Editing Openai/690ebe98-9ccc-8012-b7a2-42d4636988b4 (section)

=== 2. The Bible ===

Transmission and preservation:

* The Bible consists of the Old Testament (Hebrew/Aramaic) and New Testament (Greek), written by many authors over about 1,000 years.
* There are tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts—a huge corpus—but also many textual variants between them.
* For the New Testament alone, there are over 400,000 textual variations (differences in words, phrases, or order). Most are minor, but some affect meaning.

Examples of significant variants:

* The ending of Mark (16:9–20) and the story of the adulterous woman in John (7:53–8:11) are absent in the earliest manuscripts.
* The Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7–8), used historically to support the Trinity, is a later Latin addition.

Scholarly consensus (confidence: ~90%)
→ The Bible has undergone more textual evolution and editorial changes over time, though modern critical editions (like Nestle–Aland) aim to reconstruct the earliest recoverable text.

Sources:

* Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperOne, 2005)
* British Library – “The Transmission of the New Testament Text”