Was the Bible Changed? (2023)

Have you ever played the children’s game of telephone? A chain of people quickly whisper a message from one person to the next. By the time the message reaches the last person, it has often transformed into something almost unrecognizable from the original.

The game is fun when the message doesn’t matter, but what if a person’s eternal destiny relied on the message? Could the message of the Bible have been distorted through a copying process that produced the same effect as a game of telephone? New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman thinks so, and his diagnosis is grim:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals, we don’t even have the copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another in many thousands of places . . . possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament (Misquoting Jesus, 10).

Ehrman iscorrect that we no longer possess the original manuscripts of the Bible. For example, we do not have the original scroll on which Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians. In fact, we don’t have any of the original copies of any of the books and letters in the Bible. This may seem worrisome; but keep in mind that we do not possess the original manuscripts for any work that was composed in the ancient world. We do not possess Plato’s original Republic. We do not possess the original Jewish histories of Josephus, the Roman histories of Tacitus, or the Greek histories of Thucydides. Those books were written on leaves or animal skins that were lost or destroyed or that simply decayed over time.

Fortunately, modern scholars can reconstruct a document’s original manuscript by comparing all of its surviving copies. This method of reconstructing an original text by examining its copies is called textual criticism. How does it work?

Aunt Mildred’s recipe

Imagine your Aunt Mildred showed you the recipe for her delicious chocolate chip cookies while you were visiting her cabin up in the mountains. Since the cabin has no electricity (and hence no scanner or computer), you make a handwritten copy of the recipe. Perhaps a few weeks later you bake Mildred’s cookies for a dinner party, and now your guests are begging you for the recipe. You oblige them by quickly copying the recipe, which you had affixed to the refrigerator.

Now imagine fifty years have passed, and someone wants to find out what the exact ingredients were in Aunt Mildred’s original secret recipe. Unfortunately, Aunt Mildred died several decades earlier, and her cabin where the original recipe was kept was destroyed by fire.

Even so, the original recipe isn’t really lost; there are lots of copies of it with Mildred’s family members. These copies include ones you gave away and copies Mildred sent to her other nieces and nephews. Of course, some of the recipes differ slightly. Maybe Uncle Bob was lactose-intolerant and left the milk out of his recipe. Maybe cousin Susie spelled vanilla with one “l.” But if you have enough copies of the original recipe, it’s easy enough to sift through the minor differences in each copy and reconstruct the original.

What works for Mildred’s recipe also works for books written in the ancient world. As long as we have enough copies, we can compare them and reconstruct the original manuscripts. For example, we do not have any of Plato’s original writings, but we do have more than 250 ancient manuscripts that help us reconstruct what Plato wrote.

For other ancient works we only have a handful of manuscripts, or even a single copy that was produced centuries or even millennia after the original. But this does not deter scholars from studying these writings and, at the very least, it does not deter them from knowing what the original texts said.

Copy for God in the highest

What makes the New Testament unique from all other ancient works is the sheer number of copies we have and the reverence people paid to these copies.

We have more than 5,500 copies of New Testament manuscripts written in the Greek language and 15,000 manuscripts written in languages such as Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. Fifty of the Greek manuscripts can be dated to within 250 years of the original copies. The first complete copy of the New Testament, called Codex Sinaiticus (because it was discovered in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai), can be dated to within three hundred years of the original documents.

Compare this to Homer’s Iliad, which was written in the eight century B.C. While a few fragments can be dated to within five hundred years of Homer, the oldest complete copy of the Iliad was written in the tenth century, or 1,800 years later! Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce puts it bluntly: “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament” (The Books and the Parchments, 78).

The reason we have so many copies of the New Testament is that as new Church communities sprang up in Europe and Asia, they would desire a copy of the scriptures. Remember that during this time Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire. Christians called scribes who copied the New Testament were willing to endure monotonous hours of writing by hand and the risk of a painful death if they were discovered, just so others could have a copy of the new scriptures. As modern Christians we should feel spoiled each time we encounter a free Bible in a hotel room or on the Internet.

