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There is a sentence printed in many modern Bibles that I suspect most of us barely notice.
It usually appears in tiny writing at the bottom of the page, where publishers apparently assume only the truly determined will venture. Sometimes it says that some manuscripts do not include these words. Elsewhere, it might tell us that other ancient authorities read something slightly different.
For years, I treated those little notes as interesting but largely irrelevant. I was far more interested in the words printed above them. Yet when you stop to think about what they are actually saying, they are rather extraordinary.
Your Bible is openly telling you that not every ancient copy of the Bible says exactly the same thing.
If you have grown up hearing Scripture described as the Word of God, that can initially feel slightly uncomfortable. We might imagine the Bible travelling through history like a perfectly preserved package, passed carefully from one generation to another without anything changing along the way.
The reality is more complicated.
The Bible was copied by human beings, and human beings make mistakes.
Strangely, though, the more I have learned about those mistakes, the less troubling I have found them. In fact, I have begun to think that those tiny footnotes at the bottom of the page reveal something rather reassuring.
They show us that nobody is pretending the mistakes did not happen.
