“The Bible Has Been Changed Over Time” How Do You Respond?

Have you noticed that we now live in a world where everyone is a specialist in everything? And the first victim in all this is, of course, Christianity. I have never seen a religion with as many experts as our Christian Faith. The Christian Bible, in particular, is by far the most criticised literature in all of eternity. And the target? The inspiration of Scripture: the idea that the Bible is the Word of God. Consult the modern-day philosopher like Joshua Maponga. Give ear to Muslim theologians like Shabir Ally, and I can assure you that you will hear them consistently attack the reliability of Scripture. Their outcry? “The Bible, as we have it, has been tampered with.” What they mean is that the book that you carry to church Sunday after Sunday is a bastard version of itself. It might have contained the words of God sometime in the past, but unfortunately, there has been so much copying that it has lost its original content. That argument, I admit, sounds very compelling. Enough to persuade the best among us. Now, over to you, my Christian friend. How would you respond to that? Save your worries, I have your back. There is always a way to counter any argument against your Christian foundation. In this case, allow Mr Wise Philosopher to say more, while you carefully listen. You do that by presenting a series of very direct questions – so that you can discover the context from which they are coming from. 

Here we go: 

WORLDLY WISEMAN, “I do not believe the Bible; it is not the Word of God. It has been corrupted over time.”

BELIEVER: Okay, how did you come to that conclusion? – You see, nobody arrives at any position randomly. There must be something in the background of their life that led them down that path. Allow them to express that. More often than not, the reason may be some negative experience they had with the church or a particular mistreatment by a professing Christian of some sort. Yet the deepest of them all, is when that individual has backslidden in their relationship with Christ and gone back to sin. Hence they can only direct that frustration to “there must be something wrong with the Bible.”

BELIEVER: Do you have any evidence of that? – Related to the first part is that everything a person believes must have tangible evidence to convince the world. Sadly, most people really do not have time to research for themselves; instead, it’s much more convenient to believe whatever they hear from others on Facebook, when that source also heard it from somebody else and the tradition goes on. Therefore, I am confident that the day you challenge them to produce evidence for the corruption of the Bible is the day you expose the lie. Because there isn’t any! I am convinced that nobody, in this wide world, can tell you that someone saw a strange, tall man, wearing a dark coat, enter the Bible library, late at night, with a red pen and a rubber to modify the Apostle Paul’s words. Such a theory is just that: a myth. Which is somehow believable to some.

BELIEVER: What sort of changes do you think are there? – Ask them to provide a specific Bible verse – how it has been changed; when was it changed; by whom and why? It is also within their privilege to provide you with what the “original” looked like; what did the verse say before it was changed? But Alas! They don’t have such evidence. Yet they want us to believe their theory as truth.

Why must you trust Your Bible?

Do you know that there are more than 5, 000 Greek Bible manuscripts (copies) today? If we were to include other ancient languages such as Latin, Syriac, etc., the figures go all the way to something like 25, 000. And they are even available on the internet; you can access them, examine them, compare them yourself and even translate them into your own language and are guaranteed to produce the same Bible as your KJV, NIV, ESV. Might I also inform you that Scripture could not be altered, even if someone tried to. That is, there has never been a time in history when the entire Bible manuscript collection has been under the control of one individual. That is how changes can be made, by the way. Instead, it has been copied into so many duplicates, spread across various locations and copied at different periods of time, such that any alterations would be noticeable if compared side by side.

You see, the multiple copies criticism is not a weakness in the preservation of Bible truth, but its very strength. This is true with any other piece of writing. For example, you write your job application letter by hand. Then you make 1, 000 copies of that paper to send it to 1, 000 different companies. Suppose it happens that 50 of them get tampered with in some way, while another 400 get lost. Because of the vast number of the copies in the first place, you can still use the remaining 550 to restore what the original looked like using the word-for-word comparison. Why not? That is how we got our Bible, in case you didn’t know. There is a process called Textual Criticism. Which is when God’s people took all the available copies, compared them side by side, recognized a few that were tampered with and used the vast majority of similar ones to reconstruct the original rendering as written by Apostle Paul.

Another good example that proves my point: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Do you know that this portion of Scripture was discovered 2000 years after the Bible was already in circulation? Yet it dated back before the time of Jesus our Lord. It was compared with the modern Bible and found to have been an exact match. You can trust your Bible! One more thing that people forget is that the truth of Scripture is in its overall doctrine and message, not in its word-for-word accuracy. That is, you can have two Bibles that use different words in a certain verse, yet the doctrine or message in that context is still the same in both of them. Hence we can all read Scripture in various languages and versions, yet still come up with the same Christian message of who God is, what He has done in Christ and how He expects us to live. What more do you want?

Doctrine of preservation

Tied to the doctrine of Divine Inspiration (God as the Author of the Bible) is the doctrine of Divine Preservation. That is, if God wanted all people from all time to get the message of the Bible, would it be so hard for Him to preserve it – to see to it that it reaches every human generation without being altered? I think we all know the answer to that.

Psalms 12:6-7 The words of the LORD are pure words, Like silver tried in a furnace of earth, Purified seven times. You shall keep them, O LORD, You shall preserve them from this generation forever.

My dear Christian brother, you do not need the “original” of the Bible to prove anything; the Bible as you have it in your hands is the original. Believe its truth, obey its principles and proclaim its message. Case closed.

Sinothi Ncube

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