Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

by Bart D. Ehrman

What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Θ, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for “God” (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OΣ), a different word altogether, which simply means “who.” The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “who was made manifest in the flesh.”

As Wettstein continued his investigations, he found other passages typically used to affirm the doctrine of the divinity of Christ that in fact represented textual problems; when these problems are resolved on text-critical grounds, in most instances references to Jesus’s divinity are taken away. This

In it Wettstein does print the Textus Receptus, but he also amasses a mind-boggling array of Greek, Roman, and Jewish texts that parallel statements found in the New Testament and can help illuminate their meaning. He also cites a large number of textual variants, adducing as evidence some twenty-five majuscule manuscripts and some 250 minuscules (nearly three times the number available to Mill), arranging them in a clear fashion by referring to each majuscule with a different capital letter and using arabic numerals to denote the minuscule manuscripts—a system of reference that became standard for centuries and is still, in essence, widely used today.

rational eclecticists

(transcriptional probabilities)