“Man Changed The Bible”
"Man Changed The Bible"
If you are sitting across the table from someone who claims the Bible has been changed or corrupted over time, you are actually looking at someone who doesn't understand how history is recorded.
Most people treat the Bible like a giant game of Telephone where the message gets garbled after being whispered through too many ears. But that theory isn't just a bit off; it is a total impossibility.
In reality, the Bible is the most documented and verified piece of literature in the history of the world.
Think about the standard we use for everything else. Take William Shakespeare for example. Nobody spends their time arguing whether Hamlet is real or if the text was altered, yet we have zero original manuscripts written by Shakespeare himself. We rely on copies made years after he died. If we applied the same skeptical "rules" to Shakespeare that people apply to the Bible, we would have to toss his plays into the trash and claim they never existed.
The numbers tell the real story. For the New Testament alone, we have over 25,000 manuscript portions. To understand how insane that is, you have to compare it to other famous historical works. We only have about ten copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and the earliest one was written a thousand years after he lived. We have about seven copies of Plato. If the Bible is unreliable, then we have to admit we know absolutely nothing about Caesar, Plato, or the entire Roman Empire. You cannot trust the history of the world and then turn around and doubt the Bible when it has a mountain of evidence that is a mile high.
The best part about this "paper trail" is that it made corruption impossible. Because the Bible spread so fast to different countries, there was no way for any king or group to "edit" the message. By the time someone might have wanted to change a verse in Rome, there were already hundreds of copies in Egypt, Syria, and Greece. There was no "Save As" button or central server to hack. If you tried to change your copy, everyone else’s copy would prove you were a fraud. It is the original blockchain technology.
When scholars compare these thousands of copies from all over the world, they find a 99.5 percent match. The tiny 0.5 percent difference is mostly just spelling variations or word order. Not a single major event, miracle, or teaching has been altered. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proved this once and for all by showing that the Old Testament stayed identical for over a thousand years of copying.
The Bible isn't just a book of faith. It is a historical juggernaut that has survived a level of scrutiny that would destroy any other book in existence.