This is why we know the Bible was corrupted

Bart Ehrman’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary. He was a former evangelical who once passionately believed the Bible was the divine word of God. But years of studying ancient manuscripts led him to a huge shift in perspective, one that would shake the foundations of belief and our view of history. 

Faith thrives on certainty. People want a firm foundation, something solid to hold onto in a chaotic world. That’s why many insist the Bible is perfect, inspired, without flaw. But Ehrman’s journey dispels this narrative and shows that this certainty is an illusion.

Bart Ehrman was a devout evangelical in his youth. The Bible, he was taught, was the word of God, perfect, unchanging, and divinely preserved. He started at Moody Bible Institute, a place where questioning was discouraged and belief was king. There, students weren’t just taught the Bible, they were trained to defend it. Every verse, every phrase, was considered the literal word of God, untainted by human error.

But then came a cold, hard fact: we don’t have the original manuscripts. What we have are copies. Copies of copies. Some dating back centuries after the originals were written. And when you compare these manuscripts, the differences are staggering. Thousands upon thousands of variations. Some are minor, misspellings, forgotten words, but others? They change the meaning of entire passages. And that’s where the problem begins.

Take Mark 2:26, for example. Ehrman wrote a paper arguing that this passage couldn’t possibly be an error. His professor at Princeton Theological Seminary left him a simple, devastating comment: Maybe Mark just made a mistake. That was a crack in the dam. If the Bible could contain mistakes, then how could it be inerrant? And if it wasn’t inerrant, what did that mean for faith?

The Reality of Human Hands

The idea that the Bible is a single, cohesive book is comforting, but it’s also wrong. The Bible is a collection of writings from different authors, with different viewpoints, living in different eras. 

Look at the Gospels. Mark, the earliest, portrays Jesus as deeply troubled, crying out in agony on the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

But Luke? His Jesus is calm, composed. Instead of despair, he says with confidence,

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46)

Two very different portraits of Jesus’ final moments. If these accounts were dictated by God, why do they contradict each other?

Even Paul’s letters show that Christianity was never a single, unified doctrine. His writings are filled with rebukes, corrections, and debates over what “true” Christianity should be. And later, as different sects of Christianity fought for dominance, scribes altered texts to better reflect their own beliefs. The doctrine of the Trinity? Some of the strongest scriptural evidence for it (like 1 John 5:7) was added centuries later.

Christianity has always been a religion of the book, but for most of history, its followers couldn’t read it. In the Roman world, literacy was a privilege of the elite. The average Christian wasn’t poring over manuscripts, they were listening to scripture read aloud in church. That meant that whoever controlled the texts controlled the message. And scribes, whether intentionally or accidentally, shaped that message as they copied it.

Picture an ancient Christian community. No printing presses. No publishing houses. If you wanted a copy of a gospel, someone had to sit down and write it out by hand. And that someone? Likely not a trained scribe, but a literate believer doing his best. Early Christians didn’t have the luxury of professional scribes like those found in Roman or Jewish circles. Imagine you’re a first-century Christian with a borrowed gospel in front of you, a blank sheet of papyrus beside it, and an oil lamp flickering in the background. You’re tired. Your eyes strain. You misread a word. Maybe you skip a whole line. Maybe you fix what looks like an error but wasn’t.

These mistakes stacked up over time. Even educated writers like the Roman philosopher Seneca and the poet Martial complained about scribes botching their work. And they were working with professional copyists. The Christian scribes? They were ordinary people, doing what they could.

And here’s another uncomfortable truth, the Bible wasn’t even written in Jesus’s language. Jesus spoke Aramaic, yet the Gospels were written in Greek, decades after his death. What does that mean? It means we’re reading translations of translations, shaped by Greek-speaking scribes who had their own theological agendas.

And let’s not forget the biggest challenge: ancient Greek had no spaces between words. Read this and tell me if you get it right the first time: "GODISNOWHERE." Did you read “God is now here” or “God is nowhere”? Exactly. Now imagine copying a whole book like that.

