Question · FaithLogic
Was the Bible corrupted or changed?
The New Testament is the best-attested text of the ancient world — roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, some within a generation or two of the originals. The differences between them are almost entirely trivial and fully catalogued; none affects a doctrine. There is no textual evidence of a deliberate rewrite.
In more depth
The charge of tahrif (corruption) is usually made on theological rather than textual grounds: because the Qur'an assumes the earlier Scriptures agreed with it, any disagreement is taken as proof they were changed. But the manuscripts let us check directly.
We have around 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, plus thousands more in Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. The earliest fragments date to the second century, and near-complete copies survive from the third and fourth. No other ancient work is remotely as well documented.
Textual critics catalogue every difference between manuscripts. The overwhelming majority are spelling, word order, or obvious slips. A small number are meaningful, and a handful are both meaningful and hard to decide — but every serious variant is footnoted in modern Bibles. Nothing is hidden.
If the text was corrupted, when? Before Muhammad's time the Qur'an itself calls the Scripture in the hands of Jews and Christians a light and a guidance and tells them to judge by it. After his time, the manuscripts we already have would have to all agree on the "corrupted" reading — which would require an impossible, undetectable, worldwide edit.
This is part of the FaithLogic study library — the biblical, historical and manuscript case that Jesus is God, with every claim linked to its source. Open the interactive version for search, cross-references, read-aloud, and the full library.