15. February 2025
Has the Bible been Changed Over the Years?
First off read the following article I posted regarding the reliability of the Bible. The Bible is Reliable.
To summarize that article:
“The Old and New Testaments enjoy far greater manuscript attestation in terms of quantity, quality, and time span than any other ancient documents.”
“All the evidence inside and outside the New Testament runs contrary to the claim made by form criticism that the early church distorted the life and teachings of Christ.”
“While we cannot say that archaeology proves the authority of the Bible, it is fair to say that archaeological evidence has provided external confirmation of hundreds of biblical statements. “
Quite often critics will use the claim that the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation. This comes from the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic, his disciples wrote in Greek (1st translation), then the Greek was translated to Latin and then the Latin was translated into English.
Likewise, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Latin to then English.
Now that might be true for the original English Bibles, such as the new King James Bible. However, that is not the case for modern English Bible translations. They are translated from the original Greek or Hebrew with no translation into Latin.
Also, if you can read the original Greek or Hebrew, then there is no translation needed.
Another often quoted analogy is comparing the Bible to the “telephone game.” In the telephone game, one person starts with a phrase and then whispers it to one other person, who then whispers the phrase to one other person and so on. At the end, the phrase the last person receives is nothing like the original phase.
However, this is a very incorrect analogy. First off, the Books of the Bible were not whispered to a single person at a time. They were written down. There were several copies made of each book of the New Testament. Yes, these were handwritten copies that can contain errors. We have over 5,000 Greek manuscripts, about 8,000 Latin manuscripts, and another 1,000 manuscripts in other languages (Syriac, Coptic, etc.) By reviewing and studying these thousands of manuscripts we can see any difference and determine where any errors were made and correct them in the current translations. One can argue that the Bible has become more reliable over time, not less.
A comparison between the books of the modern Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back over two thousand years, reveals that aside from variations in spelling and punctuation, the texts remain unchanged with no differences in meaning. So the Books of the Bible have remained unchanged for thousands of years.