Distorted

Frequently asked Bible Questions/How do we know the Bible has not be distorted

How do we know the Bible has not been distorted and tampered with through the years.

Unfortunately, twenty-first century man has become skeptical of the reliability of the documents of the Bible. I suspect that this doubt has been generated by secular literature, education or the media. I remember a game that teachers had children play in school: the teacher would sit all of the children in a circle and give one child a message to whisper in the ear of the next child. By the time the message got to the end of the circle it didn’t even resemble the original message. The conclusion: You can’t trust second- or third-hand information.

This game has been used by some to illustrate that the Bible is not reliable. But what if we play the game the way the Bible was actually preserved. The message would not be whispered, but written; and each of the children could check their copies with all the preceding copies. The message at the end would be identical with the message at the beginning.

The Bible is based on existing manuscripts from the early N.T. church. These manuscripts accurately correspond to each other even when separated by region and time. There has yet to be discovered any doctrinal manipulation of the text of Scripture.

In that God has ordained to speak to man, God has also ordained to preserve His Word so that mankind could continuously have the message of salvation.

1 Peter 1:24-25

For, “All flesh is like grass, And all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, And the flower falls off, But the word of the Lord endures forever.”

Another confusing point for many is the various versions of the Bible (King James Version, New American Standard, New International Version, etc.) The writing of various versions does not mean that we have multiple renderings of the Bible. The meaning of the text of Scriptures are not changed from version to version. Versions simply translate the meaning into the language of the reader. For instance, the King James version is 17^th century English and the New American Standard version is modern English.

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