The reliability of the Bible

You may have been told the Bible was changed. If you are a Muslim, you may hold that the Torah and the Gospel were given by God but later altered, the charge called tahrif. If you are a Latter-day Saint, you have read in the Book of Mormon that “plain and precious” things were taken from the Bible, and you accept it “as far as it is translated correctly.” If you hold no faith, you may have heard that the Bible is the end of a long game of telephone.

Each of these is a claim about history, so it can be tested against the manuscripts. This page does that.

No original manuscript of any biblical book survives; no original survives for any ancient book. Copyists made mistakes, and sometimes they made changes on purpose. The claim here is more modest: the message the writers delivered can be recovered with confidence from the copies we have. Whether that message is true is a separate question, taken up in the reliability of the New Testament.

A variant is any place where manuscripts differ. There are hundreds of thousands of them across the New Testament manuscripts. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic textual critic at the University of North Carolina, made that number widely known in Misquoting Jesus, and he is right about it.

A few well-known passages were very probably added after the books were first written:

• the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 16:9-20)
• the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11)
• a line about the Father, the Word, and the Spirit in 1 John 5:7, found in the King James Version but not in the early Greek manuscripts

These are not secrets. Most modern Bibles put them in brackets or footnotes, and Christian scholars wrote those footnotes. If you were told that Christians hide the Bible’s textual history, look at the notes in almost any study Bible. The variants have not buried the message.

The number of variants is large because the number of manuscripts is large. The Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster catalogues several thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and there are many early translations into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, as well as quotations in early Christian writers. Every extra copy adds new differences to count, and new evidence to compare them against.

Most variants are spelling differences, changes in word order that Greek allows without changing the meaning, or obvious slips of the pen. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts explains that most make no difference a translation would show. The variants that both change the meaning and are hard to decide are few, and they are discussed openly.

This is also why the telephone game is the wrong picture. In that game one message passes down one line, and only the last version is heard. The Bible was copied along many independent lines at once, in different regions and languages. A change in one line shows up against the others. Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman’s standard handbook describes the discipline’s aim as recovering the earliest text, a task the evidence makes possible.

A claim that the Bible was changed has to say when. The manuscripts let you check.

A small papyrus fragment of John’s Gospel, known as P52, is usually dated to the second century. Codex Sinaiticus, a complete Greek Bible copied in the fourth century, contains the whole New Testament and is now viewable online. These copies were made more than two centuries before the Qur’an, and well over a thousand years before the Book of Mormon. They carry the same Gospels, the same letters, and the same message: Jesus’ death on the cross, his resurrection, and his unique relation to the Father.

If you are a Muslim, this bears on a passage in the Qur’an. It addresses Christians of Muhammad’s time as people who possess the Gospel and tells them to judge by what God revealed in it (Qur’an 5:47). The Gospel those Christians possessed is the one in these earlier manuscripts. If you are a Latter-day Saint, it means that no manuscript has been found that preserves an earlier, fuller gospel from which plain and precious parts were removed.

Another form of the claim is that the books themselves were chosen later, perhaps by the emperor Constantine. The record shows something slower and more public.

Around AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyons named the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as the church’s received Gospels. In the early fourth century, the historian Eusebius sorted Christian writings into those accepted everywhere, those disputed in some places, and those rejected. In AD 367, Athanasius of Alexandria gave the first surviving list that matches the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly. Scholars who have collected the early lists, such as Edmon Gallagher and John Meade, describe a gradual process across many churches, with debate at the edges and agreement at the center.

Christians do count the Old Testament differently. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include books that Protestant Bibles do not. That difference is real. But they share the same twenty-seven New Testament books, and the disputed Old Testament books do not create or remove anything Christians teach about who Jesus is.

If you are a Muslim, you can reasonably ask that the Bible and the Qur’an be judged by one standard.

Sunni tradition itself describes how the Qur’an came to be written down. Sahih al-Bukhari reports that after many reciters died at the battle of Yamamah, Abu Bakr asked Zayd ibn Thabit to collect the Qur’an from written materials and from memory. Later, Uthman had a standard copy made for the provinces and ordered other copies burned. Islam also recognizes several canonical readings, the qira’at. Many differ only in pronunciation, but some differ enough to show in translation; Bridges’ Translation of the Ten Qira’at marks those.

Muslim scholars, such as the authors of the Yaqeen Institute’s study of the Uthmanic codex, argue that this process preserved the Qur’an faithfully. That is a serious argument, and none of this disproves Islam. It does mean that collection by human beings, copying, and variation cannot by themselves show that a scripture was lost. The question for both books is the same: does the public evidence preserve the message?