Has the Bible Been Changed?

There is a reality about the Bible that Christians may not like to think about. No original copy of any single book of the New Testament survives. We don’t have the sheet of papyrus John wrote on when he was inspired by the Holy Spirit and wrote the Gospel of John. Not one of the original documents Paul wrote remains either. Those all disappeared long ago. What we do have are copies. And copies made of those copies. For hundreds of years, humans copied them and carried them around the globe. And when we look at these manuscripts, we discover the unsettling truth that human beings made mistakes.

So when you pick up your Bible today, how do you know you’re actually reading what Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or Paul originally wrote?

Has the Bible been changed?

The short answer: Scribes did make mistakes and changes while copying the New Testament, and scholars can point to them. But we have thousands of Greek manuscripts, some of them very early, and comparing them shows where the copies differ. None of those differences overturns the core teachings of the Christian faith.

Who says the Bible has been changed?

There are many who have raised this concern. In a widely read Newsweek article, Kurt Eichenwald claimed that none of us have actually read the Bible. At best, we have read a “translation of translations of translations” based on “copies of copies of copies” [1]. We’ve all played the game of telephone, where people whisper a phrase from person to person around a room. And the phrase the game begins with is never the phrase at the end of the sequence. It’s lost in translation. This is exactly what many have claimed about the Bible.

It’s also common to hear someone say that the Bible has been altered. This might come from a skeptic, but it also might come from followers of other religions that have spun off the Christian tradition such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Islam. In asserting that the biblical text became corrupted, they add that their religion’s holy writings have corrected the problem.

But is this actually how the Bible has been passed down to us today? Here we would like to address one question with relevance to the reliability of the Bible.

Do we have good reason to believe that the New Testament we read today accurately represents what its authors originally wrote?

To answer this, there are three pieces of evidence worth considering. Before we get to them, we’d like to talk first about how Christians passed the New Testament from generation to generation through history.

How the New Testament was passed down

For most of Christian history, there was no printing press. Thus, if a Christian community wanted a copy of one of the four gospels, or any piece of scripture, someone had to copy it by hand. Christians read, handled, transported, and copied from the original documents, called the autographa, as they desired to share the gospel with others. Because of this, they most likely would have seen great wear, and we no longer have them. What has survived are manuscripts, or handwritten copies of the text, written on papyrus and parchment.

What textual criticism does

Because the original documents are gone, to answer our question, scholars use a discipline called textual criticism. John Meade and Peter Gurry define it as “a discipline that seeks to recover the original wording of an ancient book by examining the remaining ancient copies of that book” [2].

In simple terms, scholars gather the evidence, compare manuscripts, study their differences, and seek what the original said.

So what does the evidence show?

1. How early are our manuscripts?

The earlier the manuscripts, the more confidence we can have that they may more accurately represent the original, because scribes may have made fewer copies between them. So how far back can we go? Pretty far.

P52 and the earliest fragments

One of the most famous examples is called P52, the John Rylands Papyrus. It’s a fragment and contains portions of John 18 where Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate. Scholars generally date it to the first half of the second century. When we move along to the second and third centuries, the evidence becomes more substantial. Manuscripts such as P45 preserve sections of the Gospels and Acts. P46 preserves a large collection of Paul’s letters. And by the fourth century, we have major manuscripts such as the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus preserves the complete New Testament.

If these early manuscripts interest you, you may want to check out this video Matthew Tingblad made on some new research showing the percentage of the New Testament we find in our earliest manuscripts.

Could the text have been tampered with early on?

Now, if the earliest manuscript we have is just a portion of the gospel of John, and only goes back to the second century, and many of our others are a few hundred years removed from the autographa, that still leaves a gap. If the New Testament authors wrote their books in the first century and most of our surviving manuscripts come later, couldn’t someone have changed them before our copies appear?

Some believe that someone intentionally changed the text of the Bible during its early development, perhaps motivated by political or theological reasons. In principle, it’s possible that this happened. But with our evidence, we do not want to only ask what is possible; we want to seek what is probable. We have to ask: do we have evidence this actually happened? Is there reason to think a massive rewrite of the New Testament occurred during those years?

Why the copies spread too far to change

One important piece of evidence is that the New Testament books did not remain in one location with one surviving copy. They spread. Communities across the Roman world copied, carried, read, and exchanged Scripture. We can see this in the early Christian writers. Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others quote or allude to writings that are a part of our New Testament. And these writings came from different places at different periods.

As the copies spread rapidly across the Roman world, changing the textual tradition would become extremely difficult. You would have to travel around and change all of them, or gather all the copies up and edit them. If someone changed one copy in one place, there are still many other texts to compare it with to see the change.

For a radically altered version of the New Testament to replace what came before it, that text would have to become dominant across this growing and multiplying movement or a network of manuscripts and churches. We don’t have evidence of that happening. Sure, we have a gap, but a gap itself is not evidence that the text has been corrupted.

2. How many manuscripts do we have?

The simple answer is a lot. Jacob Peterson in Myths and Mistakes states that we have roughly 5,300 Greek New Testament manuscripts [3]. Scholars call this an embarrassment of riches.

Why Greek manuscripts matter

Now, why are Greek manuscripts especially important? Because the New Testament was originally written in Greek. When scholars produce a modern Bible translation, they are not translating an English Bible from a German Bible that came from a Latin Bible that came from another translation hundreds of years earlier. They can go back to manuscripts written in the same language in which Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, and the other New Testament authors wrote. So, the “translations of translations of translations” picture is misleading.

