Misleading Statistics
Misleading Statistics
Two of the undercurrents flowing through Misquoting Jesus are the quality and quantity of the textual variants. “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament,” argues Ehrman.11 Elsewhere he states that the number of variants is as high as 400,000.12 That is true enough but by itself is misleading. Anyone who teaches NT textual criticism knows that this fact is only part of the picture and that, if left dangling in front of the reader without explanation, is a distorted view. Once it is revealed that most variants are inconsequential—involving spelling differences that cannot even be translated, articles with proper nouns, word order changes, and the like—and that only a small minority of the variants alter the meaning of the text, the whole picture begins to come into focus. Indeed, less than 1 percent of the textual variants are both meaningful and viable.13 The impression Ehrman sometimes gives throughout the book—and repeats in interviews—is that of wholesale uncertainty about the original wording,14 a view that is far more radical than he actually embraces.15
As to quantity of variants, consider the sentence, “Jesus loves John.” In Greek that statement can be expressed in a minimum of 16 different ways, though every time the translation would be the same in English. And once we factor in different verbs for love in Greek, the presence or absence of little particles that often go untranslated, and spelling differences, the possibilities run into the hundreds. Yet all of them would be translated simply as “Jesus loves John.” There may be a slight difference in emphasis, but the basic meaning is not disturbed.
Now if a three-word sentence like this could potentially be expressed by hundreds of Greek constructions, how should we view the number of actual textual variants in the NT manuscripts? That there are only three variants for every word in the NT, when the potential is almost infinitely greater, seems trivial, especially when we consider how many thousands of manuscripts there are.
As Samuel Clemens said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Ehrman's emphasis on the quantity of variants while deemphasizing their nature, then speaking about the most problematic texts in the NT as though these were almost random examples from among thousands, looks increasingly like Clemens's third category.