Has the Bible been changed over the centuries?

No - not in any way that has corrupted its message. The "game of telephone" image, in which the text degrades a little with every retelling until it bears no resemblance to the original, misunderstands how manuscript copying actually worked, and the surviving evidence shows close to the opposite. The New Testament survives in over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus tens of thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other early languages - by far the best-attested text of the ancient world.

The "telephone" picture assumes a single chain of copies, each made only from the one before it, with no way to check backward. Real transmission was nothing like that. Copies branched out in many directions and many regions, and earlier manuscripts were never destroyed when newer ones appeared. That means scholars are not stuck at the end of one fragile line; they can lay hundreds of independent copies side by side and compare them. Where they disagree, the disagreement itself usually reveals where and when a slip entered, so the change can be traced and corrected rather than silently passed down.

It would be misleading to pretend the copies are identical - they are not. But what matters is not the number of differences; it is their kind. The vast majority are spelling, word order, and obvious scribal slips; only a small fraction affect meaning at all, and of those, not one core Christian doctrine hangs on a disputed line. Even sceptical text critics grant this point. The Dead Sea Scrolls told the same story for the Old Testament: an Isaiah scroll a thousand years older than our previous copies matched them closely. None of this proves the Bible's claims are true - that is a separate question - but it does answer this one. The text was not corrupted beyond recovery; it was carefully preserved, and we can show our work.