This is the article I was most careful about writing, because it is the one where it would be easiest to tell you what you want to hear.
So here is my commitment up front. I am going to give the other side its strongest argument, not its weakest, and I am going to tell you plainly where the honest uncertainty is. If our position needs me to hide something in order to survive, it is not worth holding. It does not need that.
What we are actually talking about
We have thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. They agree overwhelmingly. Where they differ, the differences cluster into families, because manuscripts were copied in particular places from particular exemplars.
Two of those families matter for this argument.
The Byzantine text is the form found in the great majority of surviving manuscripts. It is the text that was copied and read in the Greek speaking Church for century after century. It is what stands behind the Greek used in this reader, drawing on the Byzantine Textform compiled by Robinson and Pierpont.
The Alexandrian text is found in a smaller number of manuscripts, including some very old ones from Egypt. Most modern critical editions and most modern English translations follow it in the places where the families disagree.
The argument for the Byzantine text
There are two, and they are different in kind.
The first is numerical. This is the reading of the overwhelming majority of witnesses. If you want to know what the Church was reading, count.
The second is the one I find weightier, and it is not really a textual argument at all. It is ecclesial.
The Church is not a library. She is a living body, and the Scriptures are her book, read inside her life. The text that was read aloud in her services, preached on by her Fathers, and copied by her monks for a millennium and a half is not one option among several. It is the text she has actually used. There is something strange about telling a living community that the book she has been reading the whole time is not quite her book.
That is why we use it. Not because of a theory about manuscripts, but because of what the Church has done.
The argument on the other side, stated fairly
Now the part I promised.
The strongest argument for the Alexandrian text is not that it is more numerous, because it is not. It is that manuscript counts measure survival, not origin.
Think about it as a copying process. If a reading enters the tradition in a region that goes on to do most of the copying for a thousand years, that reading will end up in most surviving manuscripts, regardless of whether it was original. Counting late copies tells you which region had the busiest scriptoria and the best climate for preserving parchment. It does not by itself tell you what the first century author wrote.
The Alexandrian witnesses are, on average, older. And on the general principle that a shorter reading is more likely original, because scribes tended to add clarifications rather than remove them, several distinctively Byzantine readings look like expansions.
That is a serious argument. I am not going to pretend it is stupid, because it is not, and if you go into a conversation thinking it is stupid you will lose that conversation.
Where I actually land
I hold the Byzantine text, and I hold it primarily on ecclesial grounds rather than on a claim that I have personally settled the manuscript question.
I think the counting argument is weaker than its advocates say and the age argument is weaker than its advocates say. Oldest surviving is not the same as best, and a manuscript surviving in the Egyptian desert tells you about the climate as much as about the text. Both sides overstate.
What I will not do is claim that the evidence is one sided, because it is not, and you will meet people who know the evidence far better than either of us.
The thing that settles the anxiety
Here is what actually matters, and it is why I can afford to be relaxed about the above.
No doctrine of the Christian faith changes depending on which family you follow. Not one.
The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the sacraments, the moral teaching. All of it stands in either text. The disputed readings are mostly matters of a word order, a title, a clarifying phrase, an addition that likely came in from a parallel passage.
And you can verify that yourself rather than trusting me, because the apparatus is in the reader. Open the Greek footnotes on a chapter like Mark 16 and you will find the actual variant readings recorded with their witnesses. That is not hidden from you. It is on the page.
Two concrete cases are worth your time, and I have written both up separately. The Byzantine text keeps the longer ending of Mark, which the Alexandrian witnesses lack. And the Byzantine text does not contain the Comma Johanneum at 1 John 5:7, which the King James does. Read those two together and you will see that Byzantine priority is not the same thing as keeping every familiar reading.
How to handle this in conversation
If someone comes at you with textual criticism as though it dissolves Christianity, the answer is not to panic and it is not to bluff.
Say what is true. The manuscripts agree overwhelmingly. Where they differ, no doctrine moves. The Church reads the text she has always read. And the variants are printed in the footnotes of the Bible on my desk, which is a strange way to run a cover up.
Always keep your critical thinking. If you suspend it, you are in a cult. Follow the reason all the way down. It does not end where they told you it ends.