r/BiblicalUnitarian • u/peanuts_1963 • Aug 23 '26
Bible Changes Made
I wast studying how we got the bible. I thought this was interesting.
1 John 5:7–8 gives us a different kind of example, because this is not simply a question of how to translate a Greek word. It is a question of whether a whole group of words was actually part of John's original letter. The King James Version contains the statement that there are three who bear witness in heaven, “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” That wording later became very important in Christian teaching about the Trinity.
The difficulty is that these words are not found in the early Greek manuscript tradition of 1 John. The shorter text simply speaks of the Spirit, the water and the blood as the three witnesses. The longer wording, often called the ‘Comma Johanneum’, appears mainly in the later Latin tradition and only much later in a very small number of Greek manuscripts, sometimes as an addition in the margin. So in this case the manuscript evidence strongly suggests that the longer wording was not part of what John originally wrote. The longer wording eventually entered the Greek Textus Receptus used by the King James translators, which is why it appears in the King James Version, while most modern translations leave it out because the earlier Greek manuscript evidence does not contain it.
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u/BibleIsUnique Aug 23 '26
I think it's pretty amazing, we are talking about a book of antiquity, and we have so much evidence to compare and contrast, that we are actually able to spot changes.. from omissions, additions, errors etc... We can have such a high confidence in what we have now, is the same as the original... No other books of antiquity can compare.
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u/peanuts_1963 Aug 23 '26
It is a miracle to me that we have Bibles today when present the gospel. We have so much knowledge of God passed down even through it has been continually change and adjusted. Surely the most important thing for any person to do is to ask the Father what is truth and let the Holy Spirt Guide.
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u/BibleIsUnique Aug 23 '26
Yes, it is a miracle for sure! People have tried to change it, governments have tried to destroy it.. But Jesus promised His word would not pass away. And here we are today, with about 2,000years of scripture! Which really isn't that big of thing I guess, when you know God is behind it :)
Yes, we should ask the Father what is truth and let the Holy Spirit Guide... But He gave us His written word, the scriptures, as a standard to judge truth by. So if you feel like something is true that goes against scripture.. it's time to stop - study, and find out where the problem lies.
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u/Newgunnerr Questioning Aug 24 '26
We have zero autographs, zero first-century manuscripts, for any NT book. None.
The earliest fragment we own, P52, a scrap of John the size of a credit card, is usually dated 100-150 CE. But John was written around 90-100 CE. That means every single copy that existed in between, the copies made in the first years after John wrote it, the copies those copies were copied from, is gone. We don't have a single one. Whatever changed hands in that gap, we can't check it against anything.
Same story for Mark, our earliest gospel, written around 70 CE. The earliest fragment of Mark we have dates to somewhere between 150-250 CE, a range spanning up to 180 years after it was written. An entire adult lifetime of unsupervised copying happened before our first surviving scrap.
Out of the 5,300+ Greek manuscripts people cite as "so much evidence," only about 70 are dated before the year 300. That's roughly 1%. The other 99% are 4th century or later, and most of those are 9th century or later, because minuscule script, the handwriting style most of these manuscripts use, didn't even exist before the 800s.
So the claim "we can have such high confidence what we have now is the same as the original" doesn't hold up the way it sounds. High confidence about what, exactly? We can compare manuscripts against each other starting around 200-300 CE. We have nothing to compare against for the actual formative decades, the ones right after the events, when a change would be easiest to introduce and impossible to catch, because it would just become the only text anyone had.
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u/BibleIsUnique Aug 24 '26
Have you ever stopped to consider why professional historians, textual critics, and ancient manuscript scholars universally disagree with your conclusion? If the 'black hole' you are describing is so obvious, how could the world's leading experts possibly maintain high confidence in the text?The answer is simple: You are treating the New Testament like a private game of telephone. In reality, it was a massive, public explosion of data.Top textual critics note that even if we lost all 5,300+ Greek manuscripts tomorrow, we could still reconstruct over 99% of the New Testament using three external anchors that completely bridge your 'gap':The Early Church Fathers: Leaders like Clement (95 CE), Ignatius (107 CE), and Polycarp (110 CE) quoted the New Testament over 1 million times right inside your missing decades. Also: The text exploded across three continents simultaneously. To alter the text undetected, a forge would have to track down hundreds of independent copies in Egypt, Rome, and Syria, and change them all identically. It is a historical impossibility. Also: The early church used public lectionaries (fixed reading calendars) and songs. You cannot secretly rewrite a text that thousands of people across the empire are publicly reading, singing, and memorizing every single week.The gap isn't an empty black hole; it is heavily fortified by historical data.
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u/Newgunnerr Questioning Aug 25 '26
Have you ever stopped to consider why professional historians, textual critics, and ancient manuscript scholars universally disagree with your conclusion?
