The Bible has been copied so many times, by so many hands, over so many centuries, that no one can know what it originally said. That is the claim, and those who make it usually back it with a number. Scholars estimate roughly half a million differences among the surviving handwritten copies of the Greek New Testament, which is more differences than the text has words. A book with that many disagreements among its copies, the argument goes, must have drifted beyond recovery. T
he number holds up when tested. The conclusion drawn from it does not. The variants are numerous because the copies are numerous, and almost all of them are spelling slips and shuffled word order that no translator would notice. The small group that both changes the meaning and might be original is known, catalogued and debated in the open. The most consequential cases are printed in the notes of ordinary modern Bibles. The manuscript record shows exactly where the text is uncertain. It does not show a message rewritten beyond recovery.
The witnesses for this inquiry are four scholars who spoke with Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, each asked to explain a different part of the record: