"The Bible has been changed, so you can't trust it"

Your Bible has been rewritten over the centuries. Scribes changed it, verses were added and removed, so you cannot know what the originals said.

"Changed" is doing several jobs at once. There are three separate questions: are there differences between the handwritten copies (yes — that is true of every ancient text), were any of them doctrinally motivated forgeries (that is the real charge, and it has to be shown case by case), and do modern translations hide something (they footnote the disputed readings openly). The New Testament is the best-attested work of antiquity: roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, some within a couple of generations of the originals, plus tens of thousands in other languages and a mass of quotation in early writers. That volume is why scholars can reconstruct the text with confidence — more witnesses means more cross-checking, not less.

Even Bart Ehrman, a critical scholar, wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. The experts say it was corrupted.

Ehrman's own textbook, co-authored with Metzger, states that the vast majority of variants are trivial — spelling, word order, obvious slips — and that no essential Christian teaching rests on a contested passage. In the appendix to Misquoting Jesus he says essentially the same when pressed. His stronger claims are about a handful of theologically interesting variants (the ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery, 1 John 5:7), and on every one of those the critical consensus he helped build is that the shorter, earlier reading is original — which is exactly why your Bible brackets or footnotes them. The system for catching a change is working, in public, in the margins of the text.

For the Old Testament it is worse — those texts are far older and we have far fewer copies.

The Dead Sea Scrolls settled this. Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts were medieval. The Qumran scrolls pushed the evidence back about a thousand years — and the great Isaiah scroll, for example, is substantially the same text later scribes were copying, with differences that are overwhelmingly spelling and none that alter doctrine. Independent lines — the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint, quotations in the New Testament and the rabbis — let scholars triangulate the same way. The transmission was careful, and where it was not perfectly careful, the mistakes are visible and correctable.