Over some 1400 years of hand copying the various writings, it is inescapable and unarguable that the New Testament (NT) writings, the Greek texts, have been modified.  No argument.  No two manuscripts are the same in every respect.  Where have they been modified and why?  The answers to these questions are complicated and involved; this may be two big reasons (among several others) why so few practicing Christians have any knowledge or understanding of NT corruption.  I submit to you that the primary or most significant NT modifications have taken place regarding the Nature-of-God issue, and that a great number of these Nature-of-God modifications have been deliberate.  Probably most of them have been deliberate.  (This does not include thousands of accidental changes throughout the entire corpus of MS evidence.)  And these deliberate changes were not only executed within Greek MSS as they were copied, but even English-language translation copies have seen their share of scribal changes.    (I suppose other language translation copies have suffered the same fate.)  I hasten to add however, that in all likelihood, the majority of deliberate modifications have been made in good faith or with good intentions, that is, not with wicked, sinful, or hateful intentions. Nevertheless, I think there have been a few foxes in the New Testament henhouse.

Certainly, scribes wanted to harmonize the passages, one with another.  Some scribes, working out of their personal convictions and under the authority of the church, thought that the writer meant to say something in keeping with church doctrine, which needed to be added, or that he wrote something that was too unorthodox (heterodox).  Since the trinity had become foundational to the Roman Church during the copyist years, it would be better and of course, more orthodox and thus correct, if the scriptures reflected the notion that Jesus is God.  This would be in keeping with the understandings of the church.  Thus we find corrupted passages like Romans 9:5 and 1John 5:7, for example, residing in translated Bible versions.  I am surprised that the other “single-God” monotheistic passages, like John 17:3, were not edited out.  Textual Criticism is not a dirty word or a negative term.  Biblical Textual Criticism is the method by which scholars weigh the evidence, internal and external, of ancient biblical writings in order to determine or discern which texts conform more closely to the original autographs.  The necessity of applying textual criticism to the New Testament manuscripts and thousands of fragments comes about because of two facts: (1) No original autographs exist today, and (2) What copies of copies we do have all differ from one another.  Had Yahweh decided to miraculously preserve a few pristine copies of the original writings, called autographs, textual criticism would be easy.   Evidently, he did not so decide.  Why?

The importance of scholarly disputes or arguments over this or that fragment as coming from a particular family of MS copies or from any given century would be considerably reduced; we would have the words as they were written and that would be that.  No doubt those ideal writings would be dated.  Now, however, since that ideal has not been met, and it is unlikely to be met anytime soon, the textual critic seeks to establish from the multitude of conflicting copies which should be regarded as most closely conforming to the original.  No one can ever be certain (honestly) that what we have amassed in any NT version truly represents the original autographs.  The New Testament has been more or less preserved in over 5,000 manuscripts, partial manuscripts, and fragments.  Because of the great number of parts and bits, textual critics have generally adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three or more major groupings.  They are (1) The Alexandrian text-types, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus; (2) The Western text-type, Old Latin and Old Syriac; the (3) the Byzantine text-type; and (4) the Caesarean text-type.   The New Testament of the English King James Version was based on the Textus Receptus, an eclectic  text prepared by Erasmus based primarily on Byzantine text-type manuscripts.  Dr. Hort  suggested another, the Neutral text-type.   (Continued)