Is The Bible Trustworthy?

Ready4Eternity

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Since none of the original Bible manuscripts have survived, how do we know that the Bible is reliable?

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The Jewish scribes were devoted to accurately copying the Old Testament scriptures. They guarded against scribal mistakes by intricate counting methods.

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They numbered the letters and words of each book. They counted the number of times a letter was used within each book.

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They counted the middle letter and middle word of each book. They numbered just about anything that could be counted and used these counting systems as a means of error checking.

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The scribes looked upon the sacred text with an almost superstitious reverence. Any manuscript copy with errors or worn out from use were buried.

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Their motive was to ensure that the material upon which the sacred name of God was inscribed was of superb quality.

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Because of their meticulous quality control, the scribes were not concerned about having a paper trail of ancient copies to compare against.

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They considered any manuscript that had been carefully copied and carefully checked to be as authentic as any other manuscript regardless of its age.

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Because the scribes did not retain worn out copies, the oldest Old Testament manuscripts available in modern times dated only as far back as about 900

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AD. However, in 1947, ancient Hebrew manuscripts were discovered in caves near the

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Dead Sea. These manuscripts were at least 1 ,000 years older than any previously known and contained portions of every

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Old Testament book except one. When the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were compared with the newer manuscripts, the textual variations were almost nonexistent.

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Likewise, the New Testament manuscripts have proven to be remarkably accurate. When comparing all the

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Greek manuscripts with each other, the accuracy rate is found to be at 99 .5%.

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The 0 .5 % of textual variations are mostly composed of spelling and grammatical differences.

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Amazingly, these textual variations are so insignificant that they do not alter the message in any meaningful way.

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There are over 10 ,000 manuscript copies of the Old Testament and more than 5 ,600 manuscripts of the

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New Testament with an accuracy that is unrivaled amongst other literature from the ancient world.

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If we compare the number of Bible manuscripts to other ancient literary works, the

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Bible far outweighs them in both quantity and quality. The Bible manuscripts are a superb collection of ancient documents from which our modern