![]() Acts is noted for the number of textual variants. For modern translations, a comparison of the textual information in Acts makes an interesting study. The King James Bible, for example, cites no variants. Unfortunately, some translations are not much help with this. Although several resources exist for scholars, most Bible students are at the mercy of their Bibles to tell them. Nevertheless, the “serious” Bible student should be aware that some significant variants do exist and should know how to find out where they are. Douglas Stuart wrote, “It is fair to say that the verses, chapters, and books of the Bible would read largely the same, and would leave the same impression with the reader, even if one adopted virtually every possible alternative reading to those now serving as the basis for current English translations” (“Inerrancy and Textual Criticism,” in Innerrancy and Common Sense, ed. In the second place most of the variants do not concern significant differences. Waltke, “Old Testament Textual Criticism,” Foundations for Biblical Interpretation, B&H, 1994, 157). In the first place, about 90 percent of the Bible is the same in all manuscripts (B. This situation should not alarm or discourage a Bible student. This recreation does not match entirely any existing manuscript. Our New Testaments, on the other hand, translate a Greek text that is a scholarly recreation based on a comparative analysis of the various manuscripts. Translators waver from that codex, however, in many places and follow variants from the other manuscripts. The individual differences are known as “variants.” Our Old Testaments are largely translated from the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible (AD 1008). Our Old Testaments are based on about 15,000 manuscripts, 11,000 of which are in Hebrew. ![]() The rest are manuscripts of early translations. However, about 25,000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament exist, almost 6,000 of those being in Greek. But many are not aware that the underlying Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek text is uncertain in places, since some translations give little or no information about this. Most people are aware that English Bibles are translations from another language and that different translations are possible (and exist). But we all need to poke our heads up occasionally out of our neat little worlds and get smacked in the face with reality, which is usually a lot messier than we would like. Not everyone is excited by terms such as “textual variants,” “eclectic text,” and “Alexandrian text-type”-and that’s ok. Sponsor Show Your Support Become a Patron
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