Alteration: 1 Timothy 3:16
In 1 Timothy 3:16, older manuscripts do not use the term "God" but instead "Who."
16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.
Misquoting Jesus p. 113:
The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament itself calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit." As I pointed out in chapter 3, most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names (the so-called nomina sacra), and that is the case here as well, where the Greek word God (0EOE) is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (©£), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation. What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, 0, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta-sigma) for "God" (©2), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OE), a different word altogether, which simply means "who." The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh" but of Christ "who was made manifest in the flesh." According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.
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