Was the New Testament tampered with?

When I first started reading the Bible, I made a lot of assumptions. I assumed that the differences between the Gospels were intentional. I assumed that the writers were somehow directly connected to Jesus, either as disciples, or as friends of his disciples. I assumed that the Bible was "the inspired Word of God" and that fact alone meant that it was a holy document, impervious to tampering. Now into my fourth decade of life, many of those assumptions have been corrected. But the one that makes me the most angry is that assumption about the tampering and revising of the Gospels. As a writer, nothing would make me more upset than someone deliberately altering what I had written. I will never fully comprehend how scholars do what they do, but I've recently learned that tampering with the scriptures was commonly done by the early Church.

For instance, in Luke’s Gospel, the author conveys that Jesus’ death was not intended to be a sacrifice that brought about right standing with God as atonement demands, but that Jesus died so that those responsible for his death would feel guilty and be driven to beg God’s forgiveness. Luke never indicates in either his Gospel or the books of Acts that Jesus died “for” you or “for” others or “for” anyone. Luke believed it was God’s grace that saved them, not Jesus’s death. In other words, the event of Jesus’s death was intended to be a prime motivator for people to repent and solicit God’s forgiving nature.

What’s the difference between the two theories you ask? In one scenario a “saving act” is needed to pay the debt and in the other scenario all that is required for forgiveness is one’s desire for it—and often times, not even desire is necessary for the belief is that God is eager to forgive because that is how God is wired. With Luke, there is no debt to be paid, God simply forgives the frowned-upon action. The importance of Jesus’ death is vital for both someone like Paul who believes one way and Luke who believes differently. Unlike Paul, who chooses to tell Jesus’ story by including his willingness to settle the score of our debts, Luke focusses on Jesus as God’s messiah, sent to deliver God’s message of forgiveness by any means necessary—even inspiring learning his message by his execution. Paul, on the other hand, hammers home his insistence that Jesus was sent to die like this and his death only made sense when it was understood that that particular method of death was required by God.

Luke’s different tack on Jesus’s importance must have ruffled feathers with the early Church because in two separate occasions there is evidence that his writing was tampered with. As you may or may not know, Luke is the author of both the Gospel named for him and the Book of Acts (aka The Acts of the Apostles) in the New Testament and this single work in two volumes make up about 30 percent of the New Testament—longer than the letters of Paul combined, and 80 percent as long as Matthew, Mark, and John combined. In short, Luke, whoever he was, was kind of a big deal in antiquity. The early Church had to recognize his importance given the quality and quantity of his writing. That may be why someone altered the words Jesus spoke at his last supper in Luke's chapter 22. In most of our manuscripts the words “given for you” and “shed for you” have been added. Despite the fact that these words are familiar to us because of the words of institution that many of us clergy can recite word for word in our sleep, the language does not represent Luke’s own understanding of Jesus’ death. He never indicates anywhere else in either his Gospel nor the Book of Acts that the death of Jesus was “for you” or that it brings salvation from sin. This isn’t the only instance scholars point out where Luke’s words were modified.

In Acts chapter 8, Luke tells the story of Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunuch who is riding home by chariot, reading a scroll from Isaiah. Phillip and the eunuch become fast friends and when they drive past some water, the eunuch asked Phillip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Next thing we know, the chariot stopped and Phillip baptized the eunuch right then and there—no additional criteria necessary. Now, stop what you’re doing and go find Acts 8:37 and read what it says. What’s that? There is no such thing as Acts 8:37? That’s weird. The reason for the absence of this secret verse is that scholars postulate that when the early Church leaders read Luke's words and saw that there were no list of demands upon the eunuch’s desire to be baptized, they created and inserted some of their own. The addition went something like this: “And Phillip said, ‘if you believe with all your heart that Jesus is Lord, you may.’ And he answered and said, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”’ Whoever added these lines did so because they were likely distraught that there were no restrictions for the eunuch to be baptized! Thankfully, the textual criticism sleuths have called it out and those lines were omitted from most translations as it was clearly not included in the earliest Greek manuscripts.