Occa­sion­al­ly, we come across Chris­tians face-to-face and, more fre­quent­ly, on the Inter­net, who, when informed that the text of the gospels under­went cor­rup­tion dur­ing their trans­mis­sion, often react with the fol­low­ing type of ques­tions : ​“When ? Who did the cor­rup­tion ? In what coun­try ? Before or after Muham­mad ? Why was it done ? How come no one noticed it?” These type of seem­ing­ly ​“inno­cent” ques­tions mere­ly reveal the incal­cu­la­bly colos­sal igno­rance of the per­son in question.

“Ver­sions” are sim­ply the trans­la­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment into oth­er lan­guages. The New Tes­ta­ment writ­ers orig­i­nal­ly wrote their books and epis­tles in the Greek lan­guage where­as the ver­sions are trans­la­tions of their writ­ings into oth­er lan­guages. Nat­u­ral­ly, non-Greek speak­ing Chris­tians want­ed the text of the New Tes­ta­ment in their own local lan­guages and so the New Tes­ta­ment began to be trans­lat­ed into oth­er lan­guages some­time in the mid to late sec­ond cen­tu­ry. An impor­tant point to remem­ber is that no mat­ter how many thou­sands of trans­la­tions exist, it remains that they are in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage from the orig­i­nal lan­guage (Greek) of the New Tes­ta­ment, thus their use and val­ue will be limited. 

What do the dif­fer­ences between Bible man­u­scripts reveal ? This paper is divid­ed into the fol­low­ing sections :

1. They require you to pro­duce evi­dence on : WHEN, HOW and WHY was the Bible corrupted
2. Once upon a time, there was a myth about Bible manuscripts
3. Evi­dence : more than 50 vers­es either omit­ted or added, hun­dreds of oth­ers changed
4. Evi­dences from sec­ond and third cen­tu­ry about Bible corruption
5. Do the changes and cor­rup­tions of man­u­scripts affect doctrine ?
6. ​“For God so loved the world”? 

The ​“Old Syr­i­ac” man­u­scripts of the Four Gospels known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest, dis­cov­ered by Mrs. Agnes Lewis in the Covenant of St. Cather­ine on Mount Sinai in 1892, unfor­tu­nate­ly was forged by the Monks, delib­er­ate­ly, before it was sold to Mrs. Lewis and her com­pan­ions. They made a hole in the date of the man­u­script, thus appar­ent­ly increas­ing its age by 900 years. The work actu­al­ly was fin­ished in 1599 A.D. The Eng­lish schol­ars who exam­ined it first, placed its date as of 697 A.D. Then, not being sure, they made a sec­ond inspec­tion, and assigned to it a lat­er date, at 778 A.D. Dr. Burkitt (then a young stu­dent), at the time of its dis­cov­ery, thought that the hole in the date was nat­ur­al, that is, in the skin when dat­ed. He failed to real­ize that no respon­si­ble scribe would date a man­u­script near a hole in such a way as to leave the read­er in doubt as to the exact date.

We will take the most pop­u­lar Bibles such as the King James Ver­sion (KJV), the Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion (RSV), the New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion (NIV), the Good News Bible (GNB), the Liv­ing Bible Ver­sion (LBV) as well as the Chris­t­ian Com­mu­ni­ty Bible (CCB) and con­trast the same vers­es with­in these Bibles.