What Scripture says
Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35, ESV). “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8). Scripture also warns against adding to or subtracting from God’s word (Deuteronomy 4:2, Revelation 22:18–19).
But the Bible doesn’t claim that copyists never made mistakes. Whether the text was preserved well is a question for the evidence.
What the evidence says
Textual Criticism
How ancient books survive
No original manuscript (autograph) of any ancient book survives, biblical or otherwise. Ancient writing materials, papyrus especially, wear out. We know every ancient text through copies of copies. The question is always the same: how many copies, how early, and how well do they agree?
Scholars who compare copies to work out the original wording practise textual criticism. It is used for Homer and Plato as much as for the Bible.
How the New Testament compares
The New Testament has far more surviving manuscripts, much closer to the originals, than any other ancient work. Figures below are approximate and are updated as new manuscripts are catalogued:
| Work | Earliest surviving copy | Number of manuscripts |
|---|---|---|
| New Testament | 2nd century (decades after writing) | Over 5,800 Greek, plus thousands in early translations |
| Homer, Iliad | Fragments from about 400 years after | About 1,900 |
| Plato | About 1,200 years after | A few hundred |
| Julius Caesar, Gallic War | About 900 years after | About 250 |
| Tacitus, Annals (books 1–6) | About 800 years after | Essentially one |
Beyond Greek manuscripts, the New Testament survives in:
- Early translations into Latin, Syriac and Coptic, some from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, totalling over 10,000 Latin manuscripts alone.
- Quotations by early Christian writers, so extensive that large parts of the New Testament could be reconstructed from them.
The earliest manuscripts
- Papyrus 52, a scrap of John 18, is usually dated to the first half of the 2nd century, possibly within decades of John’s Gospel being written.
- Papyrus 46 (c. AD 200) contains most of Paul’s letters.
- Papyri 66 and 75 (c. AD 200) contain much of John and Luke.
- Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (4th century) contain the whole New Testament.
Variants: what the differences are
With so many copies, there are many differences between them, called variants. Estimates run from about 400,000 to over 500,000, which sounds alarming: more variants than words in the New Testament. But numbers mislead, because each difference is counted in every manuscript where it appears. Daniel Wallace groups variants like this:
- Spelling and nonsense errors, the large majority. For example, the Greek name Iōannēs (John) is spelled with one or two n’s.
- Changes that don’t affect meaning, such as synonyms, or word order (which matters little in Greek: “Jesus Christ” or “Christ Jesus”).
- Meaningful but not viable, readings found in only one late manuscript, which can’t be original.
- Meaningful and viable, a very small proportion, under 1% by most estimates.
Some well-known examples of the last group:
- Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11, which are missing from the earliest copies (see 4.3).
- Romans 5:1: “we have peace” or “let us have peace”, a difference of one letter in Greek.
- Revelation 13:18: the number of the beast, 666 or 616 (see 10.5).
- Luke 22:43–44: Jesus sweating “like great drops of blood”, absent from some early manuscripts.
- 1 John 5:7–8: a statement about the Trinity found in very few Greek manuscripts and none before the medieval period (see 4.9).
What skeptics say
Bart Ehrman’s bestselling Misquoting Jesus (2005) emphasized how many changes scribes made, some deliberately. But when asked directly, Ehrman has acknowledged that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition. His main concern is different: that we can’t be fully certain of the wording in the earliest decades, before our earliest manuscripts.
Defenders reply that the earliest manuscripts we do have show a stable text, and that there is no evidence of large-scale changes in the gap.
The Old Testament
The Old Testament was copied with remarkable care by Jewish scribes. The Masoretes, scribes active from about AD 500 to 1000, even counted letters to check their copies. The Dead Sea Scrolls, about 1,000 years older than the earliest complete Hebrew manuscripts, showed how faithfully the text had been preserved (see 4.2).
Where they meet
The wealth of manuscripts means the original text hasn’t been lost. Where one copyist made an error, other copies preserve the correct reading. The New Testament we read today is, by any fair standard, a very close match to what was written, and modern translations openly mark the places where scholars are uncertain.
What’s still open
- A small number of passages are genuinely uncertain, and footnotes in modern Bibles mark them.
- Scholars continue to refine the text as new manuscripts are found and studied, using new methods such as computer-assisted comparison.
- How much the text may have changed in the first few decades, before our earliest manuscripts, is debated.
Bottom line
No, the Bible hasn’t been changed in any way that matters. There are over 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts, far more than for any other ancient work. Most variants are spelling or word order, and no core doctrine rests on a disputed reading. This is rated Settled.