10 Key Textual Variants in the New Testament
Written by Marko Marina, Ph.D.
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Author | Historian | BE Contributor
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Date written: April 7th, 2025
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman
The New Testament is the most influential body of literature in the history of Western civilization. It has shaped the course of theology, philosophy, politics, literature, and art for nearly two millennia.
Since the invention of the printing press, it has remained the world’s undisputed bestseller. Yet, despite its cultural and historical significance, many readers today are surprisingly unfamiliar with the New Testament — its content but also the basic facts about how it came into existence. Some people also do not realize that it contains differences.
What caused these textual variants in the New Testament? One crucial but often overlooked aspect of its transmission process is that it, like all ancient books, was copied by hand. For the first fifteen hundred years of its history, every single manuscript of the New Testament was written by a scribe.
As you can imagine, where there is handwriting, there are mistakes. Over time, these hand-copied manuscripts began to diverge, sometimes in small and subtle ways, sometimes in ways that significantly altered the meaning of the text.
In this article, we’ll explore what textual variants are, how they came into being, and why they matter. We’ll begin by looking at the nature of the New Testament itself. What kind of collection was it, and how was it copied and preserved?
Then, we’ll examine the causes behind textual variants, from simple copying errors to deliberate editorial changes made for theological or practical reasons. Finally, we’ll explore 10 of the most significant textual variants in the New Testament.
By the end, you’ll not only have a clearer understanding of how the New Testament came down to us through the centuries but also why studying these textual differences is essential for anyone interested in the history, meaning, and ongoing interpretation of the Bible.
The New Testament: Basic Introduction
In their book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Mendez note:
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The Christian Scriptures did not drop from the sky one day in July the year Jesus died. They were written by individual authors at different points of time, in different countries, to different communities, with different concerns; they were later read by an even wider range of Christians and were eventually collected together into what we now call the New Testament.
Most of my students have little knowledge about the formation of the New Testament, which is always surprising, especially considering that we live in a predominantly Catholic country.
Even the most basic point is frequently overlooked: The New Testament isn’t one single book. It’s a library of 27 distinct writings, composed by various authors over decades, in a range of literary genres, including Gospels and letters.
These texts were composed in ancient Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean world during the first century C.E.
The earliest of these writings are the letters of the apostle Paul, with 1 Thessalonians often considered the first, written around 49 or 50 C.E. The latest is probably 2 Peter, which most scholars date to the early second century, well after the death of Peter himself.
This means that the New Testament, as we know it, emerged gradually over time, shaped by different theological, pastoral, and communal needs.
However, writing a text was only the beginning of its story. In the ancient world, every book — religious or otherwise — had to be copied by hand. The New Testament was no exception. For centuries, it was preserved and circulated by scribes who sat by lamplight, painstakingly reproducing each word onto scrolls or codices.
We don’t possess the original manuscripts (or “autographs”) of any New Testament books. What we have are later copies: Some made with great care, others with obvious errors and alterations.
A scribal culture had long existed in the ancient Near East, including in Israel, where writing was considered a prestigious and even sacred task.
While oral performance retained its authority, the act of writing (especially prophetic or divine words) conveyed seriousness and permanence. As scholars have noted, writing enabled communities to fix content, control tradition, and resist the changes that oral transmission might introduce.
Furthermore, texts were written on various materials in antiquity, from stone and pottery shards to wooden tablets and leather. However, as Bruce Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman explain, “Among these several materials, the student of the New Testament is interested chiefly in the last two, for almost all New Testament manuscripts are made of either papyrus or parchment.”
Today, scholars have access to thousands of New Testament manuscripts in Greek, ranging from tiny scraps to complete codices. One of the oldest known fragments is Papyrus 52 (P52), a small piece containing verses from the Gospel of John, likely dated to the first half of the 2nd century.
The production and preservation of the New Testament, then, was an enormous and expensive undertaking. Books in antiquity were never cheap (there were no Kindle versions, of course), and every step in the copying process introduced the possibility of change.
Whether due to human error, poor eyesight, or intentional editing, differences crept into the text over time. Scholars refer to these differences as textual variants in the New Testament. And it’s this important phenomenon (how such variants emerge and why they matter) that we now turn to.
Textual Variants in the New Testament: An Introduction
When discussing textual variants in the New Testament, it's important to begin with the basics: What exactly is a textual variant, and why does it happen? Simply put, a textual variant is any difference found among the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament.
The existence of these variants is a direct consequence of the way texts were copied in the ancient world.
Copying manuscripts in antiquity was a remarkably different endeavor than it’s today. Without printing presses, computers, or even punctuation and spacing between words, scribes had to rely on their eyes, memory, and familiarity with the text to transcribe what they saw.
