The Christian faith rests upon the sure Word of God concerning Jesus Christ. That Word has not been “faxed” from heaven, but has been transmitted through thousands of handwritten copies. Each copy reflects human effort—sometimes accurate, at times error-prone. If you tried to copy the Gospel of Mark by hand today without mistake, you would fail. Scribes tired, missed words, misread smudged letters, or even inserted explanatory phrases or rarely whole verses. But no two manuscripts are exactly alike. Thus the central question arises: how can we be certain that our Bible today accurately reflects what the apostles and prophets originally wrote?

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1. The Greek New Testament and Its Word Count

The Greek New Testament contains approximately 138,000 to 141,000 words. The Nestle-Aland/UBS editions tally around 138,162 words, while the Textus Receptus and Majority Text versions reach closer to 140,000–141,000 words. Within these 140 k words, however, lie about 400,000 distinct textual variants among the thousands of manuscripts.

2. How Could There Be More Variants Than Words?

This perplexing reality arises from cumulative differences in wording, grammar, spelling, word order, and scribal expansions or omissions. Bart Ehrman frequently states that there are more variants than words—a simplification, yet factually true: there are roughly 2.5 variants for every Greek word. Most of these represent negligible shifts, not doctrinal changes. A single variant may adjust word sequence or change one out of many letters—hardly earth-shaking.

3. Manuscript Abundance Breeds Variants

The number of variants grows in proportion to the number of manuscripts. If only a single manuscript existed, it couldn’t disagree with itself—it would present zero variants. With two manuscripts, any difference between them yields a variant reading. No scribe is likely to simplify an exalted title like “the Lord Jesus” to “He told His disciples”; rather, expansions are the norm. Over 1,400 years, the New Testament text expanded by only about 2 percent, a remarkably conservative level of change.

4. Pioneers in Counting Variants

• John Mill (1707) systematically examined 100 Greek manuscripts and documented tens of thousands of variant readings across Scripture, despite opposition from Protestants and Catholics alike.

• Richard Bentley, championing the scholarly value of variant comparisons, wrote that more witnesses mean stronger textual certainty—a conviction that shapes modern critical editions.

5. Modern Estimates of Variant Totals

Thanks to intensive collation of Revelation (Hoskier) and Jude (Wasserman), and ongoing textual research, current scholarly estimates place the total number of distinct textual variants between 400,000 and 500,000. Some scholars project upward of 700,000 as more manuscripts are digitized and compared. Yet this abundance aids rather than weakens textual reconstruction.

6. The Wealth of Manuscripts

• Greek Manuscripts: 5,824 – each over 450 pages on average.

• Latin Manuscripts: over 10,000.

• Ancient translated versions (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, etc.): conservatively 5,000–10,000 additional witnesses.

• Patristic Citations: Over 1 million quotations found in Church Fathers from the 1st through 13th centuries—ample to reconstruct the New Testament text, even independent of manuscripts.

7. Biblical vs. Classical Transmission

Classical Greek and Latin authors are preserved in far fewer manuscripts, often centuries removed from their originals.

• Pliny the Elder: ~200 manuscripts, 700 years apart.

• Plutarch: 800 years.

• Herodotus: first copies over 1,500 years later.
  By contrast, the New Testament enjoys manuscripts from within a generation of the original writing—such as papyrus P52 (John 18:31–33, 37–38), dated 100–150 C.E., close to the estimated time of John’s gospel composition in the 90s C.E.

8. Dating Papyrus Evidence

• More than 43% of all New Testament verses appear in early papyri (within 125 years of composition)—versus classical authors, none of whom enjoy that level of early textual attestation.

• We have more New Testament material from the first two centuries C.E. than the average classical author has from two millennia of transmission.

9. Manuscript Growth Since 1611

In 1611, about seven manuscripts of the New Testament (11th century) were available to the King James translators. As of today, that number has ballooned to 5,824 Greek manuscripts, spanning back nearly a millennium earlier. That represents a more than 1,000-fold increase in textual witness.

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Bottom Line

• The sheer number of manuscripts and variants strengthens—not weakens—the reliability of the New Testament text.

• Human copying, while imperfect, has produced a remarkable consistency across thousands of witnesses.

• More manuscripts, even with variants, lead to greater certainty in reconstructing the autographs.

• Compared to classical literature, the New Testament stands as the most richly and reliably preserved ancient document.

Conclusion

Rather than despairing over textual variants, Christians should rejoice. The abundance of manuscript evidence, early papyri, translations, and patristic citations provides unprecedented confidence that what we hold today very closely reflects the Word originally penned by the apostles and prophets.

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