18 Alterations Made to the Bible and its Consequences

18. All scripture is inspired by God, including each and every verse in the Bible is NOT what God’s messengers intended.

One of the most frequently quoted verses cited as proof that the entire contents of the Bible is divinely inspired comes from 2 Timothy. Verse 3:16 reads, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” This is a mistranslation and likely a deliberate one in the King James Version, which was written in part to be the only bible available for use in the Church of England, rendering it, and by extension its leader, the King, infallible and incontrovertible.

The correct translation from the oldest extant copy of 2 Timothy renders the verse in this manner, “All God-breathed scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” By writing that God-breathed scripture – not all scripture – is profitable Paul implies that there is scripture that is not directly the word of God, while some parts of the scripture are. This mistranslation appears in the King James Version and has been altered in later revisions of the bible, which reject the theory that the entire work is the literal word of God, and thus infallible in its teaching, an outrage to some believers in the King James Version.