ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Textual variants in the Epistle of Jude

Have you ever played the game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to another person and they pass it on to others until the last person says the message out loud? Sometimes the message gets changed a little bit as it's passed from one person to another. This can happen with old writings too - as people copy them over time, they might make small changes by accident or on purpose.

The Epistle of Jude is a letter that was written a long time ago by someone named Jude, and it's included in the Christian Bible. When scholars study the different copies of the Epistle of Jude, they have discovered that there are some differences between them - these are called textual variants. For example, one copy might spell a word one way and another copy might spell it a slightly different way.

These textual variants can help scholars learn more about how the Epistle of Jude was written and copied over time. Sometimes the differences are very small and don't change the meaning of the text, but other times they can be more significant. By carefully comparing different copies of the Epistle of Jude, scholars can work to figure out which version is the most accurate and closest to what the original writer intended to say.