Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 4. The Quest for Origins

John Mill's thirty thousand variants and the storm of 1707

In short

1.John Mill of Oxford spent thirty years collating manuscripts, publishing in 1707.
2.He catalogued around **thirty thousand** places of variation — and admitted he had not recorded them all.
3.Opponents such as Daniel Whitby argued the publication itself endangered the faith.
4.Richard Bentley replied that the variants existed whether or not Mill printed them.

The claim being examined

Awareness of textual variation is assumed to be a recent, sceptical development.

The Islamic position

The evidence has been public inside Christian scholarship for over three centuries; it is not an outsider's discovery.

Analysis

Ehrman uses the Mill controversy to make a point about method: the variants are not created by textual critics, they are found. Whitby's fear was that publishing the apparatus would hand ammunition to deists; Bentley's answer, which Ehrman endorses, is that the manuscripts are what they are and an honest text can only be built from them. The same exchange recurs today whenever the numbers are raised.

Sources

Bart D. Ehrman · John Mill · Richard Bentley · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 4 'The Quest for Origins', pp. 83-86, 101-115

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