Where the manuscripts differ · 1 Timothy 3:16
"God was manifest in the flesh" — two letters apart
Older Bibles read "God was manifest in the flesh"; newer ones read "He who was manifested." In ancient Greek capitals the difference is two small strokes — and the deity of Christ does not rest on this verse.
This is the variant most often waved around as proof that modern Bibles are attacking the deity of Christ. It is worth slowing down, because once you can see how ancient manuscripts were written, the whole thing becomes visible and rather ordinary.
Early Greek manuscripts were written in capital letters, with no spaces between words and no lower case. Sacred names were abbreviated with a line drawn over the top — a convention scholars call the *nomina sacra*. So the word for God, *theos*, was written as two letters, theta and sigma: ΘΣ, with a stroke above. The relative pronoun "who" is omicron and sigma: ΟΣ.
Now look at the difference. Theta is an omicron with a horizontal bar through the middle. To turn ΟΣ into ΘΣ you add one small stroke inside the O and one line above the pair. To go the other way, you lose them — and faded ink, a rubbed page, or a scribe finishing another's abbreviation could do it in either direction, with no dishonesty required by anyone.
What the manuscripts actually show
| Witness | Date | What it reads here |
|---|---|---|
| Codex Sinaiticus, original hand | 4th century | ΟΣ — "who was manifested in the flesh." A later corrector changed it to ΘΣ. |
| Codex Alexandrinus | 5th century | Disputed for centuries. A faint stroke is visible, and scholars have argued over whether it is a genuine bar making the word ΘΣ or ink showing through from the other side of the leaf. The manuscript is a witness whose testimony has to be argued about rather than simply read. |
| The Latin and Syriac versions | 4th century onward | A relative pronoun — "who" or "which" — not "God." Translators working from early Greek copies did not find *theos* there. |
| The Byzantine majority of Greek manuscripts | 9th–15th centuries | ΘΣ — "God was manifest in the flesh." This is the reading behind the KJV. |
The case each way
That it belongs in the text
"God" is the reading of the large majority of surviving Greek manuscripts and of the tradition the Reformation-era Bibles were translated from.
It reads more naturally as a sentence. "Who was manifested in the flesh" has no obvious antecedent in the immediate context, and a bare relative pronoun opening a hymn is unusual Greek.
The change from ΘΣ to ΟΣ can also be explained accidentally — a worn or faded bar simply not being copied.
That it came later
The earliest Greek evidence, including the first hand of Sinaiticus, reads the pronoun; the reading "God" appears in correctors and in the later tradition.
The ancient translations independently confirm the pronoun, and translators had no motive to demote a divine title.
Adding the sacred abbreviation is the theologically attractive direction. A copyist who saw a bare "who" and knew the passage was about Christ had every reason to clarify; nobody had a reason to remove "God."
The awkwardness of a relative pronoun is itself evidence for it. Paul is quoting an early Christian hymn, and hymns begin with a relative pronoun elsewhere in the New Testament — Philippians 2:6 and Colossians 1:15 both do exactly this.