By Bart Ehrman
If Textual Variants Don’t Change Any Key Doctrines — Then Who Cares? Part 1
Extract — But here is the main point of this post: to question whether variants would alter any fundamental doctrine is, in my view, is a rather odd way of deciding whether the variants matter or not. Let me give you an analogous situation. Suppose tomorrow morning we were all to wake up only to find that the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Mark, Philemon, 2 Peter, and 3 John were no longer in the Bible. Overnight, they had simply disappeared, leaving no trace. Would that *matter*? Would that be *important*? OF COURSE it would be important. It would be HUGE. But would it affect and “fundamental doctrine” of the Christian religion? Not in the least. Not a bit. Not at all. It would have zero effect.
Why Bible-Believing Christians Care About Textual Variants. Part 2
Extract — Of course I had always assumed that it was simply because humans had copied the texts. But wait a second. I firmly believed that God had done a miracle in order to inspire the authors of the texts to write his words. Surely this means that God wanted his people (the Christians) to have his words. Why else would he inspire the authors? But if he wanted Christians to have his very words, then why did he allow the originals to get lost? And why didn’t he ensure that the copyists didn’t make mistakes when they copied their texts? The fact that he did not ensure this showed that actually he must not have been all that interested in giving Christians his words.
