Textual criticism is the discipline that compares the thousands of surviving New Testament manuscripts in order to recover, as nearly as possible, the earliest form of the text. Because the New Testament was copied by hand for centuries, variations inevitably entered the manuscript tradition. Most are minor and of little consequence. Some, however, appear to reflect theological bias, especially in passages dealing with the identity of the Son of God. The following examples are drawn from Bart Ehrman’s 1993 book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
The best-known example of textual corruption is 1 John 5:7-8. The longer so-called Johannince Comma (“Trinitarian reading"), familiar from the King James Version, is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts and is widely recognized as a later addition. The oldest manuscript containing the Comma in its text is from the 14th century (629), but the wording there departs from all the other manuscripts in several places. The next oldest manuscripts supporting the Comma—88 (12th century), 429 (14th century), and 636 (15th century)—also preserve the reading only as a marginal note. The remaining manuscripts are from the 16th to 18th centuries. Thus, there is no sure evidence for this reading in any Greek manuscript until the 14th century (629), and that manuscript deviates from all the others in its wording. The form of the wording found in the Textus Receptus was apparently composed after Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was published in 1516.
Other lesser-known examples noted by Ehrman are also significant. In Acts 20:28, some readings make the verse say that God purchased the church with his own blood, a wording with obvious doctrinal force. In 1 Timothy 3:16, one form of the text reads, “God was manifested in the flesh,” while another reads more like, “He who was manifested in the flesh.” In John 1:18, manuscripts differ between “the only begotten Son” and “the only God.” In Jude 5, the text appears in forms that read “the Lord,” “Jesus,” or other Christologically heightened expressions.
Some variants also seem intended to soften language that sounded too human. In Luke 2:33, Luke 2:43, and Luke 2:48, references to Joseph as Jesus’ “father,” or to Joseph and Mary as his “parents,” were altered in some manuscripts. Such changes fit a scribal tendency to protect later theological claims about Jesus’ identity.
Other passages discussed by Ehrman in this connection include Mark 1:1, Luke 3:22, John 1:34, Romans 1:4, John 19:40, Mark 3:11, Luke 7:9, and Galatians 2:20. Not every example carries the same weight, and not every variant was necessarily intentional. Still, the overall pattern is difficult to ignore: in a number of places, the text appears to have been pushed toward a stronger and more explicit identification of Jesus with God.
None of this means that every textual variant affects major New Testament doctrines. But it does mean that major theological tentpoles like the doctrine of the Trinity should not be built on disputed readings.
The fact is the controversy over Jesus’ identity was not fought only in later creeds and councils; it also left its mark on the manuscript tradition. In some cases, scribes appear to have reshaped the text to serve doctrinal ends. Where that has happened, Christian integrity requires that inherited theology give way to the earliest recoverable words of Scripture, however uncomfortable the result.
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