While many of these copies of Scripture have been lost, others survived due in large part to the idea that scribal copying was a way to glorify God. In the sixth century the monk Cassiodorus, a contemporary of St. Benedict, said, “What happy application, what praiseworthy industry, to preach unto men by means of the hand, to untie the tongue by means of the fingers, to bring quiet salvation to mortals, and to fight the Devil’s insidious wiles with pen and ink!” You may have thought nothing of taking liberties while copying Aunt Mildred’s recipe, but these scribes saw it as their sacred duty before God to make sure their copies of the New Testament were as accurate as possible.

The Fathers’ trustworthiness

Along with the faithfulness of scribes, we also have the testimony of Church Fathers who glorified God by teaching and commenting on the Bible. Even though the biblical manuscripts the Fathers consulted no longer exist, they have survived as quotations in the Fathers’ commentaries on Scripture.

Ehrman admits the writings of the Church Fathers are a rich resource for textual critics: “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament” (Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 126).

The huge combined number of ancient manuscripts and quotations in the writings of Church Fathers helps disprove a common misconception about the Bible. Some popular writers, such as Dan Brown in his novel The Da Vinci Code, assert that the Church hid the “truth” about Jesus by destroying all the early copies of the Gospels and replacing them with ones that reflected their man-made doctrines. The problem with this theory is that no one person or group was ever in a position to gather up all of the manuscripts and change them. The fact that we’ve discovered only fifty manuscripts from the first few centuries is strong evidence that there were hundreds more in circulation at that time that have been lost.

Furthermore, Christians who had heard the traditional readings their entire life would have vigorously challenged change to the biblical text. St. Augustine told St. Jerome that the people of Tripoli rioted in the streets because Jerome’s new translation of the book of Jonah was unfamiliar. Imagine what these people would have done if a completely new story about Christ were presented to them!

Scribal appreciation day

“Okay, maybe the Bible wasn’t changed as part of some elaborate conspiracy,” says the critic. “But it was changed unintentionally as scribes introduced errors into the texts as they copied them.” Given the circumstances in which the ancient scribes labored, it’s understandable how errors could have crept into the copying process, despite a scribe’s diligence.

For example, the ancient scribes would sit not at a desk but with their writing material—usually dried leaves or animal skins—in their laps. Scribes often complained about how work that involved only “three fingers” put their entire bodies in pain due to being hunched over their labors for hours at a time.

There were also hazards that accompanied whatever copying method a scribe might use. If the text was read aloud to him, a scribe might miss something that was said due to a distraction in the room (like someone coughing). Or he might write down the wrong word if two words sounded the same. On the other hand, if he was copying by reading, he would look away to dip his quill in ink before returning to the page, and his eyes might return to the wrong word, either missing text or duplicating it.

Even today, in air-conditioned, well-lit office buildings, we make mistakes when we copy documents. Now, imagine the challenges a scribe faced as he worked in secret under the flickering light of an oil lantern, without reading glasses or climate control. Sometimes scribes’ inkwells would freeze solid (along with their fingers!). If the scribe made a mistake on a scroll, he would have to start over if he could not correct the mistake in the margin of his writing material. It’s no wonder that scribes sometimes finished their manuscripts with the line, “The end of the book. Thanks be to God!”

Variants: much ado about nothing

When we understand how difficult scribal work was, it’s easy to see how variants crept into New Testament manuscripts. It’s true, as Ehrman says, that “there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” Scholars believe there are about 200,000 to 400,000 differences between all the extant New Testament manuscripts and, like snowflakes, no two manuscripts are exactly alike (Misquoting Jesus, 89). That sounds like an imposing obstacle to reconstructing an accurate New Testament—until we realize there are so many variants in the manuscripts because there are so many manuscripts.

For example, if each of the 20,000 manuscripts we possess has twenty variants, that adds up to an imposing 400,000 variants. But if this huge number of variants is distributed across a huge number of manuscripts, we are left with thousands of manuscripts each of which contains only a few dozen variants.