The Problem Wasn’t Just Mistakes—It Was Intentional Changes

Some changes were accidents. Others? Not so much. Early Christian copyists weren’t just preserving texts; they were shaping them. If something didn’t sit right theologically, they “corrected” it. 

Take Origen, a third-century Christian scholar. Even back then, he complained about scribes changing texts, either because they were careless or because they wanted to make the words fit their beliefs.

Or look at Marcion, a controversial second-century Christian leader. He was accused of chopping up Paul’s letters to remove anything that tied Christianity to Judaism.

Even pagan critics caught on. The philosopher Celsus blasted Christians for modifying their scriptures whenever a passage didn’t serve their arguments. 

You might think an important book like the Bible would have strict controls on copying. Not so. There were no copyright laws, no quality control, no master copy locked away to compare against. This lack of oversight led to numerous variations.

By the fourth century, Christianity had gained powerful friends. Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal, and suddenly, the church had resources. Wealthy Christians could afford professional scribes. Copying became more precise. But by then, it was too late. The earliest, most uncontrolled period of copying had already introduced thousands of variations. Later scribes, even when they copied carefully, were preserving texts that had already been altered.

And here’s where it gets tricky. If you want the most accurate copies of the Bible, you have to look at the earliest manuscripts. They’re closer to the original but full of variations. If you want cleaner, more uniform copies, you get later manuscripts, but they’ve been smoothed out by centuries of scribal “corrections.”

The King James Bible: A Beautiful Mistranslation

Now, let’s talk about one of the most famous Bibles of all time: the King James Version (1611). Many still claim it’s the perfect word of God. What they don’t realize is that the King James translators were working from an edition of the Greek New Testament cobbled together by Erasmus, a Dutch scholar.

Erasmus had only a few late Greek manuscripts to work with, one of which was missing the last page of Revelation. So what did he do? He translated those missing verses from Latin back into Greek. His best guess became scripture.

Then there’s 1 John 5:7–8, one of the Bible’s clearest statements on the Trinity. Erasmus didn’t find it in any Greek manuscript. It was in the Latin Vulgate, but not the Greek. Catholic scholars pressured him, claiming he had omitted crucial doctrine. He finally agreed to include it, after someone conveniently “found” a Greek manuscript containing the verse. That manuscript turned out to be a forgery. But the damage was done. The verse made it into later editions and, eventually, into the King James Bible.

Chasing the Original

For a long time, churches didn’t worry much about differences in the text. That changed in the 1600s when John Mill, a scholar with an eye for detail, published a study showing that the New Testament had at least 30,000 variations. 

Johann Wettstein, another scholar who, in the 18th century, pointed out that some of the key verses Christians used to prove Jesus’ divinity might not have been in the original texts at all. 

By the 19th century, scholars had given up on the idea that the medieval copies of the Bible were anywhere near the originals. One of them, Karl Lachmann, decided to toss out the traditional Greek text entirely and reconstruct the Bible using only the oldest manuscripts he could find. This was the first real attempt to get back to what the early Church may have actually read, rather than what later generations wanted them to read.

And then came Tischendorf. He traveled to the Sinai desert in the 1800s and found an ancient manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, at a monastery. The monks were using its pages as kindling for their fires. Tischendorf knew he had stumbled upon something historic, and when he got his hands on the whole manuscript, he realized that it was one of the oldest complete New Testament texts ever discovered. It was also missing some famous passages, like the long ending of Mark, which includes the resurrection appearances of Jesus. That’s right: one of the oldest Bibles in existence didn’t even have Jesus appearing to anyone after He rose from the dead.

By the time we reach the 20th century, scholars have not only identified hundreds of thousands of textual differences in the Bible but also developed methods to determine which readings are the most authentic. They rely on principles like, “The harder reading is probably original,” because scribes were more likely to soften difficult passages than to make them harsher. 