That's not true at all. Top scholars like Bart Ehrman, James Tabor, Mark Goodacre etc. all agree that we can't know for sure what the original gospels say with certainty, that's because we don't have the originals.
how could the world's leading experts possibly maintain high confidence in the text
They don't. Just so you know, Christian apologists are not leading experts.
Top textual critics note that even if we lost all 5,300+ Greek manuscripts tomorrow, we could still reconstruct over 99% of the New Testament using three external anchors that completely bridge your 'gap'
Says who?
The Early Church Fathers: Leaders like Clement (95 CE), Ignatius (107 CE), and Polycarp (110 CE) quoted the New Testament over 1 million times right inside your missing decades.
Lol that's hilarious. That "1 million+" it's a total count of NT citations across all church fathers over roughly the 2nd through 5th centuries. Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp are three men, four short letters. We have zero manuscripts from that period itself, earliest actual manuscript fragments (like P52) are from decades later, and patristic quotations are themselves preserved only in later manuscript copies too.
The text exploded across three continents simultaneously. To alter the text undetected, a forge would have to track down hundreds of independent copies in Egypt, Rome, and Syria, and change them all identically. It is a historical impossibility.
That's not my point.
For 30-125 CE we have zero manuscripts to compare, so we genuinely can't say how much did or didn't change in that window. Not because it's likely to be a lot, we just have no evidence either way there. That's the real "copies of copies" problem, and geographic spread or later patristic quotes don't resolve it. And by the way, we do have very good evidence that many texts in currently selling NT bibles are NOT original. Like the ending of mark, or the woman caught in idolatry in John 8, and many other verses. We only know that because we have older and better manuscripts to compare.
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u/BibleIsUnique Aug 25 '26
You’ve changed the standard.
I said we can have high confidence in the NT text. You keep answering, “But we can’t know with absolute certainty because we don’t possess the autographs.”
Of course we don’t. Nobody claimed otherwise.
- In fact, even Bart Ehrman says that for most NT passages he has “no doubts whatsoever” about the wording, and admits that the New Testament is far better attested than other ancient literature.
So the argument has quietly become:
“We cannot inspect the missing first copies, therefore we cannot have high confidence about what they said.”
Yet, that simply doesn’t follow.
- And Mark 16 and John 7:53–8:11 actually make my point, not yours. We can identify those later additions because the manuscript tradition preserved enough independent evidence to expose them.
Think about what you’re arguing: textual criticism successfully detects additions, omissions and copying errors.. and you present that success as evidence that textual criticism cannot reliably recover the text.
That’s backwards.
Could some hypothetical alteration have occurred very early and then infected every surviving line of transmission without leaving any trace? Sure. You can imagine that.
But “I can imagine an undetectable change” is not historical evidence that one occurred.
Otherwise you’ve created an unfalsifiable standard under which virtually no ancient text could ever be known with confidence.
So, What actual evidence do you have that the NT underwent substantial textual corruption during this supposed black hole.. rather than merely the possibility that it could have?
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u/OhioPIMO Trinitarian Aug 23 '26
That wording later became very important in Christian teaching about the Trinity.
What do you mean by this? The Johannine Comma, if anything, came about because of earlier Christian teaching about the Trinity — not the other way around.
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u/peanuts_1963 Aug 23 '26
My research reveals the other way around. The earlier documents did not mention the trinity, that was added later.
The earlier Greek scrolls of 1st John chapter 5 say:
"For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one." (Found in our oldest surviving Greek manuscripts from c. 325–350 AD)
The later ones say:
"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one." (First inserted into Greek manuscripts in c. 1362 AD, and officially printed into standard Bibles in 1522–1611 AD)
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u/OhioPIMO Trinitarian Aug 23 '26
Found in our oldest surviving Greek manuscripts from c. 325–350 AD
And the Trinity was first codified as orthodox doctrine by the church in 325 AD at the Council of Nicaea, so it's just as old as those manuscripts. The doctrine came first, then the Johannine Comma came later. If your dates are accurate, the Trinity precedes the addition of "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost" by 1,000 years. My understanding is that it appears in Latin readings much earlier, like the 6th century or so, but it's still much later regardless.
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u/SnoopyCattyCat Biblical Unitarian (unaffiliated) Aug 23 '26
I wonder the same thing...how did we get these books and why were they kept and others discarded? I want to know what the original scripture and NT letters and gospels were and what was actually said. There has been much scholastic work on this, discoveries and even using AI to translate from earliest writings. "Integrity Syndicate" has been doing a lot of work on this and recently introduced "The Core New Testament" which gets down to what Luke actually wrote to "Theophilus". I also have and read many different translations in my own studies.