there are words in the New Testament.

References and Links: