Was the Bible copied accurately?

When talking with skeptics or religious seekers, it is very common to hear the following questions in regard to the Bible:

“How can you trust something that is that old?”

“How can you believe in a book that contains so much error?”

“How can you base your life on a book that contradicts itself on the facts of history and science?”

Many professing Christians also wrestle with these types of questions.

“How do we know that our copies of the Bible are what the original authors wrote?”

“Surely the Bible has some errors in it, right?  After all, it is thousands of years old.”

“The Bible has been copied an innumerable amount of times by an innumerable amount of people, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that at least one of them made a mistake?”

If you have asked questions like these, you have asked questions about “transmission.”  To transmit is “to cause to go to another person or place; to hand down; to transfer.”1  Transmission analyzes the process through which people reproduce things.

Artists sometimes paint a piece of art and have other artists copy it.  A scientist incorporating transmission later comes along and studies how accurately the second painting was duplicated.  He looks at how much detail the copying artist included in his work.  He looks at the matching of the colors and the shading.  He determines whether the size of the reproduction is correct and if the scale is accurate.

Scientists concerned with transmission do the same thing with other fields of study.  The field of study that concerns us in this particular article is the Bible.  Was the Bible copied accurately?  Was it transmitted correctly?  Can we be sure that Matthew wrote what we say he wrote?   Is it reasonable to assume that the letters of Paul were not “tampered with” by the early church?  Can we be confident that some scribe in a monastery in A.D. 912 didn’t fall asleep while copying Leviticus and make some mistakes that have crept into our copy of Leviticus?

These are very important questions and they will be answered by looking at two areas of transmission.

1. The Way the Old Testament was Copied 

Obviously, the Old and New Testaments were written by different authors and have a very different history.  So it would be helpful to look at them both separately.  The first thing we know about the copying of the Old Testament is that the Old Testament was not copied as many times as you might think.

Some people think that the copying of the Bible was similar to the game of “telephone.”  In the game of telephone, you line up a group of children and you whisper something in the ear of the first child standing in line.  It is then his job to whisper what you said into the ear of the second child standing in line.  The second child whispers it to the third child who whispers it to the fourth child and on and on until the message reaches the last child.  The last child in line then tells everyone what was whispered in his ear and it usually comes out pretty distorted.  Where you told the first child “My grandmother makes delicious pancakes,” the last child heard, “My grandmother plays with apes” or “My grandmother throws spoiled grapes.”

The message gets distorted as it passes hands.  That is the point of the game of “telephone.”  And the more hands you have, the more the message gets distorted.  In fact, if you have a long line of children or if you have a child who is purposefully trying to change the message, the last child won’t hear anything close to what the first child heard.

Some people think that the copying of the Bible was like the game of “telephone.”  The original message passed down through hundreds of hands to the point that it has been completely lost.  But that is not the case and the copying of the Old Testament demonstrates that.

Genesis 5 is a summary of the lives of Adam’s firstborn male descendants from creation to the flood.  It seems to come out of nowhere in the Book of Genesis but it actually fits in quite nicely with the flow of the book.  In chapters 1-2, Moses talks about Creation.  In chapter 3, he talks about the Fall.  In chapter 4, he talks about Cain and Abel.  And in chapter 6, he talks about Noah.  Chapter 5 tells us what happens between Cain and Abel and Noah.  But it tells us what happens in a very boring fashion.  “So-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so.”  Adam gave birth to Seth who gave birth to Enosh who gave birth to Kenan who gave birth to Mahalel.  Not very exciting.  A genealogy chart.  We are reading about the wonderful events of creation and the first murder in human history and we are about to read about the flood and in the middle of it all Moses gives us a list of births.  Pretty anti-climactic.  But, in all actuality, it is pretty climactic.

Genesis 5:1 says that, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.”  The Hebrew word for “book” in verse 1 is sefer.  Sefer literally means, “inscription, writing, document, or scroll.”2  As he is writing the Book of Genesis, Moses tells his readers that he has information from a “book” about Adam’s descendants.  He has a “scroll” in his hands that tells about Adam’s line.  “Here is a book I have in my possession that I am going to pass on to you . . .”

As Moses was writing the first five books of the Bible, he was copying from a book that was already written.  That makes Genesis 5 a little bit more interesting, doesn’t it?

Let me make it even more interesting.

If you do a little calculating3 and look at the ages of the men and the ages of their firstborn sons in Genesis 5, you can see that Adam lived right up to the time of his 8th generation of descendants (Lamech).  Adam died in the year 930, Lamech was born in the year 874.  Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great grandson.

And if this scroll was composed by Adam or by Adam’s children, then it is possible that when Noah (Adam’s great grandson x 6) entered the ark, he carried first / second hand information with him about the creation of the earth.  And while we don’t know how many times the scroll was copied after that, Moses had a copy of it when he wrote Genesis 5.  It is possible that Moses had the original copy.

My point is that the Old Testament was not copied as many times as you might think.  There were not hundreds / thousands of people who wrote about the creation event before Moses.  There might have been 5-10 or less.

Not only that but Joshua 1:6-8 says,

Be strong and courageous, for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them.  Only be strong and very courageous; be careful to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, so that you may have success wherever you go.  This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.

After Moses died, Joshua took over the leadership of Israel.  And as he prepared to conquer the Promised Land, the Lord told Joshua to be encouraged and to obey the Book of the Law (v. 8).  He also told Him to follow all the law that Moses gave him (v. 7).

When Joshua entered the Promised Land, he brought with him a book that was not written by scribes or by copyists.  It was not passed down through 30 different hands.  Joshua entered the Promised Land with the writings of Moses.  Not with copies of the writings of Moses . . . Not with second-hand information about the writings of Moses . . . Joshua entered the Promised Land with the actual writings of Moses.

Non-Christian and, unfortunately, even some Christian scholars today make it sound as if there were hundreds of Old Testament stories passed down through thousands of years before anything was ever written down.4  But that was simply not the case.

The second thing we know about the copying of the Old Testament is that the Old Testament was kept isolated within the Jewish community until the Christians came along.  The New Testament was spread everywhere when it was first written but the Old Testament stayed with the Hebrew people until the beginning of the church.  The early Christians advertised both testaments because they believed that the new was a continuation of the old but the Jews kept the Hebrew Bible to themselves.

The early Christian Apostles sent letters to Galatia and Rome and Colossae and Ephesus and Corinth but the Jews did not do that with their Old Testament.  It stayed exclusively among them.  It never left the Israelite community until the early church began to propagate it.

For some of the rationale behind this exclusivity, Deuteronomy 12:29-31 tells us that Moses commanded the Israelites,

When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations which you are going in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, beware that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, “How do these nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?”  You shall not behave thus toward the Lord your God, for every abominable act which the Lord hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.

The Jews were commanded to separate themselves from other nations in their worship of God.  They were not to adopt the detestable religious practices of the Babylonians or the Philistines or the Canaanites or the Babylonians or the Greeks.  The Israelites were to be one hundred percent devoted to God.

And while they did not follow this command like they should have, the Hebrew people did isolate themselves socially from the nations around them.  In fact, the New Testament portrays the Jews as almost arrogant in their separation from other nations.5  The Israelites believed that they were better than the Gentiles6 and better than the Samaritans7 and better than the Romans.8  And, because of this separatist attitude, the copying of the Hebrew Old Testament was done completely “in-house.”  People from other nations were not allowed to touch the Old Testament, let alone read the Old Testament, let alone copy the Old Testament.

This isolationism also protected the Hebrew Scriptures from error.  The same people that wrote it, copied it, studied it, and taught from it.  The same nation that first put it down on paper later copied it down on paper.

The third thing we know about the copying of the Old Testament is that the Jews were very meticulous in the way they copied the Old Testament.  We do not have a lot of information as to how the Jews copied the Old Testament before the A.D. era but we know how they were copying the Old Testament during the 6th – 7th Century A.D.

Some time around A.D. 500, a group of Jewish scribes called the Masoretes began to copy the Old Testament and add things into the text to make it more readable for a Western audience.  Most of the Jews in that time period were becoming more and more like their Western neighbors, so the Masoretes tried to accommodate them.  They did not change the text, but they added “helps” to ensure its accuracy and to aid the people in understanding it.9

One way they did this was by adding vowels to the Hebrew text to help the reader pronounce the words.  Western / modern nations in the 600’s had a hard time pronouncing a series of consonants.  We would have the same difficulty today.  It is hard for a Westerner to pronounce “bllgm.”  It is easier for him to pronounce “ballgame.”  We need vowels to pronounce our words.  So to assist Westerners in the 7th Century, the Masoretes added vowels to the text.

The Masoretes also added a system of checks and balances to make sure that the text was copied accurately by their scribes and the system was very, very, thorough.  Numbers were placed at the end of each book, telling the copyists the exact number of words that a book contained in its originaly manuscript.  If the copy had a few more words or a few less words than the original, the copy was thrown away.  At the end of each book, the Masoretes also listed the word or the phrase that would have numerically been found in the exact middle of the book.  Again, if the copy did not have the right word or phrase in its middle, it was thrown away.

To double-check for accuracy, after one scribe had finished writing, another scribe would begin to count his words and to look for the phrase that appeared in the middle of the book.  If he found everything as it should be, the copy would be kept and used for reading and studying.  If the scribe found so much as one error, the copy would be discarded and the writing scribe would have to start all over again on another copy.  Talk about a frustrating job!  A scribe could spend up to several months copying the Book of Ezekiel, only to find that he was one word off the number count and he must now start all over again.

The Masoretes also included a system of checks and balances within the Hebrew text itself.   Within the text, they included footnotes that told how many times a certain word or group of words appeared in the book.  One footnote might reference the word “garden” and in the margin it would say that the word “garden” appears 11 times in the Book of Nahum.  After the copying scribe finished the Book of Nahum, another scribe would see this footnote in the text and count how many times the word “garden” appeared in the book.  If it appeared 11 times, the copy would be kept.  If it only appeared 10 times or if it appeared 12 or 13 times, it would be thrown away and the copying scribe would have to start all over again.

Another footnote the margins included was the ketib / qere.  The ketib meant “what is written” and the qere meant “what is read.”10  These footnotes were included to indicate what the reader was supposed to read out loud and what he was not supposed to read out loud.  There was the written material and there was the read material (read “out loud in front of an audience” material).

Hebrew Old Testaments were read out loud in synagogues to the Jews and the Masoretes believed that there were some things in the text that were not intended to be read out loud.  For instance, the name Yahweh was considered sacred to the Jews.  It was so sacred that the Masoretes felt that it should not be pronounced out loud.  What if someone sneezed while reading it?  Wouldn’t that be blasphemous?  What if someone mispronounced it or burped or hiccupped while saying it?  Would that not be a dishonor to God’s holy name?  To ensure that none of that happened, the Masoretes included a footnote above the name Yahweh every time it appeared in the text.  The footnote referenced a note in the margin which gave another name to be read in its place.  The ketib was Yahweh.  The qere was usually a name like Adoniah. 

How accurate were the Masoeretes at copying the Old Testament?  By all accounts, the Masoretes were incredibly, we could even say supernaturally, accurate.  When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah was found from 125 B.C.11  When it was compared with a scroll of Isaiah from A.D. 900, a scroll copied 10 centuries later, it was found to match in 95 % of its contents.  The material that did not match included simple misspellings or slips of the pen.  No doctrinal material was affected by the discrepancies.  And it can be certain that the Masoretes and their Jewish counterparts played a great role in the accuracy of that text.  And there are other examples from ancient history that show the exactness of the copying of the Old Testament.12

2. The Way the New Testament was Copied

There is more information available to us today about the copying of the New Testament than there is about the Old.  The first thing we know about the copying of the New Testament is the process used in copying the New Testament.  The Old Testament stayed primarily with the Jews but the New Testament was sent all over the known world and, because of that, we know something of the process that was used in reproducing it.

The process of copying a letter goes back to the beginning of time.13  Since there were no computers thousands of years ago, if a king wanted to send a letter to his people, he would call his scribes together and dictate the letter to them.  They would write it down and messengers would send the letter out to the people.  If the king had 40 scribes, 40 letters would go out.  If a scribe misrepresented the king or if he got part of his letter wrong by accident, he could be killed for his imprudence.

When the church first started, the Apostles began to circulate instructions to local congregations of believers in the form of letters.  As they did so, Christian scribes would copy them down and pass them out to other congregations.  As the church continued to grow and more and more congregations appeared, communities of Christian scribes would get together and copy the letters together.  They would find the oldest copy on hand and make new copies from that.  When the ink on the page faded out, the scribes would use it again, which is a problem for us today because some of the oldest surviving copies of the New Testament have been copied on and recopied on to the point that it is impossible to tell what was originally written on them.

The reproduction of letters was a costly enterprise in the first few centuries of the church.  Paper was not cheap like it is today.  In fact, paper did not exist at first, so scribes had to write on parchment or leather.14   To conserve space on the parchment, they would write from the top corner of the page to the bottom corner without leaving any space in between the letters.  That may seem strange to us but the common practice of reading at the time was to read out loud.15  So scrunching all the words together would not have been a problem for the average reader because he sounded his words out as he read.

When scribes were making copies in ancient times, they would often sit Indian style in a room with a parchment scroll on their lap.  A head scribe would read to them from the oldest copy of a book / letter and junior scribes would write down what they heard.  Paper was eventually invented along with the binding of books and, as time moved on, scribes found themselves copying from books as they sat at a table.  In the 15th Century, Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press and the era of the printed page began.

The second thing we know about the copying of the New Testament is what the oldest copies we have tell us.  How accurate were the New Testament scribes?  How precisely did they record what they heard and read?  We can answer those questions by looking at the ancient copies of the New Testament that we have with us today.

Those copies come in several forms.  One form is in fragments or pieces.  Due to the years and years and years of weather and war and destruction, some New Testament books have only survived in fragments or pieces.  There are 5,700 ancient fragments in our possesstion today that contain part of the New Testament on them.  If we were to put all 5,700 together, we would have all of the New Testament.16  Here are some of the oldest.

p (4), p (64), and p (67) contain fragments of the early chapters of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew 3, 25, 26.17   They date back to the A. D. 100’s and are located in the British Museum in London.  Also in London in the Chester Beatty Library and in Geneva in the Martin Bodmer Library are p (45) and p (47).  p (45) dates back to the A. D. 200’s and contains all four Gospels and the Book of Acts.  p (47) contains a large copy of the Book of Revelation which also dates back to the 200’s.

The oldest fragment of the New Testament that we have with us today is located in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.  It is known as p (52).  p (52) is a 2 ½ by 3 ½ inch papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John 18:31-33, 37-38.  It was first found in Egypt and it dates back to at least the first half of the 2nd Century, only 50 years after the Apostle John died.

There are also fragments of Jude and Peter that date back to the A. D. 200’s and we have many other fragments that go back to within a few centuries of when they were originally written.

And here is the significance of all of these fragments of the New Testament: we can cross-check the New Testament that we have today with fragments of the New Testament that were written within a hundred or two hundred years of the originals.  Error can creep in when you are copying a book but it is hard for it to creep in within a century or so.  Not all that much error comes about with the passing of one or two hands.

People today who say that the New Testament has been copied a million times or more to the point that we have no idea what it originally said do not know the facts.  That is simply not true.  We can cross-check what we have today with fragments that date back to within a century or two of the original copies.

