Hasn't the Bible been changed over the centuries?
It has been copied by hand thousands of times, and copying by hand makes mistakes. But the mistakes are visible, because we have the copies. Of roughly 1.5 million differences across the manuscripts, the ones that both change the meaning and might be original come to less than a tenth of one per cent — and no Christian teaching stands or falls on any of them.
Everyone knows the game where a sentence is whispered down a line of people and comes out the other end as nonsense. That is the picture most people have of how the Bible reached us.
It is the wrong picture, and the reason is simple. In the whispering game you only ever hear the last version. With the New Testament we have the whole line — thousands of copies, from different centuries, made in different countries by people who never met. When one of them slips, the others show it.
The size of the pile
About 5,700 Greek manuscripts have been catalogued. Add the early translations — Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and others — and you are somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 handwritten copies made before printing existed.
Set that beside anything else from the ancient world. A typical classical author survives in around fifteen copies, and the earliest of those is usually five hundred to a thousand years after he wrote. For the New Testament there are fragments within decades of composition.
So the honest comparison is not “the Bible versus a perfect text.” It is the Bible versus every other document of its age, and nothing else is close.
Then why so many differences?
Here is the number sceptics quote, and it is real: roughly 1.5 million variants among the manuscripts — more differences than there are words in the New Testament.
That number sounds devastating until you ask what a variant is. Every time one copy spells a word differently from another, that is counted. Once. Then again in every manuscript that repeats it. The count is a measure of how many copies we have, not how corrupted they are. Fewer manuscripts would mean fewer variants and less certainty, not more.
Sort them and the picture changes completely:
Spelling slips and obvious nonsense. About a million of them — a letter doubled, a word misheard, a line skipped. Nobody is in any doubt about what was meant.
Differences that could be original but change nothing. Word order, mostly. Greek says the same thing several ways.
Differences that would change the meaning but are obviously not original. A later scribe’s addition, showing up in one late manuscript and nowhere else.
Differences that both matter and might be original. This is the only category that counts, and it comes to less than one-tenth of one per cent — about 1,500, and of those only a dozen or two are genuinely contested.
The two famous passages
You may have heard that some passages “aren’t in the earliest manuscripts.” That is true of two well-known ones: the woman caught in adultery in John 8, and the longer ending of Mark.
Notice how you know that. Your own Bible almost certainly tells you, in a footnote, in the text you are holding. This is not a secret that was uncovered by critics and hidden by the church. It is printed on the page by the people who translated it.
And notice what happens to Christian belief if you remove both passages entirely: nothing. No teaching depends on them.
Where the sceptics and the defenders actually agree
Bart Ehrman is the best-known critic of the New Testament text, and his books are where most of these objections come from. It is worth knowing what he does not dispute: that the wording of the New Testament can be reconstructed with a high degree of confidence, and that the variants do not overturn its central claims.
His disagreement with Christians is not really about the copying. It is about whether what the documents say is true. That is a much more interesting conversation, and it is the one worth having.
Objections answered
But the originals are lost, so how can you know?
We have no originals of anything from the ancient world. What historians do is work backwards from the copies, and the more copies from more places, the tighter the reconstruction. It is the same method used on every ancient text — the New Testament simply has far more to work with.
Wasn't it translated from language to language, losing something each time?
No — and this is a common mix-up. Modern Bibles are not translations of translations. They are made directly from the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. The chain people imagine, Greek to Latin to English, is not how any serious translation is produced.
Didn't the church change texts to support its doctrines?
If it had, the evidence would be missing. Instead the awkward readings are all still there, printed with footnotes, in Bibles published by the church. A body that was editing its own records to win arguments made a strange job of hiding the edits.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
Every tradition works from the same manuscript evidence and the same discipline of textual criticism, and all of them accept that copying introduced errors which scholarship can identify.
Eastern Orthodox
Uses the Byzantine text tradition in its liturgy, which differs in places from the critical texts used by most modern translations — a difference of manuscript family, not of doctrine.
Protestant
Modern translations follow the critical text, which weighs the earliest manuscripts heavily; a minority hold to the Textus Receptus behind the King James Version.
Related questions
Inspired by Daniel B. Wallace — "Is the New Testament Text Reliable?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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