Ancient New Testament Manuscripts

In John 8:1-11, Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees who bring an adulterer to him for punishment, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then, after the accusers relent, he says to the offender, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more.”

But if you look carefully, our Bibles include editorial notes indicating that John 8:1-11 has only tenuous manuscript support.  That is, as ESV editors state, “The earliest manuscripts do not include John 7:53-8:11.”  Best, then, to depend on other Bible passages (of which there are many) to convey Jesus’ practice of offering mercy to sinners.

“Textual criticism” is the discipline that seeks to reconstruct the word­ing of lost docu­ments based on surviving copies (“criticism” here simply means “study”—it’s not a negative term).  We don’t have the original Greek New Testament manuscripts (e.g., the actual papyrus sheets on which John wrote his Gospel, or Luke wrote Acts, etc.), although we do have a lot of copies.  Here and there these copies differ from one another in wording (imagine what’s involved in copy­ing a book by hand…).  Textual criticism compares the points of variation and draws inferences to help establish the original wording.

If you check your Bible’s footnotes, you’ll see there are various places where the Greek NT manuscripts differ from one another.  Some critics have blown this way out of proportion, as if it undermined the integrity of the Bible.  But that’s nonsense.  The points of variation amount to only a tiny fraction of the NT, and in almost all cases scholars can discern the original wording with great confidence.  So it would be wrong to conclude that the manuscript footing beneath the Bible is tenuous—not so, not at all.  In fact, compared to copies of all other ancient writings, NT manu­script support is in a league of its own in terms of its high quality and quantity.  Further, no point of Christian doctrine is obscured by the existence of these manuscript variants.  The truthfulness and reliability of Scripture stand strong.

If you want to explore this topic further, let me encourage you to visit michaeljkruger.com (e.g,. here and here; and also peruse his Article Index links for “Textual Criticism” and “Ancient Manuscripts”), the “Textual Criticism” article at bible.org, or see David Alan Black’s short book, New Testament Textual Criticism:  A Concise Guide (Baker, 1994).  Also, the ESV Study Bible comments are a great help.