How Many Variants Make It into Your Greek New Testament?

Greek students sometimes get the wrong impression that their Nestle-Aland apparatus records all the variants for the New Testament. I certainly thought this at one point. And it’s not just students. I once heard a story about one of Kurt Aland’s colleagues who called him up in a state of distress because he had found a variant in the Syriac that was not in the NA apparatus! Aland had to break the news to him that this poor variant was not alone. The Nestle apparatus, like most apparatuses is selective.

But just how selective is your Greek New Testament? Since we now have complete collations for several small parts of the NT, and since I’ve done the boring exciting work of counting the variants in them, we can now get a sense of just how selective our standard editions are in their apparatuses.

Drawing on the data available for John 18, Philemon, and Jude, we can see just how many of the total number of variants the UBS4, NA28, and ECM apparatuses include. It’s not a perfect comparison because these editions all include variants from versions and fathers which the exhaustive collations don’t. They also don’t necessarily share the same variant units either. But for giving a general sense of the data, I think these comparisons are helpful.

Results

Here are the results of my comparison:

And in table form with percentages:

Section	Number of Variants (% of total)
	UBS4	NA28	ECM	TOTAL
John 18	10 (0.3%)	183 (6.0%)	–	3,058
Philemon	16 (1.4%)	55 (4.6%)	–	1,185
Jude	47 (2.8%)	145 (8.6%)	789 (46.6%)	1,694

From these numbers we can see just how selective the UBS and NA apparatuses are. In the UBS, we only get 0.3 percent of the total variants in John 18 and it’s still only 2.8 percent in Jude. The NA does better, of course, but it is still just a drop in the bucket of the total number. Somewhat surprisingly, even the ECM with its extensive apparatus comes in below 50 percent.

Signficance

I see at least two conclusions we can draw from these comparisons. The first is that unqualified claims that most of our variants were created early on are simply false. Given that the NA, UBS, and ECM apparatuses all lean heavily toward the earliest evidence, it follows that the bulk of our variants were created (or at least are first attested) later on. In Jude, for example, over 53 percent of variants don’t show up in an edition that represents the text’s first 1,000 years of development (i.e., the ECM). So we cannot blithely claim that most of our variants were created early. It may be true that most of our most interesting or most important variants were created early, but that would take us well beyond the time I have for this blog post.

Second, insofar as these editions succeed in presenting the most significant variants for exegesis and translation (I’m thinking now of the NA and UBS editions), we can conclude that most of our variants are pretty insignificant.

Now that phrase “insofar as” is a pretty important qualifier and I can already hear many astute blog readers protesting that the NA/UBS editions leave out too much of value. I hear your protest. But editors have to draw the line somewhere and I don’t envy them for that. Even knowing that editors leave out some readings we think should be there, my comparisons here still give us at least one concrete way to answer the question “How many variants matter?” If we adjust the question to “How many variants mattered enough that the editors included them in my Greek New Testament?” the answer is less than ten percent.

HT: Greg Lanier for suggesting the idea.