Often, ancient manuscripts presented words in an unbroken sequence (like THISWITHOUTSPACES), requiring scribes to parse and interpret the meaning as they copied. This made the work prone to error. Some scribes copied visually, others by listening and repeating what was read aloud. In both cases, human fallibility inevitably crept in.
These errors can be grouped into two broad categories: Unintentional and intentional changes.
Unintentional errors include mistakes such as confusing letters that sound alike, skipping a line due to similar endings (a phenomenon known as homoioteleuton), repeating words or phrases, and occasionally inserting marginal notes into the main body of the text.
On the other hand, intentional changes were introduced when a scribe believed the text needed “correction.” Sometimes, this was due to doctrinal convictions or the scribe’s memory of an alternative reading he believed to be more accurate.
The sheer number of manuscripts and fragments we possess only adds to the complexity. As Leon Vaganay explains in his An Introduction to the New Testament Textual Criticism:
What constitutes a handicap for New Testament textual criticism are the vast number of witnesses and the enormous number of variants. There are more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts, counting the lectionaries. And that is nowhere near the number of manuscripts of the versions (that is, the translations into foreign languages), let alone that of the quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers (several million), which help to make up the total sum of witnesses. That being the case, it is not hard to imagine how many thousands of variants there must be. Some say 150,000, others would say nearer 250,000, but the exact number is not really important. The fact is that it would be difficult to find a sentence, even part of a sentence, for which the rendering is consistent in every single manuscript. That certainly gives plenty of food for thought.
Likewise, Bart D. Ehrman, in his book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, underscores the point: “Strikingly, with the exception of the smallest fragments, no two of these copies are exactly alike in all their particulars. No one knows how many differences, or variant readings, occur among the surviving witnesses, but they must number in the hundreds of thousands.”
Needless to say, the vast majority of textual variants in the Bible are minor and don’t affect the meaning of the text. However, some do, and it’s these theologically and literarily consequential changes that merit closer examination.
We aren’t, of course, going to survey every example of textual variation in the New Testament. That would require not just an article but an entire book — or perhaps a series of them!
Instead, in what follows, we’ll focus on some of the most noteworthy examples: Ten key textual variants in the New Testament that likely emerged from deliberate changes made by scribes who, for various theological or interpretive reasons, believed the text before them needed modification.
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Ten Key Textual Variants in the New Testament
#1 – The Woman Caught in Adultery
We begin our exploration of the textual variants in the New Testament by looking at one of the most famous and beloved scenes in the Gospels: The story of the woman caught in adultery.
This poignant episode, in which Jesus tells a crowd of would-be executioners, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone,” is absent from the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of John.
In his bestseller Misquoting Jesus, Bart D. Ehrman explains:
The story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.
#2 – The Longer Ending of Mark (Mk 16:9-20)
I remember reading the Gospel of Mark for the first time and realizing its abrupt ending without any clear reference to Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. Being a Christian, it kind of bothered me. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one.
At some point in the early transmission of the text, a scribe added a longer ending (verses 9 to 20) detailing resurrection appearances, missionary commands, and signs of belief.
However, most scholars today agree that the original Gospel of Mark ends at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear, and that the longer ending is a later addition designed to resolve the awkward silence after the original narrative.
As Ehrman explains in his book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture:
That scribes were concerned to emphasize, to some degree, the ascension of Christ into heaven is demonstrated in other, less disputed, corruptions… The longer ending of the Gospel according to Mark, which by common consent forms no part of the original text, attests the actual ascent of Jesus into heaven… Here, there can be no doubt concerning the dating of the tradition: it is attested in the main by sources as early as Irenaeus.
#3 – The Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7-8)
Another example of a textual variant in the Bible (perhaps the most theologically loaded) is found in 1 John 5:7-8, a passage known as the Comma Johanneum. In later manuscripts, especially in the Latin Vulgate, the text includes an explicit Trinitarian formula: “The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit — and these three are one.”
However, this phrasing is absent from all early Greek manuscripts and appears to have been added much later to support the doctrine of the Trinity during theological disputes. Most scholars agree that this phrase isn’t original to the text of 1 John but is instead a clear example of an intentional scribal alteration introduced to reinforce a particular doctrinal viewpoint.
In his Commentary, Raymond E. Brown concludes:
Today scholars are virtually unanimous that the Comma arose well after the first century as a trinitarian reflection upon the original text of 1 John and was added to the biblical MSS [manuscripts] hundreds of years after 1 John was written.
Did You Know?
Even Homer Wasn’t Safe from Editors and Scribes!