Early translations and Christian writers

And Greek manuscripts are only part of the evidence. Early Christians translated the New Testament into languages such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. We also possess quotations and allusions from early Christian writers. Together, these provide additional witnesses to the history of the text.

How more copies reveal the original

Why does having more manuscripts help? Imagine we gave five people the same paragraph and told each one to copy it by hand. Someone might accidentally misspell a word, or write the same word twice. Another might skip a line. And another may leave a word out. But if we were to gather up all the copies of the original paragraph, we can compare them and with confidence arrive at what the original would have said. This is because it’s unlikely that everyone would make the same mistake, in the same place. This is a simplified picture of what scholars do with all of our New Testament manuscripts.

3. What about all the differences?

When comparing the manuscripts, it can be concerning that we do find differences. We find changes made by scribes and passages that are missing in particular manuscripts. This can be deeply troubling if you grew up hearing the Bible has no errors and is consistent and is the Inspired Word of God. But we don’t need to hide from this fact. Even with the differences we find, we can have confidence that the Bible is still right in everything it teaches.

What is a textual variant?

When two manuscripts differ, scholars call it a textual variant. Some of these variants are extremely simple, such as a misspelled word or the same word occurring twice. But some variants are more substantial. The most commonly known variants noted in your Bible are the long ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery in John (John 7:53–8:11).

But notice something important about these two disputed texts; we know about them. They are not secrets uncovered somewhere and hidden by Christians trying to manipulate. Modern Bible translators openly identify significant textual questions because scholars possess the manuscripts and can compare them.

How many variants are there?

Now, it’s important to note that we have a lot of variants. You will often read that we have over half a million among just our Greek manuscripts. But we must ask, what kind of variants are they? Many are simple spelling differences or readings that make no meaningful difference. Others change the meaning but have virtually no chance of representing the original wording. The smallest category consists of variants that are both meaningful—they affect the meaning—and viable—they have a reasonable chance of being original. Dr Daniel Wallace estimates that less than one percent of variants fall into this category [4].

Do the variants affect Christian doctrine?

We also need to make another important point about our variants. Peter Gurry states, “Neither the Christian faith, nor the Bible’s inspiration is threatened by textual variants” [5]. In light of the variants, we can hold the core doctrines of the Christian faith with utmost confidence.

Here is Dr Craig Blomberg: “No orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording” [6]. Here is Peter Gurry again: “In relatively rare cases, variants do have some bearing on some doctrines and ethical practices of the Christian faith, but none of these doctrines or ethical practices is established from these disputed texts” [7]

What even a critic concedes

Even Bart Ehrman, one of the most well-known critics of New Testament transmission, agrees with this narrower conclusion. In the paperback appendix to Misquoting Jesus, he explains that his position does not conflict with his mentor Bruce Metzger’s view that textual variants do not affect essential Christian beliefs. [8]

This is significant. Neither the resurrection of Jesus, nor his Deity, nor salvation, the Trinity, or the core ethical teachings of Christianity are in jeopardy due to the differences we find. We can hold them with utmost confidence.

Divine Fingerprints and Human Fingerprints

When looking at the manuscript tradition ourselves, there is something we’ve come to appreciate. The Bible did not fall out of heaven in the English translation we have in our hands. Instead, the original authors were inspired by God and wrote what God desired to have written. And from then on, Christians believed in God’s inspired word and those words were entrusted to humans. People carried them from town to town, copied them and shared them and translated them so other languages could have access to the Bible. And thus, when we look at our Bible, we find both divine fingerprints and human fingerprints.

The divine fingerprints mark the Bible as a divine book from God. But the human fingerprints testify to the story of Scripture and give evidence that the Bible we have today is reliable.

So has the Bible been changed?

It depends on what we mean. If by “changed” we mean, did scribes ever change something while copying a manuscript? Yes. We can point to those variants. But if by “changed” you mean, the New Testament has been corrupted so badly that we no longer know what its original authors wrote? The manuscript evidence gives us very good reason to say no.

What the evidence shows

We possess early witnesses to the text and thousands of Greek manuscripts and additional evidence from early translations and Christian writers. We know where the manuscripts differ because scholars have spent centuries comparing them. And the relatively small number of significant textual questions does not erase or overturn the core doctrines of the Christian faith.

This evidence puts substance to Jesus’ words spoken in Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Almost two thousand years later, we can still read those words.

What we do with the words

If we have good reason to believe these words have actually been handed down to us, what are we going to do with them? The Bible’s relevance does not begin simply with the fact that it is ancient, influential, or religious. It matters because Christians believe that through these words God has revealed himself. If the words have been faithfully handed down, then we cannot simply keep them at a distance. We have to confront what they say about God, about us, about our brokenness, about what we were made for, and ultimately about Jesus.

The manuscript evidence gets us to the text. Then we have to decide what we will do with the words.

If you want to see more of the evidence for the Christian faith laid out step by step, explore Established: a Crash Course on the Evidence for Christianity on Sightline U.

Notes

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/02/thats-not-what-bible-says-294018.html

[2] Meade, John D., and Peter J. Gurry. Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022, pg 52.

[3] Hixson, Elijah, and Peter J. Gurry, eds. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019, pg 68.

[4] Daniel B. Wallace, “Lost in Transmission: How Badly Did the Scribes Corrupt the New Testament Text?” in Daniel B. Wallace, ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2011), pp. 42–43

[5] Hixson, Elijah, and Peter J. Gurry, eds. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019, pg 209.

[6] Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2014), pp. 27–28.

[7] Hixson, Elijah, and Peter J. Gurry, eds. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019, pg 209.

[8] Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, paperback ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2007), pp. 252–253.