The Bible has been rewritten so often we cannot know what it originally said.
For 1,500 years before printing, every copy was hand-produced. Scribes were human: they made spelling errors, harmonized parallel passages, inserted marginal notes into the text, and occasionally adjusted wording for theological clarity. The textus receptus behind the KJV contains later additions (the Johannine Comma, the long ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery) that modern critical editions flag or bracket. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus (2005) made a bestseller out of the sober point that there are more variants among NT manuscripts than words in the NT. Add the layer of translation, and the worry is obvious: across 2,000 years of copying, editing, translating, and canonizing, meaning could easily have drifted.
The very evidence that generates the worry is also what makes the text recoverable. (1) Manuscript density: we have ~5,800 Greek NT manuscripts, plus ~10,000 Latin, plus ~9,300 in other ancient languages - far more than any other ancient work. Homer's Iliad, the next best-attested, has roughly 1,900. (2) Early attestation: P52 (John 18) is dated ~AD 125-175, within a generation of composition; P46 contains most of Paul by ~AD 175-225. Nothing in Greco-Roman literature is this close to its autographs. (3) Nature of variants: of ~400,000 variants across all manuscripts, textual critics (Wallace, Metzger, the Nestle-Aland committee) classify roughly 99 percent as trivial - spelling, word order, definite articles. Fewer than 1 percent are both meaningful and viable, and Ehrman himself concedes "essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants." (4) Canon and translation: the canon was not invented by Constantine; the four Gospels, Acts, and Paul's major letters were functioning as Scripture by the early 2nd century (see Muratorian fragment, Irenaeus). Modern translations work directly from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not from a chain of translations. The Dead Sea Scrolls (copied a thousand years earlier than the Masoretic manuscripts previously available for the OT) confirmed that the text had been transmitted with remarkable fidelity.
The right question is not "have there been variants?" but "do the variants affect meaning, and can we reconstruct the original?" The answer, from the full field of textual criticism, is that we can - with more confidence than for any other ancient document.
Sources & citations
- Rylands Papyrus P52 (John 18) (c. AD 125-175)primary
- Papyrus P46 (Pauline corpus) (c. AD 175-225)primary
- Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 250 BC - AD 70)archaeology
- Jesus and the Eyewitnesses — Richard Bauckham (2006 (rev. 2017))scholarlyFind on Amazon