Ehrman highlights a chilling fact in his work: there are more differences among the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Think about that. The book that millions base their faith on has been altered over time, in thousands of different ways. 

Not All Changes Were Small

Many changes were minor. A missing letter here. A different word there. But some altered the text’s meaning:

1. Matthew 24:36 – Early copies say, "No one knows the day or hour, not even the angels, nor the Son." But some scribes removed "nor the Son", likely because it made Jesus seem less than all-knowing.

2. The Lord’s Prayer – In Luke, the prayer was shorter. Some scribes added words to match the version in Matthew.

3. Jesus and the Adulterous Woman (John 7:53–8:12) – This famous story? Missing from the earliest manuscripts.

4. Mark 16:9–20 – The resurrection appearance? A later addition. The earliest manuscripts end with the women finding the empty tomb, with no appearances of Jesus at all.

And the changes didn’t stop at Jesus. Some Gnostic texts flip the story of the Garden of Eden on its head, portraying the snake as the one offering wisdom and the God of the Old Testament as the one trying to suppress knowledge. If early Christians were debating such foundational stories, then what does that say about the version of faith that has been passed down to us? 

Jesus Had to Be God, No Exceptions

In the early days of Christianity, not everyone agreed on who Jesus was. Was he born divine, or did he become the Son of God later? These debates weren’t happening in some forgotten theological corner. They were shaping Christianity itself. And when copyists got their hands on the biblical texts, its messages were shaped  to fit a version of Jesus that early Christians wanted to believe in.

Take 1 Timothy 3:16, for example. The original manuscripts read: “Who was manifested in the flesh.” But that left room for interpretation. Was this just some holy man appearing on the scene? That wouldn’t do. So somewhere down the line, a scribe made a tiny but monumental change: “God was manifested in the flesh.” Just like that, no more debate, Jesus wasn’t just a messenger. He was God.

Or look at Luke 3:22, which in its earliest versions says: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” That wording suggests that Jesus became God’s Son at a specific moment in time—dangerous ground for those arguing that Jesus was divine from the start. So, the text got cleaned up to align with orthodox doctrine: “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Making Sure Jesus had Flesh and Blood

There were other groups, the docetists, who saw Jesus as more of a divine ghost. For them, the idea that Jesus suffered and bled like any other human was unthinkable. And that’s where another round of edits came in.

Take Luke 22:43-44, the famous passage where Jesus sweats drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. The earliest and best manuscripts don’t have it. So why do later versions include it? Simple. The addition reinforced the idea that Jesus had a real, suffering body, a body that could feel pain, could break, could die. A body that wasn’t just a mirage.

Or look at Luke 24:51, where Jesus is taken up into heaven. The earliest versions just say “And he was removed from them.” Later scribes added a crucial phrase: “And he was taken up into heaven.” That little tweak made it clear: Jesus wasn’t just disappearing mysteriously. He was bodily ascending, solid and real.

No Room for Two Jesuses

Then there were the separationists, Christians who believed that Jesus and “the Christ” were two different entities. Jesus was just a man, and the divine Christ only entered him for a time, perhaps at his baptism. The divine part left before the crucifixion. The human Jesus suffered. The Christ did not.

That kind of thinking wouldn’t fly with those pushing a more unified picture of Jesus. So when scribes copied Hebrews 2:9, some of them changed its meaning. The original text says Jesus died “apart from God.” That sounds suspiciously like separationism—God abandoning Jesus at the moment of death. So, some scribes softened the blow, rewriting it as: “By the grace of God, he tasted death.” Now Jesus’ death wasn’t an abandonment; it was an act of divine grace.

Women Were a Problem so They Had to Go

If you read the New Testament closely, you’ll see that women played a major role in the early Christian movement. They weren’t just helpers in the background; they were leading churches, supporting Jesus’ ministry, and even being called apostles.

That made some people uncomfortable.

