“That They Might Pervert the Right Ways of the Lord”
There are basically two kinds of textual variants in biblical manuscripts which have occurred over the centuries: the unplanned and the planned. The former are frequently the unintentional ones, those resulting from human error; they are in some ways the simplest to deal with and the ones to which a textual critic might devote a lifetime of study. The latter-the planned variants-result when a sincere scribe begins to “clarify” in his own way or when a more devious scribe seeks to alter, take away, or keep back valuable truths. Even these latter types of errors could be corrected if we had access to original or even earlier unaltered documents. Unfortunately we do not have such documents.
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