“Throughout the first centuries of its existence, the New Testament experienced not only an uncontrolled, but almost a chaotic distribution. From the middle of the first century until AD 313, Christianity was a ‘religio illicita’ under Roman persecution. At times it was illegal to own or even copy its Scriptures. During relative peace, the church could become established and as part of its ministry copy the Scriptures, but then persecution would rise again, and history records the destruction of literally thousands of these manuscripts.
Still, Christians wanted everyone to know about the Savior, hear about the Lord, so they did not place restrictions upon the copying of their sacred texts. From the earliest days, the individual New Testament books were copied and recopied, even during the original authors’ lifetimes, so that their message of life and forgiveness in Christ could be proclaimed to all. Translations into Latin, Coptic, Sahidic, Bohairic, et al., were an early result of this attitude.
This willingness to have the texts copied meant that at no time during the history of their transmission did any one person, any group, any ecclesiastical structure control the books’ content, individually or corporately. Despite mythological traditions to the contrary, the early church, as a persecuted minority, was not under the control of a single man or group of men, and the copying of manuscripts was done freely, without centralized control.
The New Testament illustrates the concept of multi-focality, multiple authors, writing at multiple times to multiple audiences, produced a text that from the start, by definition, could never be under any institution or single group’s control. they were so scattered that once the epistles of Paul, Peter and John and the Gospels began to circulate, it would have been impossible to gather them all up and make changes. There is simply no possibility of a wholesale edition process whereby doctrines could be taken out of the whole corpus or other concepts read into the text. Alter a manuscript, or even a few manuscripts, in one geographical area and those will be seen to differ when compared with earlier manuscripts from another area. One would have to alter all manuscripts completely to be able to make any major textual change, and no one in the ancient world was ever in a position to pull that off.
The result of this uncontrolled production of the New Testament books is twofold. First, we can have complete confidence that what we possess today is what was written in the first century by the apostles of Jesus. Second, because the frequent copying was not always done by professionals (manuscripts destroyed by the Romans had to be replaced; church growth required more manuscript production), inevitable copyist errors appear in the manuscripts. ANY handwritten work, no matter how carefully done, will contain these. But in the case of the New Testament, the VAST majority of all variations do not impact the meaning of the text, being limited to vagaries of the Greek language, such as the ‘movable nu’ or the spelling or arcane names.”
From “What Every Christian Needs to Know about the Koran” by James R White
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