Take Romans 16:7, where Paul greets a woman named Junia and calls her “foremost among the apostles.” That was a problem for later scribes who couldn’t stomach the idea of a female apostle. So they changed her name to Junias, a masculine name that didn’t exist in any other records.

Or consider 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which commands: “Women must be silent in the churches.” That passage contradicts what Paul says just a few chapters earlier, where he allows women to pray and prophesy openly. Scholars now believe those restrictive verses were a later addition, slipped in by scribes who wanted to make sure women stayed in their place.

Blaming the Jews

As Christianity distanced itself from Judaism, some scribes went to work rewriting history. They made small but meaningful edits that shifted responsibility for Jesus’ death away from the Romans and onto the Jewish people.

Take Matthew 27:25, where the Jewish crowd supposedly cries out: “His blood be upon us and our children!” That line has been used for centuries to justify persecution against Jews. Did the crowd actually say that? Or was it a later addition, reflecting the hostility between early Christians and Jews? The earliest manuscripts suggest the latter.

The Bible We Have Is Not the Bible That Was

The battle for Christianity wasn’t just fought within. It was waged on the outside, too. Christianity needed power. And that’s where the Council of Nicaea came in. The Council, convened in the 4th century under Emperor Constantine, was a turning point for Christianity. Constantine didn’t call the council to discover the truth. He called it to unify an empire. A divided Christianity was a weak Christianity. This was about deciding what version of Christianity would be permitted to survive, and it wasn’t God who decided which books should stand and which should fall. It was men. Constantine gathered bishops, pressured them to agree, and used the power of Rome to crush dissenters.

That’s where the New Testament was not discovered, not revealed, but chosen. Books were put in, others were cast out. The teachings of Arius, who argued that Jesus was not equal to God, were condemned. The doctrine of the Trinity, absent from earlier Christianity, was voted into existence.

The question arises: If the Bible had been handed down in its perfect form, why did it take a political council, driven by imperial power, to decide what it should say?

And let’s not forget the man who shaped the Bible the most, Paul. The same Paul who never met Jesus, the same Paul who once persecuted Christians before claiming to have had a revelation. Paul preached a version of Jesus that aligned with Roman authority, and so was elevated, overshadowing even the voices of Jesus’s closest disciples. Paul’s letters, his own interpretations, became the backbone of Christian doctrine. How is it that a man who once cursed the name of Jesus ended up defining what Christianity should be at Nicaea?

Paul's writings were promoted, while alternative perspectives, like "The Gospel of Mary," "The Gospel of Barnabas," and "The Gospel of Judas," were thrown aside. Not because they were false. But because they were inconvenient.

Alternative texts like the Nag Hammadi texts claimed that Jesus was never crucified at all, that he escaped, that he stood at a distance and laughed at those who thought they had killed him. If that sounds shocking, remember, this was a real belief held by early Christians. It wasn’t a fringe idea; it was an argument that stood alongside what would become the mainstream belief in the resurrection. But as Christianity became the religion of empire, that belief had to disappear.

So the scribes responded with ink, with edits, with theological revisions. And in the end, the Christianity that survived wasn’t necessarily the one that was true. It was simply the one that was written into history.

So where does that leave us? The Bible, as it stands today, if we still insist on calling it divine, then we must admit, it is a divinity shaped by men, not the other way around. 

Historical Errors in the Bible

Even beyond theological edits, the Bible is filled with historical inaccuracies.

• The Bible confuses Mary (mother of Jesus) with Miriam (sister of Moses), despite them living centuries apart.

• The Bible places Haman in the wrong historical period, making him a companion of Pharaoh, even though Haman appears much later in Persian history.

These are not small issues. They prove that the Bible contains errors. If history itself has been rewritten, what else has been changed?

The Bible is not a book, it’s a back-and-forth over generations, with scribes, priests, and theologians leaving their fingerprints all over the text. Every time someone copied it, they had choices to make. Which reading made the most sense? Which version felt more correct?

And so we end up with a Bible that isn’t one thing, but many things. Not a stable foundation, but shifting ground.

