“The Bible has been translated so many times it's like the telephone game. There's no way we know what it originally said.”

Translation Is Not Copy-of-a-Copy:
Modern translations (NKJV, ESV, NASB, NIV) go straight back to the Hebrew and Greek texts. English Bibles are not translated from German, which came from Latin, which came from Greek. It's one step: original language to English.

An Embarrassment of Riches:
There are about 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, over 10,000 in Latin, and thousands more in Syriac, Coptic, and other languages—some copied within a century or two of the originals. Compare other ancient works: Caesar's Gallic War survives in a few hundred manuscripts, the earliest copied some 900 years after he wrote, and the first six books of Tacitus' Annals survive in a single medieval manuscript. Historians still trust those texts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls:
Before 1947, our oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah dated to around AD 1000. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (2nd century BC) is about a thousand years older—and it agrees closely with the later text; most differences are spelling and minor wording.

Textual Criticism and the Variants:
Because copies came from different places, comparing them lets scholars spot where a copyist slipped. Most variants are spelling, word order, or obvious errors; a small fraction affect meaning, and none overturns a core Christian belief. Where a passage is uncertain, your Bible tells you openly in a footnote (for example, Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11).

God Preserves His Word:
"The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isaiah 40:8).