Have copying mistakes corrupted the Bible?
FAQs (016)
Because the Bible was copied by hand (before the days of printing) people often ask whether the copy writers made mistakes that have corrupted the message.
That there are variations between the different early copies of the Bible texts is undeniable. Despite very careful procedures to minimise errors (eg. counting the words on each page, counting the words on each line, checking that each line starts and ends with the correct word, etc) errors while copying did occur.
It has been suggested that there are over 200,000 variations in the manuscripts, however, this must be seen in proportion. Where a single copyist made a single mistake and his manuscript was subsequently copied 3,000 times over the following years this is counted as 3,000 variations when in fact 2,999 are perfect copies, albeit including that single mistake.
Fortunately the fact that we have so many early manuscripts of the Bible (over 24,000 copies - many, many more than any other ancient piece of literature) means that the variations can be identified by cross comparing the different copies. Of the variations that exist the vast majority are trivial, being variations in spelling or style.
Therefore we can be confident that despite such variations we have the New Testament text today substantially as the original writers wrote it. Norman Grisler and William Nix in their book 'A General Introduction to the Bible' have calculated that this would "compute to a text that is 98.33% pure".
With regard to the possible corruption of the message - see the related questions in the menu on the right.
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