The problem of textual variants: Textual criticism undermines religious belief

Abstract

I argue that textual variants pose a problem for religious belief. Specifically, the existence of hundreds of thousands of textual variants in the New Testament's manuscript tradition, many of them large and ideologically motivated, should reduce a believer's confidence in the Bible as a source of information. This problem is different from the problems of evil and divine hiddenness because, whereas those problems entail the falsity of a religious claim, such as theism, this problem poses an epistemic challenge instead.