Wasn’t the Bible Changed over Time?

The short answer: We don’t have the original pages the Bible’s writers wrote, but we have thousands of very early copies, far more than for any other ancient book, and comparing them lets scholars work out the original wording with great accuracy. The Bible you read today says what was first written.

You’ve probably played the game where a message is whispered round a circle. By the time it reaches the last person, “Grandma is coming for tea” has become “Grab a bra and come for free.” Some people imagine the Bible was like that: copied by hand for centuries, with each copyist changing things, until nobody knows what it originally said. Others say powerful church leaders rewrote it to suit themselves.

It’s a reasonable worry. But it doesn’t match the evidence.

Not a whisper game

The whisper game has one person passing a message to one other person, in secret, once. The Bible was nothing like that. Copies were made in many places at once, from Egypt to Rome to Syria, and spread across the ancient world. Nobody controlled them all. If someone in one city changed a verse, the copies in other cities would still say the original, and the change would stick out.

Today scholars have more than five thousand ancient handwritten copies of the New Testament in Greek, plus thousands more in early translations, and the early Christian writers quote it so often that you could rebuild much of it from their quotations alone. Some fragments date from within roughly a century of when the books were written. Compare that with other ancient writers: for many famous Greek and Roman authors, we have only a handful of copies, often made many centuries after they wrote, and nobody doubts we know roughly what they said.

What about the differences?

It’s true that the copies have differences. Scribes were human. They misspelled words, skipped a line, swapped word order. Scholars have counted a very large number of these variations. That sounds alarming until you understand two things.

First, the vast majority are tiny: spelling, word order, small slips that make no difference to the meaning at all. Second, because we have so many copies, we can compare them and see where a slip crept in. It’s like having a thousand photocopies of a letter where some copies have a smudge in different places. Put them side by side and you can easily read the original.

There are a small number of passages where scholars aren’t sure of the original wording. Good Bible translations don’t hide these. They put a note at the bottom of the page. And here’s the reassuring part: no Christian belief depends on any of them. Everything the church teaches about God, Jesus and salvation is taught clearly in passages whose wording is secure.

The Old Testament too

For a long time the oldest complete Hebrew copies of the Old Testament came from around a thousand years after Jesus. Then, in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves near the Dead Sea. They included copies of Old Testament books, among them a complete scroll of Isaiah, roughly a thousand years older than the copies we’d had. When scholars compared them, the text was remarkably close. Over a thousand years of copying, the message had been carefully kept.

Kept on purpose

Christians see God’s hand in this. Isaiah wrote, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8). That doesn’t mean no scribe ever made a mistake. It means God has made sure His Word has not been lost. Peter quotes the same promise and applies it to the gospel message itself: “the word of the Lord stands forever” (1 Peter 1:25).

What about the claim that church leaders rewrote the Bible to suit themselves? The copies we have from before Christianity had any political power say the same things as the later ones. And if powerful people had edited the Bible, you’d expect them to remove the embarrassing bits: Peter denying Jesus, the disciples running away, women being the first witnesses of the resurrection when women’s testimony was often not trusted, and Jesus crying out on the cross. They’re all still there.

So when you open your Bible, you can read it with confidence. It’s not a garbled whisper. It’s the message as it was given.

Think about it: If someone told you the Bible has been changed, what would you want to ask them before you believed it?

Go deeper: The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith by R. A. Torrey — Torrey explains why Christians believe the Bible is inspired by God, and admits openly that the manuscripts contain thousands of small variations, showing how comparing them lets us recover the original. Start with chapter 2, “Inspiration, or to What Extent Is the Bible Inspired of God?”.