Are Textual Variants Motivated By Theology?

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...

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What is the Q Source Hypothesis?

In my last two articles I've researched What is the Synoptic Problem? and Which Gospel was Written First?. It is frequently accepted by modern scholars that Mark was written first, and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. 

There is material common to both Matthew and Luke which is not in Mark, so where did they get that material? It is generally believed Luke was written third, so either Luke copied the...

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Which Gospels was Written First?

(This post was supposed to go out last Saturday, but I realized yesterday it hadn't.)

The order of the Gospels in the New Testament is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, however, scholars typically believe they were written in a different order. How did they come to this conclusion?

In my article What is the Synoptic Problem?, I showed there is so much in common between the Synoptic Gospels that the later...

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What is the Synoptic Problem?

The first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are called the Synoptic Gospels. The term synoptic comes from the words meaning "same" (syn) and "sight" (optic), or "to see together". There is quite a bit of overlap with what these three books report, while about 90% of the Gospel of John contains different information.

There are different views on how Christians should view the overlapping information. On the one hand, if the authors are...

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Why are there Four Gospels?

The Gospels describe Jesus's ministry, death and resurrection, but why are there four Gospels? Why didn't one person write a comprehensive biography of Jesus's life?

Suppose that today four men should undertake to write a “life” of ex-president [Theodore] Roosevelt, and that each one designed to present him in a different character. Suppose that the first should treat of his private and domestic life, the second deal...

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What are the Gospels?

I wrote several articles about the Torah, which is comprised of the first five books of the Old Testament. Now I want to move several hundred years later and research the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament.

The word Gospel comes from an Old English translation of the Greek word euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον; Strong's G2098), from which we get the English words evangelize, evangelist and Evangelical. Gospel means "good...

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How was John’s Gospel Transmitted to Us?

The forth book of the New Testament is the Gospel of John. John was a disciple and Apostle of Jesus and witnessed his ministry, death and resurrection. There are three people known to be students of John: Ignatius, Papias and Polycarp.

Ignatius (born 35 AD, died 117 AD)[1] (he called himself "Theophorus", which means "God Bearer") became Bishop of Antioch (Turkey). He wrote a number of letters to different churches, of which some copies still exist. Ignatius quotes or refers to...

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