How Many Variants Are There?
Hundreds of thousands
Occasionally updated and edited.
Copyright © 2011
English theologian John Mill invested 30 years of his stellar career comparing extant New Testament manuscripts. He uncovered about 30,000 discrepancies. That was 300 years ago.
Today we have access to an estimated 25,000 complete or fragmented manuscripts including 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and another 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages.
The number of variants is so immense that no one is willing to count them. Eberhard Nestle (d. 1913) estimated the number of known variants to be 150,000 to 200,000. Bart Ehrman currently estimates the number of variants to be about 400,000.
About John Mill ►
About Eberhard Nestle ►
About Bart Ehrman ►