Many peo­ple claim that a cer­tain coun­cil took the teach­ing of rein­car­na­tion out of the Bible. Although the major­i­ty can­not name the spe­cif­ic coun­cil, they most fre­quent­ly refer to the Sec­ond Coun­cil of Con­stan­tino­ple (A.D. 553) and the Coun­cil of Nicaea (A.D. 325).

In real­i­ty, though, at that time there were already many man­u­scripts in exis­tence spread through­out the Roman Empire, which makes it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how some­one could have col­lect­ed all the extant copies in order to have all of them “cor­rect­ed”. Today there are many sur­viv­ing man­u­scripts from the time before the coun­cils, whose text accu­rate­ly cor­re­sponds to the cur­rent­ly accept­ed text of the Bible. (See: “Selec­tion of Ancient Man­u­scripts of the New Tes­ta­ment”)

There are also thou­sands of quo­ta­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment in the writ­ings of the Church Fathers from before the fourth cen­tu­ry, which cor­rob­o­rate the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the text of the Bible.

The two coun­cils’ course of events is well doc­u­ment­ed by his­to­ri­ans, and the records show that the sub­ject of rein­car­na­tion was not addressed at all. Although the teach­ing of pre-exis­tence (the exis­tence of the soul before con­cep­tion) was con­demned by the Sec­ond Coun­cil of Con­stan­tino­ple (AD 553) in response to the teach­ing of Ori­gen, the teach­ing of suc­ces­sive rein­car­na­tions is a sep­a­rate mat­ter and was not dealt with by the coun­cil. While many peo­ple think that Ori­gen believed in rein­car­na­tion, he him­self refutes this teach­ing in his com­men­tary on the Gospel of Matthew (XIII.1): “…In this place it does not appear to me that by Eli­jah the soul is spo­ken of, lest I should fall into the dog­ma of trans­mi­gra­tion¹, which is for­eign to the church of God, and not hand­ed down by the Apos­tles, nor any­where set forth in the Scrip­tures….” Sev­er­al church fathers and ear­ly Chris­t­ian authors con­firm this opin­ion (e.g. Ire­naeus: Against Here­sies 2:33:1–2, Ter­tul­lian: Apol­o­gy 48, Gre­go­ry of Nys­sa: The Mak­ing of Man 28:3, etc.).

If rein­car­na­tion was real­ly tak­en out of the Bible, it is not enough to assume that such pas­sages were delet­ed from the Bible. The New Tes­ta­ment is inter­wo­ven with pas­sages which speak about the fun­da­men­tal Chris­t­ian belief in Jesus’ res­ur­rec­tion and our own res­ur­rec­tion. All these pas­sages refer­ring to the teach­ing of res­ur­rec­tion (e.g. John 5:28–29), the last judg­ment (e.g. 2 Corinthi­ans 5:10; Acts 24:15), eter­nal life and eter­nal con­dem­na­tion (e.g. Matthew 25:46) would have to have been insert­ed, because the teach­ing of the last judg­ment clear­ly con­tra­dicts the idea of repeat­ed rein­car­na­tions, through which peo­ple get a sec­ond, third (and so on) chance.

One pas­sage in par­tic­u­lar (Hebrews 9:27) clear­ly excludes the doc­trine of rein­car­na­tion:

And just as it is appoint­ed for man to die once, and after that comes judge­ment.…

The old­est extant man­u­script con­tain­ing this clear state­ment is Papyrus 46, a doc­u­ment writ­ten in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry AD, long before the Coun­cils of Nicaea and Con­stan­tino­ple. Since the Enlight­en­ment the Bible has ceased to be the exclu­sive priv­i­lege of the cler­gy. Today’s crit­i­cal Bible schol­ar­ship (e.g. arche­ol­o­gy, tex­tu­al stud­ies) would not be at all inter­est­ed in keep­ing silent on rein­car­na­tion if there were even a trace of this teach­ing in the ancient man­u­scripts of the Bible. Addi­tion­al­ly, there are sure­ly many schol­ars who would rel­ish the fame result­ing from such a sen­sa­tion.

The dis­cov­ery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 raised the hopes of many that evi­dence for the belief in rein­car­na­tion would final­ly be unearthed. How­ev­er, the bib­li­cal man­u­scripts found there have been close­ly exam­ined and pub­lished in Eng­lish. They are now pub­licly avail­able to every­one who wants to read them. They com­prise the writ­ings of a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, whose con­cept of the after-life cor­re­sponds to the teach­ing of the Old Tes­ta­ment that phys­i­cal death is final and is the end of life on earth (e.g. 2 Samuel 12:23; 1 Kings 2:1–2; Gen­e­sis 25:8) and that the right­eous will rise and be with God in eter­ni­ty (e.g. Daniel 12:2–3).

Final­ly, we want to encour­age every­one who is search­ing for the truth and is in any doubt regard­ing the authen­tic­i­ty of the Bible, to start read­ing it for your­self with an open heart. We believe and have also per­son­al­ly expe­ri­enced that, if we are open to lis­ten to them, the words of Jesus can touch us very deeply and can shape our life and our way of think­ing.

1. Trans­mi­gra­tion: when the soul or spir­it, after the death of the body, comes back to Earth in a new­born body—a con­cept iden­ti­cal to rein­car­na­tion. ↩