Slide 13 of 22
Notes:
There may be times when the student of scripture might wish not to know about textual variations, but variations are there, and decisions have been made about which readings to adopt (perhaps some 500,000 of them in the New Testament). Are these decisions important? The answer may be a matter of the specific variant in question.
Yet certainly variations do have some implications for how we think about the nature of scripture and the relation of its authority to its transmission in the Christian community. How have these texts come down to us? And Which text shall we indeed read or use?
One thing is clear: it is not only the originals or autographs that have been seen as the word of God. Christians through the centuries have regularly used translations and other versions and have called them word of God, whatever their acronym (NIV, RSV, KJV, NRSV, TEV).
