Wasn't the Bible just a game of telephone?

You've probably played telephone: one person whispers a sentence down a line, and by the end it's nonsense. Some people assume the Bible worked the same way.

But telephone has one chain and no way to check. The New Testament was copied in many places at once, by many hands, and thousands of those copies survive. When copies from different regions agree, we can be confident about the original. When they differ, scholars can usually see where and why.

What the differences look like

Most differences are spelling, word order, or a skipped word. A small number are meaningful, and good Bibles note them in the margins. None of them changes a core teaching of the Christian faith.

A fair question to keep asking

An accurate copy doesn't automatically mean the message is true. That is a separate question, and a good one. But you can be confident that what you read is very close to what was first written.