For centuries the leadership of the dominant Christian Church, the Catholic Church, insisted that the common people couldn't be trusted to even read The Bible, let alone understand it. They reserved that privilege for themselves, not permitting Bibles to be printed in any language except Latin, a language which no one spoke any longer. People were executed for translating The Bible into the local vernacular. Things changed when the Protestant Reformation started in the Sixteenth Century. The ostensive goals of the Reformation were twofold: to facilitate translation of The Bible into the local vernaculars — English, German, etc., — and to promote the idea that it was the text of The Bible itself, scripture alone, (sola scriptura) and not church hierarchy, that determined Christian doctrine and practice. On the first point it was successful, on the second, it's a mixed record.
There's a belief among many people that "the patriarchy", or some other conspiracy, "changed" The Bible in order to advance their own viewpoints and prejudices. There's some truth in that, but only some, it's not that simple. For several hundred years there was no "The Bible". As I discussed in the article about Other Christianities, there were several competing versions of Christianity as Jesus' message spread throughout the Roman world and beyond. Each of these "Christianities" developed their own leadership hierarchy, including the group that evolved into the Catholic/Orthodox Church. They each thought (or at least claimed) that they were the only ones who had faithfully passed on Jesus' teachings. In some cities the different sects competed for members, in others one Christianity predominated. One, the Catholic/Orthodox Church, got big and widespread enough, and was the dominant form of Christianity in the two capitols of the Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople.
Most of these sects, as far as we know, wrote gospels, epistles, treatises, apocalypses, and maybe even graphic novels, to bolster their version of what Jesus taught. Most of them were attributed to the original apostles since claiming such authorship tended to make them appear more authoritative. A lot of them, including the writings that made their way into The Bible, contain rebuttals of competing doctrines and attacks against competing prophets and teachers. Some writings couldn't definitively be traced back to any specific group, but were used more broadly. It wasn't until Marcion, the founder of one of the Christianities that has not survived until present day, put together his own canon of scripture that the dominant group attempted their own.
Marcion's canon contained one gospel, The Gospel of the Lord, an edited and shortened version of the Gospel of Luke. It also contained edited versions of ten of the Pauline Epistles: Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, First and Second Thessalonians, Laodiceans (which may have been Ephesians under a different name), Colossians, Philemon and Philippians. But not Hebrews, Titus, or First and Second Timothy, which are all considered forgeries. Catholic/Orthodox leaders had over time begun to use most of the books that now make up The Bible, but it wasn't until 393 CE that the current 27 book canon was made official, although the Codex Vaticanus, which was printed in 350 CE has the complete canon.
Were some books "taken out" that espoused ideas like the equality of women or fringe ideas about spirituality? No, because there wasn't anything to take them out of yet. However it's indisputable that the Catholic/Orthodox Church Council made deliberate decisions to include or exclude writings that they didn't think aligned with the doctrines that had evolved over three centuries. From that point on, other than the books that we know as the Apocrypha, nothing was removed from The Bible. (The Apocryphal books were removed from the Old Testament) And that's the way it remained for another 1200 years.
Now we finally get to sola scriptura.
The Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned earlier, had two main goals. Translating The Bible into the languages of the people was accomplished. But the reason for that was so that Christians would no longer be dependent upon church leaders, upon priests and popes, to tell them what The Bible said, to decide for everybody what God's will was. In theory, it succeeded at that as well. (A third aspect was the fact that European monarchs now had the option of disentangling themselves from The Catholic Church) But did it really succeed, at least in the way the reformers thought?
Indisputably we have The Bible available in virtually every language on Earth. Any literate person can pick it up and read it. Bible study aids are available to assist in comparing to the original languages. No one has to depend on the priests and popes. But do we really rely upon sola scriptura, scripture alone? I would argue that we don't. Foundational to my opinion is that the scriptura that we have available to us has been filtered through, first, the people who wrote the gospels and epistles in the first place. The very earliest is the first Pauline Epistle to the Thessalonians, written around 20 years after Jesus' death. You could argue, I suppose that Paul and the anonymous and pseudonymous authors of the rest of the New Testament were inspired by God, but as an agnostic, I don't but it. It's their opinion. Next, the men who decided what writings would comprise The Bible are an additional filter. Who knows if they left out inspired writings or included fraudulent ones? And modern day Protestants might be surprised that the scripture that they should alone depend on was decided upon by the Catholic Church which they think is unbiblical! During Luther's time there was spirited debate about whether several canonical books should be removed. It is well known among biblical scholars that several of the epistles attributed to Paul are in fact forgeries and were written by an unknown author or authors. It's not a secret that copyists made changes to the originals. Translators, no matter how diligent, add another layer of doubt. How can we say whether what we have today faithfully represents the originals, or even if those originals represent the hypothetical "God's will"?
We can't.
The whole concept of sola scriptura is based on the false assumption that we can easily determine what God wanted to get across if only we could read it ourselves in an accurate translation.
If that were so, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations based on the same text.
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