Equipping University

The standard Greek New Testament of today has 138,162 words. It is a simple fact that out of the 5,745 biblical manuscripts that we have through the end of 2006, we find all sorts of variations between them. These variations are called "variants," which are "any place among the manuscripts of the New Testament where there is not uniformity of wording." How many textual variants are there? The best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 variants between the numerous manuscripts. That number sounds daunting and discouraging to the believer and enthralling to the skeptic and atheist. Indeed, it is disturbing to many believers to see such instances of differentiation but they do exist. Because they do exist, we must deal with them. We can not afford to "stick our head in the sand" and pretend the variants do not exist. In the pages of this document, we will look at the issue of variants and discover how variants came to exist in biblical manuscripts and what they mean for the reliability of Scri

It is amazing that we know anything of the New Testament. The early church had no great libraries or sanctuaries in which to store its books. Persecution began early and continued for a few hundred years. During the first three hundred years of persecution and the years after of freedom, the New Testament was continuously copied and recopied as believers held fervently to the only thing that could sustain them ��� the revealed Word of God. A study of the transmission of the Bible during this time period reveals much of how we got the Bible that we have today. Read of the amazing number of ancient manuscripts that have been discovered so far. Learn the names and characteristics of the more famous and important of these ancient manuscripts (with pictures of sample pages).

It is amazing that we know anything of the New Testament. The early church had no great libraries or sanctuaries in which to store its books. Persecution began early and continued for a few hundred years. During the first three hundred years of persecution and the years after of freedom, the New Testament was continuously copied and recopied as believers held fervently to the only thing that could sustain them ��� the revealed Word of God. A study of the transmission of the Bible during this time period reveals much of how we got the Bible that we have today. Read of the amazing number of ancient manuscripts that have been discovered so far. Learn the names and characteristics of the more famous and important of these ancient manuscripts (with pictures of sample pages).

For hundreds of years, scholars refused to believe that Matthew, Luke, Paul, and Peter could have written the books of the Bible that bear their names. Instead, it was widely believed that men from the late second and third centuries wrote the documents and put the apostles' names on them for credibility. The discovery of a famous fragment from John's Gospel in 1920 changed all that forever. Read how the New Testament came together and discover that all of the New Testament was written before the end of the first century and much of it was written decades before then.