Variations in
Old Testament manuscripts are much fewer than in the New Testament, numbering
in all around 2,000. The reason for this is two-fold: we have comparatively few
Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, and apparently the Jewish scribes
exercised much more care in their work than did those who copied the Greek
scriptures. It is estimated that there are about 200,000 variations between the
more than 3,000 New Testament manuscripts extant. These variations include
differences in spelling, transposition of letters, words, and clauses, order of
words, order of sentences, reduplication, etc. By 200,000 variations is not
meant that there are that many places where variations occur, for in many cases
several variations are counted for one word, depending upon the number of
manuscripts that differ at that point. In most cases these variations would not
even call for a difference in translation.
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