I always get a laugh when mormons trot the "thousands of variants" arguement - with apparent lack of what the definition of 'variant' ever really is or how it it totaled. Most of these 'variants' consist of mis-spellings or obvious slips of the pen, so that a variant spelling of one letter of one word in one verse in 2,000 manuscripts is counted as 2,000 “errors.”. Kinda sucks the oxygen out of the mormon applicaition doesn't it.
The fact of the matter is that because of the wealth of tens of thousands of ms, both in greek and other languages, the writings of ANF, lectionaries etc, these are readily identified. Others are readily identified as grammatical. Bottom line is Textual scholars Westcott and Hort estimated only one in 60 of these variants has significance. This would leave the text 98.33% pure. Philip Schaff calculated that, of the 150,000 variants known in his day, only 400 altered the meaning of the passage, only 50 were of real significance, and not even one affected “an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching.”
PS Bible scholars know where these critical variants occur, and have so for quite some time.
Please tell us all why smith left these clear variants, like the Johannie Comma in place when he supernaturally corrected the KJV to translate it to what it origionally should have read? Thats one I'm still waiting for an answer on.
Thanks for helping me make my point to svcw.
svcw: Ok, how do you have reverence for the Bible when you also believe it wasn't translated correctly.
I'm still wondering how svcw reconciles this statement with a belief in the Bible. Assuming svcw also believes in the Bible inspite of the thousands of errors you have so helpfully pointed out.
Would I be correct in saying that you reverence the Bible inspite of all these well known errors?
I have a Geneva Bible which has a few letters of the words accidentally upside down. Can these be called “errors”! ;-)