The accusation is often made that somebody changed the Bible deliberately — that a council, a church, or an emperor edited it to say what suited them, and that what you read now is the edited version. Alongside it runs a milder complaint: so many copies were made over so many centuries that nobody can know what was first written.

Both claims can be tested.

Here is what we are working with. The Old Testament was written over roughly a thousand years, from about 1400 BC to about 400 BC. The New Testament was written inside the lifetime of the men who walked with Jesus — the bulk of it before AD 70, the last of it before the first century closed. What we possess are copies, and it is worth being clear about what God claimed for the writing and what He never claimed for the copying.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 (NKJV)

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Paul is describing Scripture as God gave it. The words the prophets and apostles wrote were breathed out by God and are therefore without error. What Paul does not say — and what Scripture nowhere claims — is that every man who later copied those words would be kept from mistakes. Scribes were careful. They were also men.

Jesus showed us that this is the right way to treat the Scriptures. Every scroll read aloud in the synagogues of His day was a copy, centuries removed from the prophet who wrote it. He never handled those scrolls as second-hand goods. He read from them, argued from them, and rested His own authority on them.

Matthew 5:18 (NKJV)

For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.

A jot is the smallest letter in the alphabet — about the size of an apostrophe on this page. A tittle is smaller still: the short stroke that tells two similar letters apart, the way one crossbar is all that separates an F from an E. Jesus picks out the two tiniest things a man could get wrong with a pen and says that not one of them will drop out of what God has spoken — and He said it holding a copy.

Sceptics like to quote a number: four hundred thousand differences between the copies. Hearing it, you would think the Bible is riddled with doubt. It is the opposite. That number exists because we have thousands of copies to compare — and the more copies that turn up, the higher it climbs. Most ancient books have no such number, because two or three copies survive and there is nothing to check them against.

Here is a fact that sceptics use and Christians sometimes avoid. Apart from the small scraps, no two hand-written copies are exactly the same. Bart Ehrman, the best-known sceptic in the field, says it. Daniel Wallace, who has spent his career photographing these manuscripts and defending their reliability, says it too. But look at what these differences actually are: a name spelled two ways, two words standing in a different order, a letter written twice, a line the scribe's eye skipped and a later hand put back in the margin. That is what copying by hand does to a text. Try it for yourself. Write out a chapter twice and your own two pages will not match either.

Now that we are over that, look at what those copies give us. Close to six thousand of them survive in Greek, the language the New Testament was written in, and thousands more in Latin, Syriac and Coptic. They were made in different centuries, in different countries, by men who never met and could not have compared notes. Every one of them is a separate check on what the apostles wrote. That is why the differences can be found at all — you cannot spot an odd reading unless you have something to hold it against.

So yes, there are differences between the copies. The Bible has not changed. What arrived on your shelf is not one scribe's page passed down untouched, but a text that thousands of copies agree on — and where any single scribe's hand slipped, the others show it up.

Ehrman goes further. In Misquoting Jesus he acknowledges that the vast majority of the differences among our manuscripts are insignificant — misspellings and slips showing only that scribes lost concentration as easily as anyone else. In the interview printed at the back of the paperback edition he states that his own position does not stand at odds with his teacher Bruce Metzger's conclusion that “essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” Ehrman does argue that particular readings are disputed and that some of them affect how a verse is understood. What he does not argue, because the evidence will not let him, is that the message has been lost.

Paul's letters were copied the moment they arrived and carried on to the next church, so within one generation the text was in Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, Alexandria and a hundred towns in between. It was never in any one man's keeping. No council met for another two hundred years, and by then there was no way to reach the copies. A change made in one city stays in that city. It turns up in the manuscripts copied from that page and in no others, and set beside the copies from everywhere else it reads as the odd one out.

You do not have to take that on trust, because we can look behind the councils. Substantial copies of the New Testament survive from around AD 200 — more than a century before any council met, while Rome was still executing Christians and the church had no power to control anything. Set those copies beside a Greek New Testament printed this year and it is the same text. Whatever else the councils did, they did not do it here. The Old Testament tells the same story. The scrolls recovered near Qumran in 1947 pushed our oldest Hebrew copies back by roughly a thousand years, and the text they carry is the text that had been copied and read all along.

So the answer is no. Where a scribe slipped, and in the few places where one deliberately added a line, we know exactly which verses are in question — they are printed in the footnotes of the Bible in your hands. Those footnotes exist because the text has been examined in the open. A managed book has no footnotes.