Copies of Copies: How Scripture Changed

Here’s a fact that surprises most people:
We don’t have the original manuscript of any book of the Bible.
Not one page of one book.

What we have instead are copies, of copies, of copies. Made by hand over many centuries. Remember, the printing press wouldn’t be available for 15 more centuries! Combine this with the fact that the literacy rate in Europe was as low as 1%, and you can see how anything written seemed powerful and almost magical. People assumed that if something was written, it was definitively true.

Of course, during all those centuries, copying a long text by hand was difficult, painstaking work, and the people who did it were human. So the copies naturally don’t perfectly agree with each other. Scholars who compare the surviving New Testament manuscripts estimate around 400,000 differences between them. As the textual scholar Bart Ehrman put it in Misquoting Jesus, there are “more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”

Most of those differences are small: spelling, word order, a skipped line. But a few are not small at all, and none of what follows is fringe or hostile scholarship. It’s the mainstream view of the field, taught in university religion departments and seminaries alike, and noted in the footnotes of most modern Bibles.

Three Famous Passages That Were Added Later

Mark is generally considered the earliest of the four gospels. In our oldest complete copies of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (both from the 4th century), Mark ends at chapter 16, verse 8: women arrive at Jesus’s tomb, find it empty, hear from a young man in white that Jesus has risen, and flee. “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s the last line.

The twelve verses that follow in most modern Bibles (Mark 16:9-20), where the risen Jesus appears to his followers, commissions them to preach, and promises they’ll handle snakes and drink poison unharmed, are missing from those earliest copies. The manuscript evidence indicates they were composed later, by scribes who apparently felt the gospel needed a fuller ending. Most Bibles today mark the passage with brackets or a footnote saying exactly this. It’s fair to ask what it means that the earliest account of the resurrection ends in silence, and that the confident ending readers know was supplied by later hands.

This is one of the most beloved stories about Jesus. Religious authorities bring him a woman caught in adultery and ask whether she should be stoned, as the law required. Jesus answers, “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” One by one, her accusers walk away, and Jesus tells her, “Go and sin no more.”

The story appears in the Gospel of John (7:53-8:11) in modern Bibles. It does not appear there in any of the earliest manuscripts of John, including the oldest papyrus copies. It shows up centuries later, and scholars believe it circulated as a free-standing story about Jesus before someone placed it into John’s text. It may well be a beautiful and wise story. The point here is narrower: the evidence shows it wasn’t part of the gospel as originally written.

The doctrine of the Trinity holds that God exists as three persons in one being: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The single clearest statement of it in the Bible is 1 John 5:7 as it reads in the King James Version: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”

That sentence is absent from the early Greek manuscripts of 1 John. It circulated in Latin copies of the Bible and gradually became familiar in the West. When the scholar Erasmus assembled the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516, he left the sentence out because he couldn’t find it in any Greek manuscript available to him; it entered his 1522 edition after a Greek copy containing it surfaced. Modern translations either omit it or flag it in a footnote. Two things are worth knowing alongside that: the church developed and debated the doctrine of the Trinity for centuries without this verse, and the doctrine doesn’t stand or fall with it. But the verse most often quoted as its plainest biblical proof was, on the manuscript evidence, a later addition.

Letters Written in Paul’s Name

The New Testament contains thirteen letters attributed to the apostle Paul. Scholars regard seven of them as securely his (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon). But there’s a broad consensus that the three “Pastoral” letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) were written after Paul’s lifetime by someone else. Their vocabulary differs markedly from Paul’s, and they address developed church structures and controversies that belong to a later generation. Ephesians and Colossians sit in a middle category that scholars still debate.

Writing in a revered teacher’s name was a known practice in the ancient world, and the authors may have sincerely believed they were extending Paul’s legacy. Still, the result is that letters Paul didn’t write carry his authority, and passages from them are quoted today, including in teachings about who may lead a church, as though they were his words.

Books Stitched Together From Older Sources

Some of the editing happened at a larger scale. Scholars describe several biblical books as composite: assembled from earlier sources by later editors. The evidence is visible to any careful reader:

  • Genesis opens with two creation accounts. In chapter 1, God creates plants, then animals, then man and woman together, over six days. In chapter 2, God creates a man first, then plants, then animals, and finally a woman from the man’s rib. The order of events differs, and so does the portrait of God doing the creating.
  • Jesus has two different family trees. Matthew and Luke both give genealogies for Jesus, and they disagree, down to naming different grandfathers (Jacob in Matthew, Heli in Luke). Various harmonizations have been proposed over the centuries, but the texts themselves offer none.
  • Matthew’s genealogy is a designed structure. It arranges the generations into three symmetrical groups of fourteen, a symbolic pattern that suggests theological craftsmanship rather than family record-keeping.

What Would We Expect to See?

Here’s a question worth sitting with. If a perfect being had written a book and wanted it preserved, what would we expect the manuscript record to look like?

  • Faithful transmission from generation to generation
  • A consistent text, without contradictory versions of key events
  • No later additions, and no need for anyone to supply a missing ending

And if the books were written, copied, and edited by ordinary people? Then we’d expect copying mistakes, sources stitched together with visible seams, passages added by later hands, and respected names attached to documents they didn’t write. The manuscripts we actually have look like the second list. That observation doesn’t settle every question by itself, but it’s a piece of evidence, and it deserves to be weighed like one.

Three Possibilities

If sacred texts contain errors, additions, and documents written under borrowed names, there seem to be three ways to account for it:

  1. A divine being wanted to prevent the changes but couldn’t. That would mean the being isn’t all-powerful.
  2. A divine being could have prevented them but chose not to. That would mean clear communication wasn’t a priority.
  3. The texts developed the way human documents develop, because that’s what they are.

Many thoughtful believers respond that only the original manuscripts were divinely inspired, and that the errors belong to the copies. It’s a fair position to consider, and it’s worth noticing what it implies: no one alive has ever seen an original. Every Bible ever printed was assembled from the imperfect copies. If only the originals carried the message, the message is something we can now only approximate, which is the same position we’d be in if the texts were human from the start.

This pattern isn’t unique to the Bible, either. The Quran has a manuscript history of its own, and Hindu and Buddhist texts show the same kinds of human fingerprints. Wherever we can examine sacred texts closely, we find the ordinary marks of people preserving something by hand, as best they could.

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