Has the Bible Changed over Time?
Hasn’t the Bible been rewritten a number of times? If that’s the case, does the Bible we have today look anything like the original? A friend said she couldn’t trust the Bible because it had been rewritten “like eighteen times.” I asked her if she thought it would be smarter for Christians to just go translate the oldest documents they could find. She said yes—and then I had some good news for her: that’s already what we do. So, are we truly reading the same book now that the earliest Christians used in the first or the second century? Or is it a book that has been rewritten and changed over the centuries? This is actually quite an easy question to answer because of the discovery of so many ancient manuscripts of the Bible in the past one hundred years. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Copies of the Bible One of the biggest discoveries of ancient copies of the Bible was the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Among these scrolls were copies of every Old Testament book (with th