Updated March 17, 2021 33.5K votes 8.4K voters 632.0K views
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Vote up the changes to the sacred text that surprise you the most.
There has never been a book more historically debated than the Bible, especially when it comes to conversations about how and if the Bible changes over time. It’s a tome that has started wars, divided nations, and probably ended more than a few friendships, all because of the myriad ways people interpret the same core concepts in different ways. The history of the Bible is fraught with revisions, wild interpretations, and massive overhauls. Over the course of the last century, changes to the Bible have seen the book expand and retract like a 2,000-year-old accordion.
To understand why so many variations of such an important book exist, you must remember that there is no "original Bible." Rather, the text of the Old Testament existed as stories that were passed down through generations before being molded together by authors and then later edited into the book that you can may have at home today. Because the Bible had such a rocky start, scholars have multiple versions of the text to work with, each with its own interpretation of events. With that in mind, a question lingers: has the Bible changed?
To find changes in Bible verses, one simply has to find some of the most popular sections (the Ten Commandments, the immaculate birth, etc.) and compare one Bible to a different version. It’s likely that you’ll notice something different. The biggest Bible changes happen when a church branches off from its parent and tries to set out with its own identity. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Latter Day Saints, for example, have managed to add their own bible histories to the mix, making things significantly murkier than they already were.
If, after reading about these changes, you're still feeling doubts about the reality of alterations, additions, and subtractions to the foundational theological documents, take a gander at Jesus' slow transformation into a white figure for further evidence that religious dogma and doctrine can—and do—alter with the passage of time.
Covet Whatever You Want—The Ten Commandments Don't Care
Depending on the translation, one of the Ten Commandments may have had a very different context than the one with which you're familiar. In the original Hebrew, the tenth commandment doesn't say anything about coveting. In fact, the original word used, "chamad," is usually used as a synonym for "lakach" (to take), so the tenth (and in some versions the ninth) commandment is actually a command not to yearn for things, but to not go around taking other people's things.
The Gospel Of Mary Of Magdala Doesn't Fit With The Rest Of The Bible, So It Doesn't Get Included
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is an apocryphal text that Biblical scholars really don't want to include in the Bible—not because it was written in the 2nd or 3rd century (plenty of books in the Biblical canon weren't even finished until the 2nd century), but because it offers a different take on spiritualism than the rest of the books.
In this book, Mary describes a discussion she has with Jesus and the disciples where Jesus explains that people have a spirit, a mind, and a second spirit that connects them with God. Many Biblical scholars believe that by adding this book to the Bible, the message of the book would be convoluted with conflicting philosophies that would teach people to find an inner harmony, rather than only to seek salvation from a higher power.
Of all the books that have been edited out of the Old Testament, the Book of Tobit stands out for the tale it tells. Initially, this story of a marriage that helped capture a demon was left out of the Biblical canon because of its late authorship. Recently, however, scholars have its omission was because Raguel, the bride's father, wrote the story's marriage document instead of the bridegroom, as was required by Jewish rabbinical law.
It's worth noting that the Midrash Bereishit Rabbah, a commentary on the book of Genesis written around 400 CE, contains a summary of the Book of Tobit—so it's not like no one knew about this book until they read it in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Continue To Confuse Modern Scholars—And They Don't Include A Seventh Day Of Rest
When studying the Bible, one of the biggest complications is that there's no "original" version of the text to use as a standard edition. Most of the stories were passed down through oral tradition, then written down by people who had their own variations of the stories.
For a long time, there were two "master" texts (the Greek Septuagint and the Masoretic Text) that scholars could work from, but between 1946 and 1956, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls seriously complicated everything. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a sizable portion of the Bible, and they predate the Masoretic text by about 1,000 years, making them the closest thing scholars have to a definitive version of the Old Testament.
While the Scrolls are more likely to be a "pure" version of the Bible, they offer some large variations on stories many people know. For instance, rather than finishing work on the sixth day and resting on the seventh, God may have finished work on the seventh day and rested during a sort of late philosophical evening.
In March 2021, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that researchers had found about 80 new Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in a Judean Desert cave. They believe the fragments were hidden there during a Jewish uprising against Rome almost 2,000 years ago. The Greek text is from the books of Zechariah and Nahum.
“We found a textual difference that has no parallel with any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or in Greek,” said researcher Oren Ableman.
“When we think about the biblical text, we think about something very static. It wasn’t static. There are slight differences and some of those differences are important,” said Joe Uziel, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls unit.
We Should Probably Throw Luke Out Since It's Such A Pieced-Together Amalgamation
Though there's no book in the Bible that hasn't been severely edited, there may not be one that's as inconsistent in its revisions as Luke. Today, we know Luke is actually an amalgamation of the Western and the Alexandrian versions of the text. To further complicate matters, a third version of Luke exists that was written by a 2nd-century heretic who made his own version of Luke that somehow got mixed into the scripture.
The Apocrypha Bridge The Years Between The Testaments
The Apocrypha are a collection of books and stories written in the years between the completion of the Old Testament and the first books of the New Testament. Those writings have enough religious value that scholars felt they deserved a place in canon. For various reasons, these were left or cut out of the Bible in order to preserve a narrative or consistent values.
Parts of the Apocrypha have popped in and out of versions of the Bible since 405 CE, but the 1455 Gutenberg Bible is considered to be the first printing of the book to include the chapters mixed into the text. It wasn't until 1534 that Martin Luther printed a version of the book with a separate section for the Apocrypha, thus acknowledging the politicization of the religious texts and giving believers a chance to find new stories of fulfillment.
The largest impact of the Apocrypha may be a verse from the Book of Esdras, which Columbus said inspired him to journey across the Atlantic. "Six parts of the earth are habitable, and the seventh is covered in water."
