If you put a mitten on the Statue of Liberty, is it still the Statue of Liberty?
How about if you cut off its head and its left foot, and drill holes all through the torch? That comes a lot closer to describing what's been done to the Bible.
In any case, let's backtrack a bit'; this whole argument over alteration begs the question of whether the Bible was EVER the infallible word of God BEFORE any alteration took place. We don't begin with that assumption and demand that it be proven false, not if we have any intellectual integrity. We begin with the assumption that it is a collection of writings reflecting the attitudes and values of the people and times by which and in which it was written, and look for evidence to prove THAT wrong.
There is very little such evidence, in fact. Just about all the books of the Bible (I'll deal with the exceptions momentarily) show internal evidence of having been written by men of the times when we know they were in fact written, without rising in any way above that.
The five books of the Torah reflect a primitive, savage view of God, man, nature, and morality, just as we should expect if they were the product of a primitive, savage people just beginning to settle down to civilized ways. The histories (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1/2 Samuel, 1/2 Kings, 1/2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther) reflect much the same. In all of this we find a God who is similar in nature to the anthropomorphic deities of other cultures of the time, possessing human mental characteristics including human character flaws. He might as well be Zeus raping mortal women or Ares going into bloody frenzies on the battlefield. Many of the Prophets exhibit the same attitudes about God and what God demands; never do they call down the judgments of God for behavior that we, in our modern perspective, would judge to be deserving of it -- not for misrule or cruelty, for instance -- but always for pursuing other religions or other Gods, or for behaving with LESS savagery than God demanded.
In all of the Old Testament, only the Book of Job and some of the Psalms, and to a lesser extent Proverbs, rise above this level of barbarism. The Song of Solomon is wonderful erotic poetry and, taken the right way, can be like a Tantric or Sufi love poem equating the erotic with the spiritual, so in one sense it transcends the vicious savagery of most of the Old Testament as well.
What of the New Testament? Well, the Gospels do depart from this pattern when they quote Jesus (bearing in mind they were written much later in a more civilized context), but often seem to reflect the credulousness of those times and prevailing mythical stories out of other religions when they aren't quoting him. They are in disagreement with one another about many points, too, which suggests rather less than divine origin.
The Acts of the Apostles, like the histories from the Old Testament, reflects the attitudes, prejudices, and beliefs of the times in which it was written, in this case the early Roman Empire, which makes it a big improvement over the Old Testament histories (which coldly justified genocide on more than one occasion). But there is nothing here to suggest divine origin; the encounter with Simon Magus is particularly suspect, as is the story of Paul's conversion.
As for the Apostolic letters, they reflect advice from religious leaders, some of it wise, some of it foolish, all of it within the parameters of mortal men. Again, no internal evidence of any but human origin.
And finally there's the Book of Revelations, a wild, whirling vision of weirdness barely coherent in its predictions and lending itself to all kinds of less-than-sacred purposes, such as the identification of whoever one disapproves of with the Great Beast (I believe the Pope has been the most popular candidate).
The fact is, the claim that this mish-mash and muddle of the sublime, the preposterous, and the chilling is all of it the infallible word of God is so crazy that it's hard to see how anyone ever believed it. I can only attribute it to the power of the myth of Hell, and the fact that many Christians are afraid to let themselves question.