And that leads to a final, uncomfortable question:

If this book was meant to be the unaltered, inerrant word of God, why does it look so much like a human product?

Gospel Writers as Editors, Not Historians

If the scribes changed the text, it’s because the authors themselves had already been doing the same thing. Ehrman points to how Mark and Luke describe Jesus’ final hours. In Mark, he’s tormented, begging God to take away his suffering. In Luke, he’s calm, composed, ready to face death. That’s not just a difference in emphasis, that’s an entirely different portrayal of Christ.

Why? Because each Gospel writer had an agenda. Mark wanted to highlight Jesus’ suffering. Luke wanted a model martyr, someone believers could look to when facing persecution. John, for his part, removes any sign of Jesus in distress altogether. In his account, Jesus controls every moment, even his own death. Same events, radically different interpretations. The Gospel writers weren’t just reporting, they were shaping the story, making it say what they believed it needed to say.

A Human Book With Human Limits

Ehrman lays it out clearly: If the Bible were truly perfect, we wouldn’t be here, sifting through thousands of conflicting manuscripts, trying to reconstruct what might have been said. 

Yet if God had gone through the trouble of inspiring the text, why not preserve it? Why allow it to be lost, altered, rewritten?

That question haunted Ehrman. Once a firm believer in biblical inerrancy, he reached a point where he had to ask himself whether a perfect God would have left His most important message in such imperfect hands.

His answer? The Bible is not inerrant because it was never meant to be. It’s a product of its time, written by people with limited knowledge, limited perspectives, and very human biases. The text was changed because it was always human hands holding the pen. At the heart of this argument is a simple but unsettling truth: If God had intended for His word to remain unchanged, it would have.

What This Means for Faith

Ehrman’s story isn’t just an academic exercise. It’s the story of anyone who has ever questioned, who has ever tried to find truth in a book that speaks in a patchwork of voices. And it leads to a question few dare ask: If the text isn’t perfectly preserved, can it be trusted to guide us to salvation? Did God ever intend for people to rely on scripture alone? Or do we need something, or someone, greater?

The answer is to recognize that a book, no matter how sacred, has never been enough. Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that people will twist and turn a text until it says what they want it to say. What we need is not just scripture, but a guide. Someone who can tell us what was meant, not just what was written. 

A voice that cannot be altered. A guide who won’t let us be led astray by the whims of those who came before, rewriting and reshaping scripture to fit their own needs.

God, in His justice, wouldn’t leave people with only a text that could be changed by human hands. That’s why He never left His people without a guide.

A Living Messenger: The Proof of Every Age

Throughout history, God has always sent a guide. Noah. Abraham. Moses. Jesus. These weren’t just teachers, they were divine proofs, messengers who carried the truth not in ink, but in their very being. And each of them was the key to understanding God’s message.

But people rejected them. They ignored Noah’s call. They defied Moses. They crucified Jesus. And instead of following the proof in their time, they clung to their books, their traditions, their inherited beliefs.

And that pattern continues today.

Who is our proof now? Who is the one appointed to correct what has been lost, to restore what has been buried under centuries of distortion? The Bible was compiled by men. The Quran, while correcting what was lost, was still passed through human hands. But the final, divine guide cannot be corrupted.

That guide today is the Mahdi, the one who holds the key to unlocking the original truth.

The Mahdi: The Guide We Were Always Meant to Have

The Mahdi rules by truth itself. A truth so clear it does not need the approval of councils or the signatures of scribes. A truth that illuminates on its own.

Without him, we are left with words that have been changed, meanings that have been lost, and books that people fight over instead of understanding. Because if there is truth in scripture, and there is, it was never meant to be left in the hands of scholars arguing over manuscripts. It was always meant to be safeguarded by the living proof of God.

The question is, will we recognize him? Or will we repeat history once again, rejecting the messenger and clinging to a book, reshaped by men, while the truth stands right in front of us?