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Argy Lacedom ~

AL: "I suspect that's true of most, if not all, the bible."

Not at all.

AL: "I suspect you've been asked before, but having acceoted that 'some' biblical passages are distortions where do you draw the line?"

I generally wouldn't say that some Biblical /passages/ are distortions; after all we've been dealing in this thread with a difference involving one -- uno -- word. There's quite a difference between deciding, between two or more rival one-word variant-readings, which one is original and which one isn't, and calling a lengthy passage a "distortion." And in each case where textual variants exist, the original Biblical text isn't the "distortion!"

In big textual variants and in smaller ones, there are some analytical principles that scholars tend to employ -- the Canons of Textual Criticism, which build on the idea that the original reading tends to be the reading which best accounts for the contending variants. It would take me a long time to explain all the factors involved in text-critical investigations; luckily, some good resources about this sort of thing are available online.

A nice place to start is with F. Kenyon's Book "The Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts," the entire text -- with plates! -- is one Google-search away. Unfortunately Kenyon's book is slightly out-of-date (so don't rely too heavily on what he says about early versions of the New Testament such as the Ethiopic and Old Georgian) but you can nevertheless obtain a good idea of text-critical principles and the evidence involved there (some major manuscripts, patristic quotations, etc.).

Extremely rarely in the New Testament (not so rarely in the Old Testament), the reading which best accounts for the contenting variants, and which seems most probable for the author to have written, is a variant which doesn't exist in any extant witness! In such cases a text-critic may resort to "conjectural emendation," which is basically two calculated guesses: one guess about what the original reading was, and a second guess about how the original reading was lost. But this is /extremely rare./

I would draw the line, so to speak, at actually *replacing,* in the transmission-stream, a variant which is attested in extant sources with a conjectural emendation -- even in cases where the conjectural emendation makes good sense and the reading with the best external attestation walks and talks like a copyist's mistake. To me, that would be too much unlike copying. /Outside/ the transmission-stream, though, I accept conjectural emendations, and have suggested several myself.

I hope this gives some idea of how I approach textual variants.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock