Back to
Questions and Answers

Is it true that there are many copying errors in the Bible? And if so, how can we trust that the Bible we have today is correct?

The Short Answer:

It is true that there are many transmission errors in the various copies of the Bible over the last 2000 years. However, this should not affect our trust in the Bible we read today.

Firstly, one of the reasons there are so many variations is because we have so many copies. Those who try to attack the Bible because of copying errors add together all the errors in all the thousands of copies we have and make it seem as if all these errors were in our present Bible today. They are not. They are spread throughout the thousands of copies of the Bible with a few in one and another few in another, and so on. No single copy of the Bible contains all the errors or even a large percentage of the errors we find.

Secondly, because we have so many copies of the Bible we are able to compare them with each other and easily find when and where the copying errors occurred, just as you would be able to quickly pick out spelling errors in a letter from a friend.

Thirdly, we have more than just the copies of the Bible itself. We can also compare the copies of the Bible to the Bible quotes in the writers of the early Church, to early translations of the Bible into other languages, and to inscriptions of Bible verses on graves, pictures and other household items early Christians used. (They liked putting Bible verses on decorative items just like we do today). These things all give us clues to what the Bible looked like when these early believers read it.

Fourthly, many of the copies of the New Testament, at least, go back to a very early time. The oldest fragment we have of the book of John, for instance, most likely was made around the year 100AD, before or just after John himself died. Finding such early copies is extraordinary and unheard of for any other ancient book.

Altogether, it means that those who work with these ancient copies and piece together what the original Bible looked like have a tremendous wealth of information at their disposal and the Bible we have today is an extraordinarily accurate picture of what the Bible looked like when the Apostles first wrote it.

The Long Answer :

Many unbelievers point to the copying errors in the Bible manuscripts over the last 2000 years as proof that we can not trust the Bible. As usual, such people hide vital information such as what kind of copying errors are there and what they really mean.

Firstly, it is important to note that while copying errors did occur, no single copy has all of them. Those who challenge the Bible based on copying errors make it sound like a game of telephone. You may have played this at a party sometime. One person whispers a sentence to another, who whispers to a third. By the time you get to the end of the line, the sentence is all garbled because each person copied the errors of the previous person and adds his or her own mistakes. The game of telephone works the way it does because there is no way for the last person to check with people earlier in the line to see what version of the sentence they had. But this is not the way the Bible works. It is true that copying errors were made and often were recopied by the next scribe. Unlike the game of telephone, however, it was and is possible to check other, often earlier, copies of the Bible to find out where the errors occurred and what the original was like.

Keep in mind, also, that the game of telephone works because there is only a single line of transmission. Imagine instead that the first person whispered to three other people instead of only one. And those three whispered to three others. And so on, down the line. By the end of the line you would have quite a variety of errors but no one final sentence would contain all of them. This is closer to what happened with the Bible. Manuscripts would be copied multiple times by multiple scribes. Each might make their own errors but no single copy would have all of them. When those who challenge to Bible in this way tell you there is a huge number of copying errors in the Bible, keep in mind that that huge number is distributed among thousands of manuscripts. No single manuscript contains anywhere near all of them.

Now, imagine such a game of telephone where you were allowed to go down the line and ask certain random participants what they thought they had heard. Even if you never asked the first person in the line for the original sentence, using common sense and the information from several participants in the game you could probably make a pretty accurate guess what the original sentence was. A whole branch of Biblical studies, called “Textual Criticism” is dedicated to doing exactly that with the Bible, comparing copies to each other and determining what the original was like. And, frankly, they do a pretty good job. I am very confident that the Greek and Hebrew Bibles sitting in my office today have very few if any differences from the original letters and books written by the Apostles and Prophets.

Now, let’s take a look at exactly what errors are found in copies of the Bible

The vast majority of copy differences involve simple differences in spelling. In some instances, it is obvious the copyist or “scribe” made a spelling error. Just as we easily spot mistakes in English spelling when we are reading a book or letter, it is easy to spot spelling errors in copies of the Bible. Other differences have to do with variations of spelling. In English we can use either color or colour. Both are correct. The same is true of Greek. John, for instance, could properly be written with either one or two n’s. These differences in spelling make up the vast majority of differences we find among the copies of the Bible. They obviously have no impact on the meaning of the Bible.

A second large source of differences involves synonyms. For instance, one copyist might have the word “Lord” while another has the word “Jesus.” The is especially true since many copies of the Bible were mean to be read out loud to a group rather than read silently to oneself. These copies are called “lectionaries.” They divided the New Testament into portions that were to be read in worship each day. When a scribe did that they had to take into account that the people present one day might not have heard the previous day’s reading. This is a problem especially for some of the long sermons of Christ when “He said” is repeated a number of times through the sermon. To make sure the people listening to the reading would know who “he” was, the scribe might change the first “he said” of the daily reading to “Jesus said.” We still do that in our Sunday readings. When you see something like “[Jesus] said” in the bulletin insert it means that the Greek has the word “He” and the Publishing house changed it to “Jesus” in order to make it clear for that morning’s reading.

A third source of differences is word order. In English the order of the words in a sentence makes a difference. “Jimmy hit the ball” is a cause for celebration. “The ball hit Jimmy” may be a reason to call an ambulance. The word order is important. But in Greek the order of words makes little difference because each noun in a sentence has an special ending which indicates if it is the subject or the object of the sentence. In Greek it would not matter whether you placed “Jimmy,” “hit,” or “the ball” first in the sentence.

Apart from these kinds of differences, which make almost no difference in the meaning of the text, we are left with very few errors. And the few that we do have make very little difference in the meaning of the text and do not affect any major doctrine of the Church in any way. The most glaring example of one of these differences would be the adulterous woman whom Jesus forgave in John 8:1-11. This account does not appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. (In fact, in almost all modern printings of the Bible you will find the verses marked in some way and a note letting the reader know that these verses were probably not part of the original text.) It would seem that this incident probably did occur and was a favorite account for many people in the early Church. And so, it was added at some point, perhaps even with the permission of John himself. However, whether it was meant to be part of the inspired Bible or not doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t tell us anything more about the forgiveness of Jesus than we already know from the rest of the Gospel.

In other words, once we see what the copying differences really are, it is easy to see they are really pretty insignificant and simply do not impact the meaning of the Bible.

More importantly, I think they actually bear witness to the importance and the reliability of the Bible.

If you think about it, God had three choices when he picked a way for us to have a reliable Bible to read.

1: He could have preserved the original copy of each book of the Bible. But that would have required a tremendous miracle to keep it intact over the centuries. Plus, think of all the problems it would have introduced. Think of the people who would have worshipped it or the bidding war that would take place from people who wanted to buy it or the cost an unscrupulous owner would charge to allow people to see it. Plus it would not really have solved anything as it would still have to be translated into other languages and those translation would have to be printed. Each step of that process would have introduced changes and errors with the result that I really honestly doubt the Bible we would have would be any better than the copies we have today.

2: He could have worked a miracle every time the Bible was copied so that it would always be the same and no errors would ever happen. But that would be millions of miracles over the last 2000 years and would have turned human beings into nothing more than copy machines whenever they worked with the Bible.

3: He could have done exactly what He did, through faith create such love of the Bible in the hearts of believers that they burned to share it with others. As a result those who received the various books of the Bible began making copies almost immediately to share their treasure with people in other communities. They began quoting it in their own writings. And they began translating it into other languages at a very early stage. The result has been that errors do happen in those copies. However, it also means that we have thousands of hand written manuscripts of the Bible we can compare to each other. We have a vast amount of quotes in the writings of the early Christians so that we can see what the Bible looked like when they read it. We have translations of the Bible into other languages so that we can piece together what the Greek looked like that the translators were working from. The fact is that, though we do not have the original, we have more than enough information to be able to piece together an extraordinarily accurate picture of what the original was like and to ensure that our versions of the Bible today are trustworthy and correct.

It is no wonder that Dr. Bruce Metzger, one of the leaders in the examination of all the “variations” in the Biblical texts, once said about his decades long work, “it has built my faith. I’ve asked questions all my life, I’ve dug into the text, I’ve studies this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed…very well placed.” (quoted in the “The Case for the Real Jesus” by Lee Strobel)

Much of this information is contained in Lee Strobel’s book, “The Case for the Real Jesus.”