Exploring LDAB: X. John 3:16 through History

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
–John 3:16

It seems fitting to spend some time during this Easter weekend to look at the textual history of one of the most famous verses in the entire Bible, John 3:16. A verse that captures the essence of Christianity.

For this exercise, I wrote a basic software program to compare the character sequence in one transcript against another, and report their similarities and differences. I retrieved 127 manuscripts that contain John 3:16 from the International Greek New Testament Project website, and compared them all against P75, one of the two earliest witnesses of John 3:16. The results are tabulated in the figure below in chronological order, according to the dates assigned by NTVMR-INTF, from early 3rd century to the 16th century. Green-coloured cells represent agreement between transcripts, red substitution and black deletion.

John 3:16 in P75 has 105 characters, 90% of which have been conserved through history, that is, they are the same in over 95% of extant manuscripts. This is evidenced by the predominance of green colour in the figure.

In P75, there is a correction between “πιστευων” (“believing”) and “αὐτὸν” (“him”), where the preposition “επ” is changed to “εις”. Consequently it reads, believing in (“εις”) him, not upon (“επ”) him. In the very next verse (v17), the same phrase is written with “εις”. So it is unclear why the copyist wrote “επ” in v16.[1] Almost all the other manuscripts have the corrected form — hence the red-coloured column on the right.

The red-coloured double column on the left highlights three variants at the same location, after the word “υϊον” (“son”). Earliest witnesses P66, P75, Codex Sinaiticus (GA01, א) and Codex Vaticanus (GA03, B) don’t include the word “αὐτὸν”, but Codex Alexandrinus (GA02, A) of the 5th century does; From the 6th to the 10th century, a different variant “νυατυ” becomes dominant, and mainly corresponds with majuscules; From the 11 and 12th century onwards, “αὐτὸν” re-emerges as the dominant variant form, and appears in the vast majority of minuscules.

Some manuscripts show similar patterns of variations, although they are dated centuries apart, which might suggest that the later was descended from the earlier manuscript, or that they were both descended from an even earlier exemplar no longer extant. For example, GA872 and GA131, GA0141 and GA821.[2]

Notes:

• ^1.This correction appears to have been made by someone other than the copyist, because the shape of the letters are different from those same letters in the next verse, but one needs to examine the entire manuscript and all the corrections made, in order to distinguish between the writing of the copyist and later correctors.
• ^2.When compared with one another in their entirety, these manuscripts also show significant similarities.

References:

• New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room – INTF. Accessed April 14, 2019. http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de.
• The International Greek New Testament Project. Accessed April 14, 2019. http://www.igntp.org/.
• Vatican Library. Accessed April 27, 2019. https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Pap.Hanna.1(Mater.Verbi)/0068