I've spent over a year researching and writing about Greek New Testament Manuscripts and New Testament Textual Criticism. My goal was to find out if the New Testament has been reliably transmitted to us over nearly two thousand years. The simple answer is: yes!
There were many, many mistakes made in copying the New Testament, but mistakes in an individual manuscript can be corrected using other manuscripts that don't have errors in the same...
While most textual variants in the New Testament were unintentional, some changes were intentional. In many cases, the intentional changes were made to clean up grammar and spelling errors, but in some cases the changes were made to emphasize theological points when a passage was ambiguous.
By about A.D. 400, the New Testament manuscripts had stabilized. Manuscript evidence after this time show that the scribes didn't make many new meaningful and...
Awareness of textual variants in literature goes back at least a few hundred years before Jesus was born, and scholars have constantly been trying to find the original readings. In the series I've been writing, I've been focused on textual variants in the New Testament, but they also exist in the Old Testament and in secular literature.
The city of Alexandria, Egypt, was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., and...
My last article was What is the Difference Between an Autograph and an Original?. Now I want to research how long the autographs by the Apostles may have lasted. I own a few books which are nearly 100 years old (I collected The Hardy Boys series for many years, and have some of the originals printed in the 1920's), and some of the books are pretty good condition. If a few of my unimportant The Hardy Boys books have lasted nearly 100...
A common claim from people who don't believe the Bible is the word of God is that the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (Constantine I) created the Bible. They'll probably acknowledge some version of the texts existed before Constantine legalized Christianity, but say Constantine dictated what books were to be in the Bible, the ones which fit his personal beliefs. The skeptic may claim the result of this fiddling created Christianity as we know it...