Textual changes aren’t unique to the Bible. In fact, some of the earliest known examples come from the ancient editors of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Working at the Library of Alexandria, scholars like Zenodotus and Aristarchus of Samothrace carefully reviewed different manuscript versions and deliberately removed or flagged verses they believed were later additions.
Zenodotus, the first head librarian at Alexandria, created one of the earliest critical editions of Homer. He made editorial interventions such as deleting lines he deemed spurious, rearranging passages, and adding marginal signs (called obeli) to flag questionable verses. His successor, Aristarchus, took this work further, creating detailed commentaries (hypomnemata) and developing a rigorous system of textual signs to mark lines as doubtful, interpolated, or especially poetic.
Modern scholarship agrees that many verses in Homer are likely interpolated, and the work of the Alexandrian critics marks one of the earliest known efforts to distinguish authentic tradition from later textual development — an issue that echoes in the study of textual variants in the New Testament.
#4 – Jesus’ Agony in the Garden (Lk 22:43-44)
Textual variants are scattered throughout the Gospels, and another major example comes from Luke’s account of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In some manuscripts, Jesus, while praying, is described as being in such agony that “his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground,” and an angel appears to strengthen him.
Bart D. Ehrman and Mark A. Plunkett argued that these verses aren’t original to Luke’s Gospel but were added by later scribes for theological reasons. In their view, the verses reflect a strong anti-docetic impulse — intended to emphasize Jesus’ real, physical suffering against those who claimed he only seemed human (a view held by groups such as the Marcionites).
These verses (Luke 22:43-44) are missing from our earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts and key early Church Fathers of the Alexandrian tradition, such as Clement and Origen.
Yet, they appear already in the second century in authors like Justin and Irenaeus. So, were they added or removed? Ehrman and Plunkett believe they were added!
They emphasized how Luke, elsewhere in his Gospel, goes out of his way to present a calm, composed, and in-control Jesus during the Passion, omitting any signs of emotional anguish that appear in his source, the Gospel of Mark.
Furthermore, the bloody sweat passage stands out as inconsistent with Luke’s redactional choices (in comparison to Mark’s text), disrupting the literary structure of the scene and introducing an image of Jesus that seems more Markan than Lukan.
However, it must be noted that not all scholars agree with Ehrman’s and Plunkett’s conclusions. Some defend the authenticity of the verses by appealing to their presence in a broad range of later manuscripts and noting their Lukan stylistic features.
In the end, while the debate continues, many textual critics lean toward seeing this as an interpolation. It’s a vivid example of how textual variants in the New Testament can reflect deep theological tensions in early Christian communities.
#5 – Luke 23:34 – “Father, forgive them…”
Among the most memorable lines attributed to Jesus during the crucifixion is his prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Yet this deeply moving saying is absent from several of our earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, including Papyrus 75 (dated to around 200 C.E.) and several high-quality codices from the 4th century.
At the same time, the passage appears in Codex Sinaiticus and a large number of later manuscripts, especially from the medieval period. This raises a classic textual question: Was the verse originally part of Luke’s Gospel and later removed, or was it a later addition inserted by a scribe?
Scholars remain divided. Some have argued that a scribe may have added the prayer to ensure Jesus appeared as forgiving as Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who prays in Acts 7:60, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
However, this theory is complicated by the fact that scribes typically harmonize passages by reproducing identical wording (not merely similar themes), and in this case, the wording differs significantly.
Moreover, Luke, who authored both the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, often draws explicit parallels between Jesus and his followers. The idea that Stephen would echo Jesus, rather than the other way around, aligns more naturally with the literary structure and theological message of Luke-Acts.
If the verse was indeed original, why might it have been removed? Historical context offers one possible answer.
As tensions between early Christians and Jews intensified, some scribes may have become uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus offering forgiveness to those perceived as his executioners — particularly if the blame was increasingly placed (see Christopher Edwards’ excellent book!) on the Jewish authorities.
In this scenario, the prayer might have been deliberately omitted to better reflect the theological and polemical climate of the time. Whether original or secondary, the passage remains one of the most discussed textual variants in the New Testament — another reason to love Biblical studies and early Christianity!
#6 – “Son of God” Omission (Mark 1:1)
The opening verse of the Gospel of Mark traditionally reads, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” However, some early manuscripts do not include the phrase “the Son of God,” leading scholars to question whether those words were part of the original text.
Many textual critics argue that the shorter reading, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ”, is more likely original. The reasoning is partly based on what is known as the principle of lectio brevior, the idea that scribes were more prone to adding clarifying or theologically rich material than removing it.
In this case, it's plausible that a scribe inserted “the Son of God” to reinforce Christological belief, especially as the title plays a key role later in the Gospel.
