Thoughts on Textual Variants in Scripture

Talking over lunch with a friend the other day, the topic came up of textual criticism in the Bible, as it of course often does in seminaries and nowhere else. She commented to me that it had taken her aback when she first found out that some things, like the story in John of the woman caught in adultery, "weren't supposed to be in the Bible." My tongue was slow and my politeness ready so I didn't jump on this statement the way I might have in a more argumentative mood. It has given me food for reflection, however. What do we mean when we say such things about those parts of the Biblical canon which are not represented in the oldest and best manuscripts? What does it mean to say that they aren't supposed to be in the Bible? There seem to me to be two main presuppositions behind such a statement and I think both of them are wrong. The first is a historical-literary idea, that the "original" form of a text is the only valuable form of it. The second is a theological offshoot of the same sentiment, that the Bible was inspired by God only at the moment it was written down.

Both these propositions are concerned with essence or nature of the Bible and like all ideologies concerned with essence, they are very insistent that the essence be unique. If I tell them that the Bible may or may not contain the episode of the woman caught in adultery and still be the Bible, they will say that that is impossible, since a Bible with the passage and a Bible without the passage are two different things and the Bible is one thing. They have trouble understanding that both are the Bible even though they are not each other.

Let us take an example. The Bible has been translated into many languages. The one I read most often contains the word "God" quite a lot. If I were to pick up a Latin Bible, however, I would read that word not once. Both of these things are the Bible but they are not each other. Or would you say that anyone reading a translation is not reading the Bible? You might say something like "they're not really reading the Bible," but what you would mean by that would be that they weren't really getting the full sense of it and might be developing mistaken ideas about what certain words or phrases mean. But a poor student of Greek or Hebrew might very well read the Bible in the original language and make just those same sorts of mistakes. If people aren't really reading the Bible because they're reading a translation, then many people who do know Greek and Hebrew aren't really reading the Bible for the same reasons. But we say of all these situations that it is someone reading the Bible, and rightly so. The things read are different but they are all the Bible.

Another example perhaps more pertinent to the idea of privileging the "original text." If St. Paul were asked what books were contained in the Bible, he would respond with a list much shorter than the one we would give. We might even ask him, as he sat down to write a letter to those troubled Christians in Corinth whether what he was writing was the Bible. He would most certainly say "No. I'm writing just writing a letter to the Corinthians. You don't write the Bible, your read it." Would Paul merely be mistaken? Did he just not know that what he was writing was the Bible? Or would it be better to say that what he wrote to the Corinthians was a letter but to us the Bible? You might say that Paul did not intend it to be the Bible and thus we shouldn't read it as the Bible. But what books were written to be the Bible? If the author had to intend for his work to be the Bible for it to really be the Bible, then it seems the Bible doesn't actually exist. But I've got it here on my desk; people refer to it all the time and have for centuries. And if the intent of the author doesn't make something the Bible, it shouldn't trouble us when something like the story of the woman caught in adultery is in the Bible even if it wasn't in John's final manuscript of his gospel.

Another way of expressing this attitude towards scripture would be to say that we can only trust the Bible if it is without change, if it has always been the same down to the letter, the way Muslims claim the Qu'ran has remained the same since it was uttered by Mohammad. In other words there is something about the sort of thing the Bible is which gives it authority and truth. Let us indulge our Thomistic streak a little and work this premise out.

1. The Bible is true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is.
2. Created things can be true and authoritative, but are not always and necessarily so; by their nature they are not always and necessarily anything, but always changeable. They can therefore be true and authoritative potentially but not essentially; they are not true and authoritative because of the sort of thing that they are.
3. God is the only thing which is uncreated.
4. Therefore, because a created thing cannot be true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is, anything which is essentially true and authoritative must be uncreated.
5. Therefore the Bible is God (the Bible is Divine).

I am no specialist, but again, similar moves are made, to my knowledge, regarding the Qu'ran in Islam and also the Torah in mystical Judaism. For Christians, however, the Bible does not occupy such a position. For Christians, the Bible is for us, not forever. It is for our edification and inspiration, that is to say, it is true and authoritative for us, not absolutely and essentially true and authoritative; God alone is that. But if that God dwells in us, we will see how surely and singularly the Bible points towards him, and we will return to it again and again and joyfully obey it and submit ourselves to its truth and authority.

Scripture is a thing ordained by God to be a guide and comfort to his people on their way to him. Any explanation, therefore, of its authority ought to begin not with the nature of scripture in se, but the nature of God's action in scripture. Hence the presupposition I spoke about earlier, which asserts that God inspired scripture only at the moment it was written, is properly theological. It begins with the action of God as a way of establishing authority and truth for scripture, as though he infused those qualities into certain texts and then left them alone to operate in the world with their special qualities. This view demands that the texts remain exactly the same, because it was in their original shape that God graced them with authority and truth.

It is easy to see how this theology moves in the direction of asserting those things which we have refuted above, and it is for this reason that I have called it an offshoot of the secular proposition: it shares the same basic assumptions about what scripture must be in terms of uniqueness and immutability. Any book which is not precisely the same as the texts which God inspired is not scripture, or at the least is corrupted scripture, and therefore not really authoritative. Yet the experience of the church resists these ideas about the essential authority and truth of scripture. Many Christians throughout the centuries have heard the Word of God in different, often differing words of scripture. Many secular scholars today have an impressive mastery of the Bible's original language and contexts, but for all that they have far more trouble hearing God's words there than the simplest pious Christian using his dinosaur of a King James and some prayer. As Jesus said to some Jews who were disputing with him, you cannot understand how the scriptures are true if the truth of God is not in you (John 5:37-39).

Is is thus necessary on the witness of the church to say that, although the scriptures were certainly inspired as they were written, they were not inspired only then. For if the truth they impart to us were tied to a particular form they once took, we would not be able to receive that truth if we encountered them in another form. The inspiration of the scriptures is not the infusion of grace into certain texts but rather God's promise to speak to us in those texts, a promise he makes good on to his faithful every hour. If we understand the inspiration of the scriptures in this way, that, like the creation of the world, it is not a one-time act, but, rather, like all God's faithfulness, is 'new every morning,' these textual problems which can deeply trouble a certain conception of scripture have no hold over us. If God be for us, who can be against us? Certainly not textual variants.