Was the Bible changed over the centuries?

Eli: Wasn't the Bible changed over centuries of copying by hand?

Eli: Fair worry, because hand copying makes mistakes.

Eli: The New Testament survives in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus thousands more in Latin and other languages.

Eli: There are roughly 300,000 variants among them, most of them word order and other trivial changes.

Eli: Hort wrote in 1882 that the job is sorting mistakes from the true reading.

Eli: Scholars date the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls from the third century BC to the first century AD.

Eli: Scholars say the scrolls show the Masoretic Hebrew text was relatively stable, though there was real variation too.

Eli: Manuscripts can't prove it's true, but they do show how many copies survive and how scholars compare them.

Eli: This is from the book of Isaiah, an ancient Hebrew text.

Eli: The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.

Eli: Read one of the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus' life, or bring your questions to a local church.