The History of the Biblical Text: Manuscripts and Variants

The question of whether the Bible represents the preserved word of God requires, as its foundation, an honest examination of the textual history of the biblical documents — the manuscripts, the variants, the transmission process, and the scholarly consensus on the current state of the biblical text. Ahmad Deedat, in approaching this question, draws extensively on the findings of Western biblical scholarship itself — findings that are widely acknowledged in academic settings but that have often failed to penetrate the popular Christian understanding of the Bible as a straightforwardly preserved divine word.

The New Testament manuscript tradition is, in terms of sheer volume, the most extensively documented of any ancient text. Scholars have identified over five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, plus thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other ancient languages. This wealth of manuscript evidence is often cited by Christian apologists as evidence for the Bible's reliable transmission. However, the same mass of manuscript evidence that attests to the Bible's ancient pedigree also reveals the extent of variation within the textual tradition: scholars have identified approximately 400,000 textual variants — differences in wording — across the New Testament manuscript tradition. While most of these variants are trivial (spelling differences, word order variations), a significant number affect the meaning of the text.

The most celebrated of these significant variants is the 'Comma Johanneum' — the Trinitarian formula found in 1 John 5:7-8 in the standard Latin Vulgate translation: 'For there are three that testify: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.' This passage, which provides one of the clearest explicit statements of Trinitarian theology in the New Testament, is absent from the vast majority of early Greek manuscripts and is now universally acknowledged by biblical scholars to be a later addition to the text — not part of the original epistle of John. Its inclusion in the King James Version of the Bible reflects the manuscript situation at the time of that translation, not the original text.

The ending of the Gospel of Mark presents another well-documented textual problem. The last twelve verses of Mark (16:9-20) — including the account of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances and the command to handle snakes and drink poison as signs of faith — are absent from the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts and are now recognized by scholars as a later addition. The Gospel of John contains the famous story of the woman caught in adultery (7:53-8:11), which is likewise absent from the oldest manuscripts and is regarded by most scholars as a later interpolation, however spiritually moving its content.

The Old Testament presents its own complex textual history. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 provided manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible approximately a thousand years older than the previously available Masoretic text — and revealed significant variations from the received Hebrew text as well as from the ancient Greek translation known as the Septuagint. These variations indicate that the Hebrew biblical text was not a fixed, stable entity but underwent a process of transmission, editing, and occasional alteration over the centuries before reaching its current form.

Deedat draws on the work of Western biblical scholars — including Bart Ehrman, whose popular book 'Misquoting Jesus' brought these textual critical findings to a wide audience — to establish that the current Bible is not, in the assessment of scholars who have devoted their careers to studying it, an inerrantly preserved divine text. This scholarly consensus, drawn from within the Christian academic tradition, supports the Islamic theological position that the biblical text has undergone human alteration — the tahrif that the Quran describes — and that it cannot therefore be relied upon as the unaltered word of God.