Where Erhman attacks the faith is to quote the number of variants, for him around 400,000, and then follow up with a question along these lines: with such a high number of variants, how can we know what the original manuscripts of the Bible actually said? The ignorant, uneducated, blind, and overly simplistic just nod their heads at such a statement, never giving it another thought.

I started reading Craig L. Blomberg’s Can We Still Believe the Bible? just a few days ago and he quoted known agnostic/atheist Bart Erhman’s calculation of the number of variants in the Bible at around 400,000. That is what Erhman says, not Blomberg. Erhman admits that the number is actually unknown since there are new manuscripts added to the pile every few years and the task of counting the variants is next to impossible.

I remember in seminary being told the number was somewhere around 50,000 variants, so the actual number may never be known at all.

Where Erhman attacks the faith is to quote the number of variants, for him around 400,000, and then follow up with a question along these lines: with such a high number of variants, how can we know what the original manuscripts of the Bible actually said?

The ignorant, uneducated, blind, and overly simplistic just nod their heads at such a statement, never giving it another thought.

The problem is that the number of variants in the original manuscripts, whether they are 50,000 or 400,000 really is not that big of a problem. Let me explain. A variant in manuscripts means that when we find two manuscripts from the same book, and we read them both, then we find that in one, it reads, “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and at the same point in the other manuscript it reads “Jesus Christ Our Lord,” that counts as a variant even though the order of the words doesn’t change the meaning one iota.

In fact, what Blomberg and others have pointed out ad nauseum is that of all the variants, only about 1,250 of them need some sort of explanation. If you have a study Bible, you know this because these variants are listed in the footnotes of your Bible.

Read More