Textual variants in the Gospel of John

Textual variants in manuscripts arise when a copyist makes deliberate or inadvertent alterations to a text that is being reproduced.

Origen, writing in the 3rd century, was one of the first who made remarks about differences between manuscripts of texts that were eventually collected as the New Testament.

If their eye skips to an earlier word, they may create a repetition (error of dittography).

They may resort to performing a rearranging of words to retain the overall meaning without compromising the context.

"[2] Peter J. Gurry puts the number of non-spelling variants among New Testament manuscripts around 500,000, though he acknowledges his estimate is higher than all previous ones.