Bravo ! vous tenez compte des remarques… effacez donc mon commentaire précédent qui n’a plus de raison d’être.

J’ai corrigé l’article pour y inclure les sources.

Sinon, pour ce qui est des 400 000, comme vous le dites c’est un détail, le but de l’article n’étant pas de discuter de la notion de variantes. Pour ce qui est des 450 pages, cela est juste, toutefois 450 parait à mes yeux comme un minimum, l’écriture sur un manuscrit ayant une police plus grande que celle d’un ordinateur… Ainsi il y aurait moins d’une variante toutes les 6,5 pages et cela ne ferait que renforcer le point de l’article.

Ceci n’est qu’un détail, ce qui ne va pas principalement c’est que vous présentez ce calcul : 5800 X 450/400 000 comme s’il coulait de source. Mais d’où vient ce 450 pages ? Vous avez évidemment pris cette idée sur un quelconque site anglophone ; le nombre de pages est évidemment lié à la taille de la police. Chaque fois que vous empruntez à d’autres, citez vos sources, ou ça devient du plagiat !

Voir la réponse de Wallace à ce calcul dans les commentaires :

I have a question about textual variants in the NT manuscripts. Dr. Wallace, you have stated elsewhere that the average Greek New Testament manuscript is roughly 450 pages, and we know that there are roughly 5,850 manuscripts in existence. By multiplication, that renders 2,632,500 total pages. If there are 400,000 variants (as many have claimed), this would mean that there is only one variant for every 6.5 pages of written text. That would be absolutely stellar in my judgment! Could you please tell me if the assumptions behind my math are correct? Thanks a bunch for all your work!

No, that’s not correct. There are too many variables that have not been taken into account. I never gave the numbers for differences among individual MSS because that depends on the baseline that one is calibrating against. For example, if one were to compare the printed texts of the UBS4/NA27 with the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text, he/she would find 6577 differences. That comes to an average of 25 variants per chapter. Even the closest two early MSS have 6-10 variants per chapter. You also can’t count by pages, since although the average NT MS has 459 pages, this doesn’t tell how much of the NT is found in that MS. Only about 60 of all 5839 Greek NT MSS are complete NTs. The largest group has the Gospels, then Paul, then the general letters, and finally Revelation. Quite a few MSS have a combination of more than one genre. So there are too many variables that are either not yet known (though the data are available; it would be easy to figure it out, though quite time-consuming) or known but not part of the calculations I gave.