#7 – "By the Grace of God" or "Apart from God" (Hebrews 2:9)
In Hebrews 2:9, most modern translations read that Jesus tasted death “by the grace of God” (chariti theou) for everyone. However, a small number of early manuscripts instead read “apart from God” (chōris theou), suggesting a different theological nuance: That Jesus died forsaken or separated from God.
Most scholars consider “by the grace of God” to be the original reading, partly because it fits more smoothly within the theological tone of Hebrews, which consistently emphasizes divine initiative and mercy.
The alternative reading, “apart from God,” while attested in early sources such as the Church Father Origen, may have arisen through a copying error, especially given the similarity of the Greek words chariti (χάριτι) and chōris (χωρὶς).
#8 – “Nor the Son” Omission (Matthew 24:36)
In Matthew 24:36, Jesus speaks about the timing of the end of the age, saying: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” However, some manuscripts of Matthew omit the phrase “nor the Son” (οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός).
In The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Ehrman explains the manuscript tradition:
Although the phrase 'nor the Son’ is found in the earliest and best representatives of the Alexandrian, Caesarean, and Western traditions, it is lacking in the great bulk of manuscripts, including most of the Byzantine. The omission must have been made quite early, as it is attested in Origen and a number of versional witnesses (most of the Syriac and Coptic, along with the Latin Vulgate).
Scholars generally believe that “nor the Son” was part of the original text and was later removed by some scribes. The rationale is that this phrase, which implies a limitation to Jesus’ knowledge, may have been viewed as theologically problematic by copyists who emphasized his divine omniscience.
This example illustrates how textual variants in the New Testament could also arise from scribal efforts to resolve perceived theological difficulties.
#9 – Expanded Ending (Romans 8:1)
Romans 8:1 is a classic example of a verse that appears in two different forms in the manuscript tradition. Some manuscripts read simply: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Others add a longer clause, adding two phrases: “who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Most scholars believe the shorter reading is original and that the longer version represents a later scribal expansion. The additional phrase was likely inserted to clarify or reinforce the ethical behavior expected of believers, aligning with Paul’s broader teaching.
Thus, Robert Jewett, in his Commentary on Romans, explicitly concludes: “The witnesses without these two phrases are sufficiently broad and ancient to claim priority.”
#10 – The Number of the Beast: 666 or 616? (Revelation 13:18)
This is, for me, the most interesting example of textual variation in the Bible. I found out about it long before I ever became a historian. As a high-school kid, I was reading John Lloyd's and John Mitchinson's excellent work, The Book of General Ignorance.
The number of the beast, famously 666, might not be 666 in every manuscript. Some early sources record it as 616. Revelation 13:18 is where the infamous number appears. In most manuscripts, it reads: “Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it’s the number of a man. His number is 666.”
Yet a handful of early and significant manuscripts (including Papyrus 115 and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus) record the number as 616 instead. This discrepancy puzzled me at first, but later, as I delved into New Testament scholarship, I learned that this is one of the many genuine textual variants in the New Testament.
As Bart Ehrman explains in his book Armageddon, both numbers may be tied to the same figure (Emperor Nero) through a system called gematria, in which letters correspond to numerical values.
Depending on how “Nero Caesar” is spelled (particularly whether the Latin or Hebrew transliteration is used), the total can add up to either 666 or 616. So, which is it?
Most scholars agree that 666 is the original reading, supported by its broader manuscript attestation and symbolic resonance in apocalyptic literature. Still, the presence of 616 in early witnesses suggests that some scribes (or Christian communities) may have used an alternate spelling of Nero’s name that fit their linguistic or cultural context.
Conclusion
The presence of textual variants in the New Testament reminds us that the Bible is not a monolithic or static document handed down unchanged through the centuries. Instead, it reflects a long and complex history of transmission, shaped by the hands, minds, and sometimes even the theological agendas of countless scribes.
If you're interested in diving deeper into how scribes changed the Bible (intentionally or by accident), check out Bart D. Ehrman’s online course, The Scribal Corruption of Scripture. Through four engaging lectures, Bart unpacks many of the themes we've explored here, offering expert insights, historical context, and fascinating examples that bring this scribal history to life.
These variations and changes don’t necessarily undermine the historical value of the New Testament but instead invite us to engage with it more thoughtfully and historically, recognizing that our modern Bibles are the product of centuries of careful preservation but also inevitable human imperfection.
By examining ten key examples, we have seen how some textual variants are minor while others carry significant doctrinal, literary, or historical implications. Whether added intentionally or introduced by accident, each tells a story. And its story is one of the many reasons I fell in love with Biblical scholarship!
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