In the fifth year of Jehoiakim's reign over Judah, a scroll of the prophet Jeremiah's words was read aloud before the king, and he cut it apart and burned it (Jeremiah 36:9, 21-23). Then the Lord told Jeremiah: "Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned" (Jeremiah 36:28). The new scroll was not an exact copy. The chapter says many similar words were added to it (Jeremiah 36:32), and it says so openly.
That episode sets the pattern for everything that follows. The books of the Bible were copied by hand for many centuries. Copyists made mistakes, and some made changes on purpose. But the copies survive in such numbers, from so many places and periods, that the changes show. The places where the wording is uncertain are few and known, and modern Bibles mark them in their notes. The text has a journey that can be traced step by step and checked along the way.
Across the movements that follow, you will build one timeline of that journey, from the scribes of ancient Israel to the Bible you own. You will draw on four scholars who discussed it with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast: Daniel Wallace, Paul Wegner, Peter Williams and Dennis Edwards. Each entry on your timeline gets a mark for what kind of claim it is. By the end, the line itself will show where the evidence is thick, where it thins out, and what that means.