2. Not every word in the NT has variants. Some places have, as you surmised, a good half dozen or more (sometimes many more) variants. Others, none. Altogether, the total comes to about 400,000. My best guess would be that about half of the words have variants, but that’s only a guess. That’s incorporating all spelling changes, word flips, omissions, additions, etc.

4. Not yet because we haven’t even digitized all the data yet, let alone organized it.

Thank you.

1. Given what you said, would the pericope of the woman caught in adultery be counted as one variant, or 100 (assuming there are 100 words in the pericope)? And what about things like inverted word order? If two words are transposed in a text, does that count as one or two variants?

2. By place, I mean instances. There are 138,162 words in the NT. If every one of those words had a variant somewhere in at least one manuscript, then there would be 138,162 instances/places in which variants occur (even though the number of variants could be higher, because each place may have multiple variants).

But let’s say of the 138,162 words, 100K are the same in every manuscript (same spelling, same order, same everything). That would mean there are 38,162 places in which variants occur. So how many places are there in which variants occur? Or to ask it in reverse, how many places/words are there in which there are no variants in any manuscript? I know that on average, there are 2-3 variants per word, but this is just an average. Some words have no variants, while others may have six.

4. Is there an online source that keeps this information up-to-date?

Thanks!

2. 10k is definitely incorrect. It’s probably based on the erroneous assumption that since the Nestle-Aland text (the standard Greek NT used today) has about 10,000 textual problems, that’s all there are. I’ve heard NT scholars (including Robert Funk!) make that assumption explicit before. But by ‘place’ what do you mean? Generally speaking, a variation unit is the smallest possible grammatical unit. This may be one word or a few words. There are approximately 140,000 words in the Greek NT. On average, each word has two or three variants (if you could count them at the word-level in each instance).

3. Your instincts are correct here. For convenience’ sake, many scholars say that no two MSS are exactly alike.

4. The list in DJ is based on the latest critical editions of the various classical authors. Many lists (especially when citing Homer) are based on a book that came out in 1951. Even in Metzger-Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th edition (2005), the information was more than 50 years old.

I’ve done a lot of reading on textual criticism, but there are some questions I have not been able to get answered. I’m teaching on textual criticism for the next two weeks, so it would help me immensely if you could answer them for me.

1. How are variants counted? For example, is every word in the periscope of the woman caught in adultery considered a separate variant? If two words are transposed in a manuscript, is that counted as one or two variants?
2. How many places in the NT do variants appear? I’ve always heard it was 10K. But if there are 400K variants, that would mean there are, on average, 40 different textual variants for each location in the text in which variants appear. This sounds unbelievable. 3. I have always heard it said that “no two manuscripts are exactly alike,” but is this an overstatement? Given the number of fragments we have, it would seem that at least two would agree. For example, doesn’t P52 agree 100% with other manuscripts containing that same portion of John? I’m inclined to think this claim only pertains to larger manuscripts and manuscript fragments?
4. I have seen so many lists regarding the textual evidence for classical authors (# of manuscripts, and earliest extant copy), and few of them match up. The truncated list you provided in Dethroning Jesus differs significantly from the others. I have searched in vain to find a reliable source that shows the current state of these texts. Do you know of a book, journal article, or website that keeps up-to-date information on this?

Thanks!