But this is the procedure which is followed in arriving at the large number of 200,000 ‘errors.'” This means that if, for example, one word is misspelled in 4,000 different manuscripts, it amounts to 4,000 ‘errors.’ Actually in a case of this kind only one slight error has been made and it has been copied 4,000 times.
This large number is gained by counting all the variations in all of the manuscripts (about 4,500). “From one point of view it may be said that there are 200,000 scribal errors in the manuscripts, but it is wholly misleading and untrue to say that there are 200,000 errors in the text of the New Testament. Lightfoot’s How We Got the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963), a book now fifty years old. Geisler got his information (directly or indirectly) from Neil R. The larger issue, however is how the number of variants was arrived at. It is quite true that (virtually) no viable variants are major threats to inerrancy the major problems that the doctrine of inerrancy faces are essentially never found in textually disputed passages in which one reading creates the problem and another erases it. The author, however, is most likely equating error with some reading that would render the Bible errant and fallible. It may well be a rather minor error (as the vast majority of them are)-in fact, something that cannot even translated it is so trivial-but it is an error nevertheless. If the primary goal of NT textual criticism is to recover the wording of the autographa (i.e., the texts as they left the apostles’ hands), then any deviation from that wording is, indeed, an error. There are several problems with this paragraph, one of which is this: to say that variant readings are not errors is an odd way of putting things. Second, these readings are spread throughout more than 5300 manuscripts, so that a variant spelling of one letter of one word in one verse in 2000 manuscripts is counted as 2000 ‘errors.'” First of all, these are not ‘errors’ but variant readings, the vast majority of which are strictly grammatical. “Some have estimated there are about 200,000 of them. 532), there is a comment about the number of textual variants among New Testament manuscripts: In the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, by Norm Geisler (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998 p.
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