In contrast to the New Testament, consider the first six books of the annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, collectively one of our primary sources of information about ancient Rome. We have only one copy of the text, and it was written 1,000 years after the original. There are no variants because there are no other copies from which the text can vary! But this is actually a bad thing, because we have no way to check if this manuscript represents what Tacitus originally wrote.

A New Testament with many variants distributed across many manuscripts is actually more reliable than a New Testament with few variants distributed across a few manuscripts—especially since the variants between the manuscripts are almost always trivial. For example, a misspelled name or word can be easily corrected by anyone who knows there’s only one “n” in John. Other times the context makes the correct reading clear, as in 1 Thessalonians 2:7, where Paul says, “But we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children.” Earlier manuscripts misspell nepioi, the Greek word for “gentle,” and render it hippoi, which changes the passage to read, “But we were horses among you.” This is no doubt a scribal error, and any competent critic would not be confused as to what the original text said—provided he had not been raised by kindly horses.

A textual variant could also arise from the order of the words in a passage. What reads “Christ Jesus” in one manuscript might read “Jesus Christ” in another. This is counted as a variant, but it doesn’t change the original text’s meaning in the slightest. In languages like ancient Greek, the location of the words within a sentence doesn’t matter as much as it does in English. The phrase “Jesus loves Peter” and the phrase “Peter loves Jesus” have two different meanings in English. But in Greek the meaning of a sentence can remain the same even if the word order is switched. That’s because the indicator of which word is the subject and which word is the direct object is typically found in the spelling of the word, not in the word’s location within the sentence. This is just one of the ways that ancient manuscripts can differ but still possess the exact same meaning.

When meaning matters

When these minor variants are corrected, we see that there are not 400,000 variants of the New Testament that change what the text means. The United Bible Societies fourth edition of the Greek New Testament is the premier version used in modern translations, and it lists about 1,200 disputed passages that are relevant to translating the text. However, most Bible translations note only 200 to 300 of the most important of these variants, usually in a footnote at the bottom of the page or in brackets within the text itself. You’ve probably come across these and dismissed them as academic minutiae.

For example, in some manuscripts Jesus says in Matthew 11:23 that Capernaum will be brought down to Hades, while in other manuscripts he says Capernaum will be driven down to Hades. In some manuscripts Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:4, “I thank God always for you,” while in others he says, “I thank my God always for you.” While it’s true these are variants, it’s more accurate to call them differences without a distinction. The vast majority of these variants don’t change the meaning of the sacred text and should not cause us to doubt what the original authors intended to communicate.

Even in cases where a difference could alter meaning, we can see which tradition behind the variants is stronger and, as a result, determine which variant is more closely related to the original text. For example, when Luke 3:22 describes what the Father says at Jesus’ baptism, the text can be rendered, “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased”; or it can be rendered, “You are my beloved son; today I have begotten you.” The latter rendering would seem to support the view that the Son of God was begotten on Earth and that the Father did not eternally beget him. However, there is only one Latin manuscript from the sixth century that contains the second rendering, while every other manuscript—including the early Greek ones—has the traditional rendering. This gives us good reason to accept the traditional rendering of Luke 3:22.

Most of the several hundred variants that remain in the biblical texts involve similarly minor issues. As New Testament critic Craig Blomberg says in his 2014 book on the reliability of the Bible:

Only about a tenth of 1 percent [of the variants] are interesting enough to make their way into footnotes in most English translations. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that no orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording [emphasis in the original]. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths. Tellingly, in the appendix to the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman himself concedes that “essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” It is too bad that this admission appears in an appendix and comes only after repeated criticism! (Can We Still Believe in the Bible?, 27-28).

The final verdict

The New Testament far surpasses all other ancient literature in both the quantity and quality of manuscript evidence. People who say we can’t trust the Bible because it was written a long time ago would also have to believe that we can’t trust ancient works that describe Socrates, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, or any other figure in ancient history. If these critics are willing to trust the texts we have about these people, despite the fact that the originals were written thousands of years ago and lost, they should be willing to place that same trust in the better-attested records of the Bible.