Booger McLovin

The charge that the Bible is corrupt is repeated often enough that many accept it without question. Atheists say it. Jewish anti-missionaries say it. Muslims say it. But repetition does not make a lie true. When the evidence is examined with clear eyes, the accusation collapses.

The New Testament is not a book floating in the clouds, detached from history. It is the most securely grounded collection of writings from the ancient world. More than 5,800 Greek manuscripts exist, along with thousands more in Latin and other languages. The earliest fragment we have comes from the Gospel of John, dated around AD 125. This is striking, for John was the last Gospel written and among the final books of the New Testament. It is as if the ink were scarcely dry before copies were already circulating across the empire.

Until this fragment was found, secular scholars were comfortable telling the world that the Gospels were late inventions of the second century, carefully shaped to avoid contradictions. That tidy story unraveled. Even the skeptical had to admit that the Gospels belong to the first century, written within the lifetimes of those who had seen Christ with their own eyes. The very generation accused of inventing the Gospels was already writing commentary on them. By the second and third generations, church fathers such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and Polycarp were quoting and preserving these writings, not creating them. Later fathers spoke of Clement and others as second-generation Christians, not as authors of new Gospels, but as those who faithfully guarded what the apostles left behind.

The fathers tell us that John, the last apostle alive, wrote his Gospel to resist the spread of Gnosticism. He was not weaving a myth among myths, but preserving the truth already under attack. He wrote as the disciple whom Jesus loved, the one who leaned against Him at supper, who stood at the foot of the cross, and who ran breathless to the empty tomb. If the Gospels were inventions, then we must believe that men who trembled at the holiness of God chose to build their lives on a lie. History knows zeal enough, but men who go singing into the flames are not usually frauds.

Nor would invention have been practical. Papyrus was costly, the work of scribes painstaking, and every line had to harmonize with the Old Testament, a text three times the size of the New. Forgers do not risk exposure at every turn. These writings were read aloud in churches, compared across regions, and weighed against the memories of living eyewitnesses. A false account would not survive public reading, nor could it slip unnoticed into a network of congregations already treasuring authentic letters. To attempt a forgery under such conditions would have been to invite immediate discovery and lasting disgrace.

And what would such a forgery even add? From the beginning Jesus was preached not only as the Messiah but as the Son of God, a miracle worker, and the One raised from the dead. These truths appear in the earliest sermons of Acts, in Paul’s letters written between AD 48 and 51, and in the hymns and confessions of the first churches. In 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, Paul records the resurrection as a tradition he himself had received, a creed many date to within five years of the crucifixion. In Philippians 2:6–11, Paul preserves an early hymn declaring Jesus in the form of God, exalted above every name. These affirmations are not inventions of later centuries. They are the living confession of the first generation.

Imagine it this way. A messiah figure comes around the time of your birth. You grow up in church, hearing week after week that this messiah was a faithful teacher, a good Jew, an example of devotion to God. Then, halfway through your life, the message suddenly shifts. Now you are told that the same messiah is Jesus Christ, that He worked miracles, that He is God in the flesh, and that He was raised from the dead to forgive sins. Would you not notice the change? Would you not protest that this was never what you were taught? This is why it is unrealistic to claim that authors took their time and slowly advanced their Christology. The Christology was not a late invention. It was there from day one.

Each Gospel carries the fingerprints of its author. Matthew writes as a tax collector, skilled in detail and Jewish law. Mark, the companion of Peter, sets down a rapid-fire account that reads like a string of sermons. Luke, the physician, shifts into “we” language in Acts, revealing his presence with Paul. John withholds his name but betrays himself in the intimate details that only he would notice, such as outrunning Peter to the tomb. These are not faceless myths. They are living testimonies.

By the middle of the first century the Christian movement had spread into at least eight major centers separated by great distances. To corrupt the New Testament, one would have had to gather every manuscript, alter them all without being discovered, and return them to guardians who treated these texts as the very word of God. The cost and impossibility of such a scheme makes it absurd. Instead, manuscripts multiplied across the empire, weaving a wide net no hand could control.

Another objection comes from Bart Ehrman, who delights in telling crowds there are hundreds of thousands of textual variants. The number sounds alarming until you recall there are over 25,000 manuscripts containing more than five million words. The vast majority are spelling slips, word order shifts, or duplicated words. Not one alters the intent of the original author. Whether the text says Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, the meaning is the same. Ehrman himself admits this when speaking to scholars rather than to audiences.

The Old Testament has also been accused of corruption. Joseph Smith claimed that the Catholic Church altered the Scriptures. He stitched together ideas from The Way of the Hebrews, written in 1823, with long stretches of the King James Bible in 1826, and offered the result as the Book of Mormon. But history has exposed him. In 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran. Dating from 250 BC to AD 70, they contain large portions of the Old Testament, including a complete copy of Isaiah. These texts match the Hebrew Bible we use today almost word for word, apart from minor spelling differences. What was read in the synagogue before Christ is what we read now.

Gather the evidence and the conclusion is plain. The New Testament is supported by thousands of manuscripts, including copies within decades of the originals. The Gospels are stamped with the character of their authors. The wide spread of manuscripts made organized corruption impossible. The so-called variants never change meaning. The Old Testament is confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Unlike the Qur’an, which was narrowed by decree and by fire under Caliph Uthman, the Bible was never under the thumb of a single ruler. It spread freely across the ancient world, and its very abundance preserved it.

So when you hear the claim that the Bible is corrupt, remember the evidence. Then answer plainly. You are not LDS. You are not Muslim. You are Christian. And Jesus is God.