These two attitudes—total despair and absolute certainty—are the Scylla and Charybdis that we must steer between. There are also three questions that we need to answer: 1. What is the number of variants—how many scribal changes are there? 2. What is the nature of variants—what kinds of textual variations are there? 3. What theological issues are at stake? A textual variant is any place among the MSS in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission
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