Scripture · Subscriber investigation
Variants That Do Not Shake the Faith — and the Two That Deserve a Footnote
Four hundred thousand differences, almost all of them spelling. Then there are the passages your Bible already brackets.
By Anna de Vries|Aug 8, 2026|10 min
Updated Sep 2, 2026 at 8:52 PM EDT
The number usually quoted is around four hundred thousand variants across the Greek manuscript tradition. The number is real and the impression it creates is false.
The overwhelming majority are spelling differences, word-order changes that do not affect meaning in an inflected language, and obvious slips corrected by the next copyist. What remains, after the mechanical noise, is a small set of viable and meaningful variants.
The two everyone knows
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