Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
In the year 1898, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt discovered thousands of papyri fragments just outside the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. These fragments turned out to be one of the most important papyri discoveries of all time.
What does James say about the rich? Was James misspeaking in James 5:5? What did he mean by the words that he used?
The minuscule script was a style of Greek writing used as a book hand during the ninth and tenth centuries in Byzantine manuscripts. The minuscule took the place of the Greek uncial, third to the ninth centuries C.E. that resembles a modern capital letter but is more rounded.
It should be noted that this is merely a handful of major variants. Less serious variants are in the hundreds of thousands. However, many Christians make the mistake of saying that the textual variants are all insignificant and change nothing. This is not true.
This simply solved textual issue caused many problems in the nineteenth century and really with the King James Version Onlyists, it still does today. The Bible scholars entered the fray because they thought the textual scholars were undermining their doctrinal position that God became man.
Lacuna (pl: Lacunae): an unfortunate loss of text within a manuscript due to accident or wear and tear. Even more unfortunate, lacunae usually are more frequent and more damaging in early manuscripts, especially the papyri. Notable Examples …
The objective of a textual scholar should be to ascertain the original words that were in the original text. He is like a detective looking for clues and evidence that can be held up in the highest court there is, before the throne of God. His goal is not to please men.
There is a bewildering variety of variant readings here. The number of variants is evidence that the scribes had some serious difficulties. There can only be one reading, which is the original reading. The reading that the other readings most likely came from is
Theodore Beza was a French Reformed Protestant theologian, a scholar of the Greek New Testament. He was a close associate and successor of the Protestant reformer John Calvin. In the year 1562, Beza, as he is more commonly known, made known this unusual ancient manuscript.
Papyrus 108 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering), designated by P108, is a copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of John, containing verses 17:23-24 & 18:1-5 in a fragmentary condition. The manuscript has been paleographically assigned to “late second/early third century (ca. 200).”