Here is the link:
The Other Number of the Beast
Let me try to give some comments. It is not easy to come up with an accurate manuscript of either Testament. Most of NT originals are from 300 AD or later, and they agree on like 99% of the text. As a rule of thumb, the earlier ones are assumed more accurate, since in those days everything was written by hand. They assume that mistakes happen with time. Since this fragment comes from 240 AD or so, the rule of thumb suggests it is correct.
But let's look at other instances, and see how good the rule of thumb is.
The OT Hebrew comes 100% from the "Masoretic text" given us by what was left of the Jewish rabbis in 800AD. They were very careful, and history bears them out. We have found parts of Isaiah so old that it could be in Isaiah's own hand. It matches perfectly. But, then there is the little piece of Genesis in the Dead Sea Scrolls I read many years ago that is an exact copy of the Masoretic text, except here and there, one single Hebrew letter is changed. The effects to the true story of Abraham were devastating, and gave us a whole other theology. Now, if you saw this, would you believe the oldest copy (800 years older than the Hebrew Bible we have), or would you believe the story in the Bible as given to us by the Jewish teachers of the Bible, and agreed to by all the Jews? Of course, especially if you have read the deviant theology in many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you would reject the oldest copy as deliberate theological fabrication. That's what everyone has done, and I agree. this proves there is more to this than just the rule of thumb. Especially when all the copies are hundreds of years older than the lost originals, as they are in the case of Genesis.
First question is thus: Is there any reason for the Oxyrhyncus Papyrus to have altered theology for some ulterior motive? Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, we don't really have all that much to see if they systematically changed other things. But I think the answer is no, because I have a better reason for the change to 616.
Second problem: Many people read Scriptures, but many more people can be added to readers of old texts if you count archeologists, philosophers, historians, etc., interested in non-Christian sources. These folks have gotten together enough to develop some rules for figuring out who made the mistake. If two people copy by hand from one text, almost certainly, a full added line with a new idea is a comment. We would put it in a footnote, but they had not invented that yet. An example of this is "these kind can be cast out only by prayer and fasting". The oldest manuscripts do not have "and fasting". Most people think it's a footnote added by some monk who liked to fast. And I think everyone knows about the two endings to Mark's Gospel; they have never figured out for sure which one is the added one. But this does not apply here, we are dealing with one character change, not a whole line.
Third (and most likely reason): Simple laziness. People who analyze mistakes have found repeatedly that if you don't understand something (like 666), you don't give it full attention when you have to copy it. There are thousands of such errors. Look at what has changed here: the chi and the stigma are the same, but xi is changed to iota. Could this have been laziness? Do we have any evidence? Well, first, the "nomina sacra" are abbreviated throughout the papyrus (see
Papyrus 115 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)- so someone was taking shortcuts anyway. But how could xi, which is three horizontal lines, get changed to iota, which is one vertical line? Simple, if you write xi as a small letter, or if you hurry and write it as one stroke, it's a quick backwards s, and some people put no curve in it at all. the next person down the line, never having heard of 666, thinks it's an iota, and copies if that way. People who study this kind of thing call it a mistake due to simplification. The key to recognize it is that it is always an error in a very small thing, like one letter, or one sound, and the new version is always simpler to write or say, than the old. It is also almost always made on some matter that is not well understood at the time.
Here's what I think happened. John's original copy from Patmos, said 666, because that's what God told him to write. Copies were made, and then copies of those, and copies of those, all by hand. Somewhere, probably 3 generations down (170?) one person took a shortcut, and wrote the quick xi. (Even John didn't live that long! So he was not around to ask.) By 200, somebody else thought it was an iota, and made it even more straight, and so on down. By 240 (let's see, this would be someone the age of John's great-great-great-grandson) copied that, and that's what we have here.
Just like I see no reason to follow the Dead Sea scrolls' Abraham story, I see not reason to think it's 616.
PS. When my wife was alive, she allowed me to tell any jokes about her inability to handle the checking account book that I liked to in my math classes. Haven't you ever changed a 4 to a 9 or a 2 to a 3 because you wrote too fast? That's what this amounts to.
