But the copies don't match!

Three copies, one original.

Here's the catch: no two handwritten copies match exactly. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic scholar whose bestseller Misquoting Jesus made the point famous, counts many hundreds of thousands of differences among the New Testament manuscripts. So how can anyone know what the writers first wrote? Line up the copies. Three people copied the same verse by hand, and each one slipped. Can you spot the slips?

Every slip is outvoted, because scribes rarely slipped in the same place. Real scholars do more than count heads: they weigh which copies are oldest and which families they belong to. With more than 5,800 Greek copies, a slip in one stands out against the rest. Most differences are spelling and word order. The few that change the meaning are well known, and many Bibles print them in the footnotes. Look up Romans 5:1: did Paul write “we have peace with God” or “let us have peace”? In Greek, one letter decides it. Ehrman trained under Bruce Metzger, a committed Christian. How far apart would the two of them be on the original text? Ehrman's answer:

He also says his work doesn't stand against Metzger's view that the variants leave the essential Christian beliefs untouched. The words weren't lost in the copying. What Mark wrote is what you can read today: “He has risen! He is not here.”