Do Textual Variants Really
Matter for Anything?
QUESTION:
I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said
this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant
Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and
so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus
spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I
mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible
translators?
RESPONSE:
This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve
given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it
periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it
another shot.
The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make
and that many people seem never to notice that I make
(especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to
my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of
thousands of textual variants that we have among our
manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and
insignificant and don’t matter for twit.
Why should any of
us care that much if a scribe spells a word one way or another
way, if it’s the same word?
Many of *them* didn’t seem to
care!
But each different spelling counts as a textual
variant!
There are many (many!) textual variants that are (virtually)
impossible to replicate in English.
That is to say, if a
verse is worded in two different ways, they mean exactly the
same thing, even though in Greek they appear different.
So variants like *that* don’t matter much.
variants.
And that’s most
But there are other variants that matter a *lot* — variants
that change what a verse means or even what an entire *book*
means. That matters!
Before explaining that, let me deal head on with the objection
that no variants threaten any “significant Christian
doctrine.”
I’m not sure that’s *entirely* true – depending
on what one means by the term “threaten.”
For example, there
is only one verse in the entire New Testament that explicitly
teaches the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, 1 John 5:7-8 –
“There are three in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy
Spirit, and these three are one.”
That’s the Trinity – three
persons who are all one. The doctrine is explicitly stated
nowhere else.
But this verse was not originally in the New
Testament. It is a later addition.
But does the fact that the only verse explicitly to teach the
Trinity was not in the NT “threaten” the doctrine of the
Trinity?
Of course not.
Theologians will turn to other
passages that do not explicitly teach the doctrine in order to
provide support for their views that there is a Trinity (for
example: verses that say that Jesus is God and that God is
God; but the problem is that these verses do not lay out the
doctrine that the three are one – so they don’t teach the
doctrine of the Trinity [since there are *other* nontrinitarian ways of thinking that both Jesus and God could be
God].
Or verses that mention Christ, the Father, and the
Spirit: but again the problem is that *these* verses don’t say
that Christ and the Spirit are God and that there is only one
God – in other words, again, they do not lay out the doctrine
of the Trinity. Only this one verse, which was not originally
in the NT, spells out the doctrine of the Trinity). That’s the
thing about theology: it is not dependent on any one verse for
any of its views, but on an entire panoply of verses on a
range of topics that are interpreted in light of each other
and in light of the Christian tradition to produce a view that
is seen as theologically acceptable.
Because of the way that
theology *works*, a textual variant by its very nature cannot
“threaten” any doctrine. Even if a variant reading says the
precise opposite of what a doctrine teaches, theologians can
incorporate it into their views by reading it in light of what
other contrary texts say.
But does
threaten
therefore
there’s a
the fact that variants cannot, by their nature,
significant doctrines mean that variants are
always unimportant and insignificant? In my view
very simply answer to the question: NO WAY!!!
Why is it that “threats to significant doctrines” are taken to
be the only standard of what is important to the Christian
religion?
In my view this idea is completely wrong-headed.
There are SCORES of things that are important to Christianity
that are not “significant doctrines.” Here’s the example I
often use, and have probably used on the blog before: suppose
tomorrow morning we were all to wake up only to discover that
in every Bible on the planet the books of Numbers, Ezekiel,
Proverbs, Mark, and 1 Peter were no longer to be found. They
had simply disappeared.
They no longer existed.
Which
“significant Christian doctrines” would then be affected?
None. Zero. Zilch.
Does that mean the disappearance of the
books would be insignificant? No, on the contrary, it would
be HUGELY significant. Significance is not determined solely
on the basis of the effects on Christian doctrine.
For one thing, not only the presence of books in the Bible
(such as Numbers, Ezekiel, and Mark) matter, but their
*interpretation* matters.
Does it “matter” if Jesus is
portrayed in Mark as an angry man instead of a compassionate
one?
I would think it matters. And it hinges on a textual
variant. Does it matter if the Gospel of Luke indicates that
Jesus became the son of God at his baptism instead of from
eternity past? I should think so. Does it matter whether the
Gospel of John ever identifies Jesus as the “unique God” or
not.
It matters big time. Does it matter if a book – such
as Luke – rejects the very idea that Jesus’ death was a
substitutionary atonement?
In fact, depending on which
variant you choose, Luke either has or does not have a
doctrine of the atonement (and thus either has, or doesn’t
have, a completely *different* understanding of Jesus’ death
from other NT writers).
Does it matter whether John’s Gospel
tells the beautiful story of Jesus and the woman taken in
adultery (a story found only in some manuscripts of John, and
nowhere else)? Does it matter if Jesus’ disciples ever see
Jesus after his resurrection in Mark’s Gospel? Does it matter
….
Well there are lots of points at which I could ask if it
matters.
It is not good enough, in my view, to say that in fact it does
*not* matter if Luke has a doctrine of atonement, because Mark
and Paul clearly do, so you can find the doctrine of the
atonement in the NT even if Luke doesn’t have it. That is
doing the work of the theologian (which, in fact, I do not
object to) rather than the work of the interpreter.
If it
turns out that Mark does have a doctrine of the atonement, and
that Luke has a *different* understanding of Jesus’ death,
then you have to figure out which one is right – especially if
they cannot be reconciled.
And that leads to an entirely
different approach to the books of the New Testament.
that in itself is highly significant.
And
So, in short, it’s true that variants may not overthrow the
Nicene Creed. But for anyone interested in the meaning of the
books of the New Testament, they are highly significant.