People claim that the bible has been edited multiple times. At what points in history was the bible edited? Do we have any earlier manuscripts which prove that the bible was edited?

by CorpusHermetica
LegalAction

I'm not sure I understand your question. Every translation of the Bible necessarily has an editor. The NIV I just grabbed off my shelf, for instance, had a Committee on Bible Translation and a number of Intermittent Intermediary (fucking autocorrect) Intermediate (2nd attempt; godfuckingdamnit) Editorial Committees and a final General Editorial Committee.

The reason for such a complex editorial process for producing a new translation (this one was begun in 1966 and completed in 1978, or at least that's the date of the preface) is that we have far, far more manuscripts of the Bible, whole or partial, than any other work from the ancient world. These manuscripts contain something on the scale of tens of thousands of divergent readings, most of which are only differences of spelling, but some are serious omissions or additions, and some divergent readings substantially change the meaning of the sentence.

The first task in any translation project is to determine which readings are correct, so the translator will know what to translate. That process is called "textual criticism," and I've written about it before here. This is the same process we use to establish the text of any ancient work, and even some modern works. The autobiography of Samuel Clemens, which was published something like a decade ago, had four divergent manuscripts which the editors considered while they constructed the text they published.

Usually, the "editor" of a published translation is the person or people that choose which readings to use, and often this person is the same as the translator. In the case of my NIV, the different editorial boards were considering different English translations with constant reference to the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts; the preface doesn't describe how the text of the original language was selected.

There will be a parallel editorial system with any published translation of the Bible (if even a single person is both editor and translator), going back to St. Jerome.

If you mean "edited" in some sense other than the one I've described, you'll have to explain what you mean.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot. The best introduction to text crit I know is Erhman's Misquoting Jesus. I am sympathetic to Erhman's religious views, but regardless of that, it is flat out the easiest approach for the layperson to text crit I know of.