A second ancient form of the New Testament that we have today is the book or the codex.  Originally the New Testament was written on parchments that were rolled up and sent out as scrolls or letters.  But, over time, those scrolls were bound up into books.  Eventually the New Testament letters were bound together with the Old Testament books, forming our modern Bible.  Today we have several ancient Bibles that tell us alot about the copying of our New Testament.

The most important book / codex that has survived would probably be Codex Sinaiticus, named because of where it was found.18  It dates back to the A. D. 300’s and is the oldest complete copy of the Greek Old and New Testament.  It was found in the 1840’s by the famous scholar Count Tischendorf at the Monastery of St. Catherine on top of Mount Sinai.

As the story goes, Tischendorf was visiting the monastery when he found a pile of ancient parchments discarded into a trash can.  As he looked closer at the pile, he found that it was composed of ancient manuscripts that the monks were using as kindling for their firewood.  After studying the manuscripts, Tischendorf realized that the writings were part of a 1500 year old Greek Bible.  Today, Codex Sinaiticus is located in the British Museum.

Another important codex is Codex Alexandrius, which was originally composed in the A. D. 400’s.  It contains all of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament.  It was presented to King Charles I of England in 1627 by Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople as a peace-keeping gift.  We do now know where Lucar found the codex but today it is also located in the British Museum.

And there are many other books that we could mention.  Codex Vaticanus, which is from the 4th Century contains both Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha.  It is located in the Vatican Library in Rome.  Codex Bezae from the 5th Century contains most of the Gospels and Acts.  And, again, the significance of these books is that we can cross-check our modern copies of the Bible with these ancient copies of the Bible.  We can use the old copies to test our new ones for accuracy.

How accurate were the scribes who copied the New Testament?  How do our copies today compare with the copies from 1800 years ago?  With 5,700 fragments and several ancient copies of the Bible, we have plenty of material to look through.  So what does the material tell us?

In studying the accuracy of the transmission of the New Testament, scholars look for what is called variants.  A variant is a difference between the original copy and the new copy.19  It is a change or an alteration.  When one letter/word is different or missing or added, it is called a variant.

In comparing the earliest Greek texts to the texts we have with us today, scholars have found close to 200,000 variants.  Now that sounds like an enormous number but the number needs to be clarified.  If a word is misspelled or added or deleted in the 6th Century by a Christian scribe and the error is not caught until the 21st Century, it would have been repeated numerous times.  If other scribes copied from that same manuscript, they would repeat the error.  The scribes were not paid to think, they were paid to replicate.  If they found an error in their manuscripts, they would not question it, they would only copy it.

If that same word was misspelled or added or deleted 3,000 times down throughout the years, scholars today would count it as 3,000 different variants.  This does not mean that there were 3,000 different words that have been misspelled or added or deleted.  The same error could have been made in 3,000 different fragments but it still counts as 3,000 variants.  So to say that there are 200,000 variants in the New Testament does not mean that there are 200,000 errors in the New Testament.  It only means that 200,000 differences have been found in the thousands of different ancient fragments and books available to us today.20

In fact, of the 200,000 variants in the New Testament, New Testament scholars believe that only 400 of these cause doubt on the actual text and only 50 of them should be considered troublesome.  And of these 50 variants, none of them affect doctrine.21

Sir Frederick Kenyon was an Oxford scholar and the curator for the British Museum in the 19th Century.  He was a world-renown expert on the Greek New Testament22 and he said this concerning the accuracy of the New Testament scribes.

One word of warning must be emphasized in conclusion on the subject of transmission.  No fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading.  Constant references to mistakes and divergences of reading might give rise to the doubt whether the substance, as well as the language, of the Bible is not open to question.

It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is absolutely certain.  Especially is this the case with the New Testament.  The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities.  This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.

Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers whose works have come down to us of, of Sophocles, of Thucydides, of Cicero, of Virgil; yet out knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of manuscripts, whereas the manuscripts of the New Testament are counted by hundreds, and even thousands.23

At another time, Kenyon went on to write,

The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence of the New Testament becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.  Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established . . . The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.24

Due to the early copies that we have and the early translations that we have (which I did not have time to mention), there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of our English New Testament.  It has been amazingly well preserved.  And we know that because we can cross-check it with 5,700 ancient fragments and over 30 ancient books that have the words of Matthew through Revelation dating back to within a century or two of when they were originally written.

Error has not crept into your Bibles.  The word you have in your hand today is the Word of God.  And this kind of confidence can be given to no other book in ancient or modern history.

  1. Webster’s New World Dictionary, ed. by Michael Agnes (New York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2003) 685. []
  2. A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. by William L. Holladay (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988) 259. []
  3. The following calculation is taken from a chart in Henry M. Morris’ The Genesis Record (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1976) 154. []
  4. Gleason L. Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, Revised and Expanded (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994) 97-98.  One example of this line of thinking is the JEDP Theory.  The JEDP Theory says that different portions of the books of the Old Testament were written at different times and later compiled together to form the Old Testament that we have today.  In other words, books like Deuteronomy or Judges might have as many as three or four different authors. []
  5. Consider passages like Luke 4:24-30; John 8:31-34; Acts 10:27-29. []
  6. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Volume Two, ed. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982) 443.  “Gentile” refers to someone who is not Jewish. []
  7. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Volume Three (303).  The Samaritans were the people who lived in the land of Samaria, right in the middle of Palestine.  For examples of the Jews’ mistreatment of the Samaritans, see John 4:7-9; 8:48-51.  Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan played off of this idea (Lk 10:25-37). []
  8.  See Footnote 9. []
  9. The following information regarding the Masoretes can be found in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979) 213-218; Archer, 70-72; R. K. Harrison’s Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969) 212-216. []
  10. William R. Scott, A Simplified Guide to Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 3rd Edition (N. Richland Hills, Tex.: BIBAL Press, 1987) 13.  Literally, ketib meant “written” and qere meant “to be read.” []
  11. For more information about the Dead Sea scrolls and this particular scroll of Isaiah, please see our FAQ: “What Does Archaeology Say about the Bible?” []
  12. Harrison, 229.  One such example is the translation of the Old Testament into Greek.  While the story itself is legendary, it does show that the Hebrew scribes were known worldwide for their accuracy in copying the Scriptures.  According to a letter from 100 B.C., the king of Egypt asked for a copy of the Hebrew Bible to be translated into Greek so he could read it.  72 Hebrew scribes were employed for the task and they worked independently, eventually arriving at a translation that was exactly the same as their co-laborers.  The name of the Greek Old Testament was called the Septuagint in honor of this event.  Septuagint means “seventy” in Greek. []
  13. The information regarding the process of copying the New Testament is found in Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman’s The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Fourth Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 16-31. []
  14. Ibid., 9.  Parchment “was made from the skins of cattle, sheep, goats, and antelopes.” []
  15. Consider how Philip “heard” the Ethiopian Eunuch reading the scroll of Isaiah when he was traveling all by himself in Acts 8:30.  The Eunuch was reading out loud to himself. []
  16. The Text of the New Testament, 52. []
  17. This information regarding the fragments is found in The Text of the New Testament, 53-61.  The “p” stands for parchment and the number refers to the order in which they were found. []
  18.  This information regarding the books is found in The Text of the New Testament, 62-86. []
  19. Webster’s New World Dictionary, 713.  Technically, the word “variant” means “different in some way from others of the same kind.” []
  20.  Norman L. Geisler & William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1971) 361. []
  21. Ibid., 365-366. []
  22. The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. by J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1978) 564. []
  23. Quoted in Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (Campus Crusade for Christ, Inc., 1972) 45-46. []
  24. Ibid., 47, 56. []

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