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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 427
fourth century) are frequently discovered in the Syrian and Latin
translations of the second century.
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Textual Variations
Since their exists conflicting texts of scripture, scholars have divided the different
manuscripts into text-types, which contain similar renderings of scripture, for evaluation. There
are primarily three text-types, the Majority Text, the Minority Text, and the Neutral Text. The
Received Text type (Byzantine Text) is considered the Majority Text because it represents
approximately 90 percent of the over 5,200 ancient hand written Greek manuscripts in existence.
The Alexandrian Text (Critical Text) is considered the Minority Text because it represents about
5 percent of the manuscripts and the remaining texts that don’t fit either of these categories are
considered the Neutral Text.
The Received Text has almost no variation. David B. Loughran of the Stewarton Bible
School in Scotland writes, in Bible Versions: Which is the Real Word of God?, that all the
translations from the Received Text and all the Majority Greek manuscripts making up the
Majority text are in agreement with only insignificant variations.
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While the number of Greek
manuscripts is somewhat small, Josh McDowell writes, in Answers to Tough Questions, that the
number of existing copies of versions, which are translations from the original Greek and
Hebrew, numbers “in excess of 18,000 with possibly as many as 25,000.”
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Truly, the historical
record of the Received Text is what you would expect to see in a text supernaturally preserved
by God.
A Modified Text
The Alexandrian Texts differs substantially from the Received Text. John Burgon noted
that in the Gospels, Vaticanus differs from the Received Text in that it “leaves out words or
whole clauses no less than 1,491 times.”
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The Alexandrian Texts also “omit approximately 200
verses from the Scriptures. This is equivalent to 1st and 2nd Peter.”
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The Alexandrian Text is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to see in a text
preserved by God. The manuscripts not only differ from the Received Text but they also differ
among each other. Two of the most esteemed manuscripts among the Minority Text collection
are the Sinaiticus (Codex Aleph) and Vaticanus (Codex B). These two texts disagree with each
other over 3,000 times is the Gospels alone. Sharon Crews writes in The Faithful Witness:
Alexandrian Text to the Church have been dubious indeed. Not only does
this text-type not meet our biblical standard of accurately representing the Word
of God, but it has trouble meeting scholarly standards for accuracy of
transcription. Minor differences within text-types are normal; however, the
number of variants within the Alexandrian Text is enormous. Not including minor
errors such as spelling, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus disagree with each other over
3,000 times in the space of the four Gospels alone. This means that one or the
other must be wrong 3,000 times. That averages to a disagreement on almost
every verse of the Gospels! It is, in fact, easier to find two consecutive verses in
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