Has the Bible been changed over time?

The evidence

Thousands of copies to compare

The official catalog of Greek New Testament manuscripts, kept by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany, listed 5,700 entries in September 2023: 135 papyri, 283 majuscules (written in capitals), 2,860 minuscules (in lowercase script), and 2,422 lectionaries (readings arranged for church services).² The institute calls that number “only a snapshot in time” and says the catalog “is far from exhaustive.”² You’ll see other totals, like 5,800, because people count in different ways.³

More copies means more mistakes to sort through. It also means a scribe’s slip in one copy can be caught by comparing it with the others.

Some copies are very early

• The St John Fragment (P52), a scrap of John’s Gospel in Manchester’s John Rylands Library, is “widely regarded as the earliest portion of any New Testament writing ever found.” Its date comes from its handwriting. The library notes that “recent research points to a date nearer to 200 AD.”⁴
• Codex Sinaiticus, written “in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament.”⁵ You can read it online.
• Codex Vaticanus, in the Vatican Library, is also from the 4th century.⁶

The Old Testament was copied with extraordinary care

The Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes “counted and noted down the total number of verses, words, and letters in the text,” and even marked the middle of each book.⁷ Checks like that make changes easy to spot. Their work held steady for centuries. Encyclopaedia Britannica says “experts have been astonished at the fidelity” of the first printed Hebrew Bibles to the oldest surviving codices.⁷

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found from 1947 on, made a test possible. They date from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD, and about 230 of them are biblical manuscripts.⁸ The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library says “many biblical manuscripts closely resemble the Masoretic Text,” which is “quite remarkable, considering that the Qumran Scrolls are over a thousand years older than previously identified biblical manuscripts.”⁸ The Great Isaiah Scroll is the best-known example.

Most differences don’t matter much

Ehrman is blunt about this: “Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are of very little importance for anything.” He adds: “Only a minority really matter. And none of these seriously threatens any significant, traditional, Christian doctrine.”¹

The strongest objection

We don’t have the originals. Ehrman puts it this way: “we don’t have any of the originals of the texts but only later copies with lots of differences among them.”⁹ If copies of copies differ in hundreds of thousands of places, how can anyone know what was first written?

Response

The objection is true as far as it goes. No original manuscript of any book of the Bible survives, and the copies do differ.

But the same is true of every ancient book, and the Bible is unusually well placed to answer it. There are thousands of copies, and some are very early. Scholars can compare them line by line, see where a scribe misspelled a word or skipped a line, and see where copies agree. The places where the original wording is genuinely uncertain are known, and modern translations mark the important ones in their notes. Two examples are the ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). The ESV sets Mark 16:9-20 in brackets with the note “Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9-20.”¹⁰

That’s why a skeptic like Ehrman and a believer can agree on the main point: the differences don’t overturn core Christian teaching.¹ Ehrman still argues some variants matter, especially to people who believe the Bible has no errors.¹ That’s a real question, and an honest Bible answers it in the footnotes.

What this doesn’t show

It shows the text was preserved. It doesn’t, by itself, show the text is true. Accurate copies of a book tell you what the author wrote, not whether the author was right. The other pages on this site take up that question.

Early dates are estimates. The oldest papyri are dated by handwriting, and scholars like Brent Nongbri have argued that some should be dated later than the traditional estimates.¹¹

Questions people ask

Are there any original copies of the New Testament?

No. Like every other ancient book, the New Testament survives only in copies.⁹ What makes it unusual is how many copies there are, and how early some are.²⁴

What is the oldest New Testament manuscript?

The St John Fragment (P52) in Manchester is widely regarded as the earliest. Its date is debated, from the early 2nd century to around AD 200 or later.⁴¹¹

What do the Dead Sea Scrolls actually prove?

They show that much of the Hebrew Bible was copied very faithfully for over 1,000 years, because the scrolls can be compared with the medieval manuscripts they predate.⁸ They also show real variety in some books.⁸

What in the Bible has been changed?

Mostly spellings, word order, and copying slips. A few longer passages, like the end of Mark, are disputed, and modern Bibles say so in their notes.

Go deeper

• The Great Isaiah Scroll: a whole book of the Bible, copied before Jesus, compared with the traditional text.
• Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter J. Williams: a short chapter on whether the text has changed. On the Shelf under “Start here.”
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman: the skeptic’s case. On the Shelf under “Know the other side.”

---

By Casey Case · Sources last checked October 11, 2026

Sources

1. Bart D. Ehrman, “Fundamentalists and the Variants in our Manuscripts,” The Bart Ehrman Blog, June 20, 2014. ↩︎
2. Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF), “<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20260923181057/How”>https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/intfblog/-/blogs/1891824″>How Many Greek New Testament Manuscripts Are There REALLY? The Latest Numbers,” September 29, 2023 (archived copy). ↩︎
3. Daniel B. Wallace, post on the latest Greek New Testament minuscules, August 26, 2013. Gives 5,838 by counting the highest catalog numbers assigned. ↩︎
4. University of Manchester Library, “<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20250515194431/St”>https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/visit/visitor-information/explore/st-john-fragment/”>St. John Fragment,” archived May 15, 2025. ↩︎
5. Codex Sinaiticus Project, “About Codex Sinaiticus,” accessed Oct. 11, 2026. ↩︎
6. Vatican Library, catalog record for Vat. gr. 1209, accessed Oct. 11, 2026. ↩︎
7. “<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20260902161530/Masoretic”>https://www.britannica.com/topic/Masoretic-text”>Masoretic text,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (archived September 2, 2026). ↩︎
8. Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, “Introduction,” Israel Antiquities Authority, accessed Oct. 11, 2026. ↩︎
9. Bart D. Ehrman, “If Textual Variants Don’t Change Any Key Doctrines – Then Who Cares?,” The Bart Ehrman Blog, accessed Oct. 11, 2026. ↩︎
10. Mark 16, ESV, with the translators’ note on verses 9-20. ↩︎
11. Brent Nongbri, “<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20201011060431/Palaeography”>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/palaeography-precision-and-publicity-further-thoughts-on-pryliii457-p52/1D4E56BF0E9D4DDDA313D0C2754E2F28″>Palaeography, Precision and Publicity: Further Thoughts on P.Ryl. III.457 (P52),” New Testament Studies 66, no. 4 (2020): 471-499. ↩︎