What cuts did Christianity make to the Bible?

A religion edits its “sacred” text

Jonathan Poletti
I blog God.
Published in
7 min readMay 24, 2023

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The Bible was written by God, so Christianity claims. The religion doesn’t have an original manuscript. Is that the sort of thing you just throw away?

The Bible ends up being known only by much later copies. For the New Testament, scholars found some 5800 manuscripts in the Greek language. None are identical. There are some 500,000 textual differences.

As one study put it, there are “more variants than there are words…”

Midjourney (2023)

The religion was given a sacred text from God and set out to rewrite it.

That’s the story Christianity tells about itself. Around 250 A.D., the church father Origen writes:

“The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”

Christian scribes were well-known for ‘editing’.

Around 180 A.D., the pagan writer Celsus notes they “alter the original text of the Gospel three or four or many times, and modify it in order to be able to reject criticisms.”

Around 400 A.D., the Christian translator Jerome, likewise, complains that Christian copyists “write down not what they find but what they think is the meaning…”

I was raised Christian, and told the Bible is “inerrant.” What I see now is that if an original text survived, it would be a miracle.

Is the Old Testament perfectly preserved?

That’s what they said. Now I’m reading of the many versions of the Old Testament. When Origen set out to find all the distinctly different copies of it, he found six to seven.

There’s also the Samaritan Pentateuch, a distinctly different version whose details could totally re-write the whole story of the Bible.

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