Lesson 7: The Writing of Many Books – Selected Scripture

If you need a workbook, we're going through a series of lessons in adult Sunday school class called God Wrote a Book. So if you need your workbook, or if you need a workbook because you don't have one, you can talk to Marsha.

She's at the back. She's passing them out, I think, if you need an extra one. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer before we get started. My Father, we are so grateful to you that you have given us this place to meet, that you have gathered us here together, that we have the freedom to learn these things, to gather together and worship and serve you.

We're thankful for that, and we're thankful for your word, which you have preserved for us, and we pray that today, in our study of these things, that you would help us to see and understand and appreciate how it is that you have preserved your word, given it to us, and then preserved it for us.

May you increase our confidence in the written word of God and our love for it and our understanding of it today through our time here, we pray in Christ's name, amen. All right, we're lesson seven, the writing of many books.

Did you have a question? Oh, thought I heard somebody say something. All right, lesson seven, the writing of many books. In this lesson, we're gonna learn about how New Testament books came to be written and then circulated, and how documents were copied and transmitted.

And I think we should be able to get through all of lesson seven today, Lord willing. So we wanna talk, first of all, about the writing of books and the occasions that books were written. Often, New Testament books, and I'm just gonna be talking about New Testament books here for a moment, they were written usually to address certain needs or to answer questions or to communicate some truth.

So, for instance, Luke writes at the beginning of his gospel that he had spent time researching these things and showing them to be true and eyewitness testimony, and he writes to make a theological argument to Theophilus.

In the book of Acts, Luke picks up the pen again to continue what he wrote in Luke to show all the things that Jesus continued to do and to teach. In the book of Luke, all the things that Jesus began to do and teach, in the book of Acts, all the things that Jesus continued to do and teach through his apostles then.

And so there are various reasons why different New Testament books were written, and understanding the teaching or the meaning of any passage in any of those books requires some understanding of the purpose that those books were written, which is why we always begin a study of a New Testament book by a little bit of background, sort of a sermon to introduce who's the author and why was it written and when was it written and to whom was it written.

And so various New Testament books had different purposes. The book of Galatians was written to correct false doctrines. The book of Ephesians was a cyclical letter written to various churches intended to be generic and not addressed to any specific church but simply circulated amongst probably the churches of Asia Minor, which would have included Ephesus and Pergamum and Thyatira and some of those churches.

The book of Philippians was a thank you letter from the Apostle Paul to the church at Philippi for supporting him and for encouraging him and sending Epaphroditus to minister to his needs. The book of Colossians was intended to answer the Gnostic heresy.

The book of Romans to explain the gospel and prepare the way for Paul's visit. The book of First Corinthians to correct the practices of a church and answer their questions. Second Corinthians was written to defend his apostleship.

Paul wrote it to defend his apostleship and his apostolic authority against those who are attacking him and slandering him. And the book of Philemon was simply a personal letter to return a slave to his master and appeal for kindness for that master.

So each Old Testament and New Testament book had an occasion for its writing. What is magnificent is how each one of those books with its unique purpose and its unique audience, intended audience, and its unique time and occasion of writing could all end up being gathered together and collected together into what we have as the New Testament.

It's quite a feat, if it were. It's quite a feat that God has accomplished in collecting those books together as they are and handing them to us. Even a book like Philemon, written from Paul to Philemon, carried by Onesimus.

So initially there were three people who were privy to that letter. Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus. That's it. And now, because of that one personal letter written to another person, carried by a third party, today we benefit from that book and we have it in our canon.

It's quite magnificent that God would find a way to preserve that for us and that it wouldn't be lost to human history. Especially considering how many personal letters and personal correspondences have been lost in ancient history, right?

It's quite magnificent that we have what we do. And of course, we have what we do because God has promised to preserve what he intended for his people to have today. So let's talk for a moment about the circulation of books.

This is under number two. The church recognized apostolic authority and followed their doctrine. You see that in Acts chapter two, verse 42. They, that is the early disciples, were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Letters and books, letter B, letters and books were read by Christians in the public assembly. And what I want you to see now is how it is that New Testament books came to be written and then came to be circulated.

There's a theology behind why it is that early Christians circulated the books of the New Testament and copied them. And I want you to see what that theology is and I want you to see it from the pages of the New Testament itself.

So letters and books were read by Christians in the public assembly. Look at 1 Timothy 4 .13. Do you have these ones in your notes, by the way? Are these references in your notes?

Okay.

1 Timothy 4 .13, until I come, give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhortation and to teaching. 1 Thessalonians 5 .27. I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren.

Now, Paul says to Timothy, give attention to the public reading of scripture. And then he says, concerning his own writings, I want you to publicly read this to the congregation. What would that tell you about Paul's view of his own writings?

He regarded them as what?

As scripture.

Now, if I left for a period of time and I was not here and one of the other elders was filling in for me and I wrote a letter back to the entire church and I said, look, I command you to have this letter read to all the brethren during the worship service on a Sunday morning.

What would that say about me? That I'm no longer fit to be a pastor of a church, right? That I somehow regard my own writing to the congregation as that authoritative, that it needs to occupy the central focus of a worship service in the church of God?

That's egomaniacal? Or Paul viewed his own writing as authoritative and on par with scripture? 2 Thessalonians 3 .14, if anyone does not obey our instructions in this letter, take special note of that person, do not associate with him so that he will be put to shame.

Paul expected his commands to be obeyed.

Why?

Because he was an apostle who carried apostolic authority and what he wrote he considered to be authoritative. Titus 2 .15, these things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you.

Paul encouraged Titus to have his words used to speak and exhort and reprove the people in that church in the island of Crete with all authority, indicating that, I mean, that's exactly what Paul says, that all scripture is sufficient for those things in 2 Timothy 3, that this is what scripture is given for, the reproving of people.

Well, then he talks about his own letter being used to exhort and to reprove people. Paul viewed his own writings on par with scripture. All right, letter C. Letters and books by apostles were recognized as scripture.

And I just want you to notice here, we're gonna go through this rather quickly. Number one, Paul claimed divine inspiration for his own writings, 1 Corinthians 14 .37. If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord's commandment.

So there's Paul claiming divine authority for his own writings, his own apostolic writings. Number two, apostolic writings carried divine authority in the church. 2 Peter 3 .2 says that you should remember the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken by your apostles.

Notice how Peter puts the commandments of the apostles on par with the writings of the holy prophets. Number three, Peter recognized Paul's epistles as scripture, 2 Peter 3 .15 and 16. And regard the patience of our Lord as salvation just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you as in all his letters, speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort as they do also the rest of scriptures to their own destructions.

Notice what Peter says there. Talks about Paul's writings and he says the wicked distort them just like they do the rest of scriptures. Meaning that Peter viewed Paul's writings as scripture. Number four, letters and books were gathered into collections.

Peter mentions Paul's letters. So it seems that Peter at least knew of multiple letters that Paul had written and that these letters were regarded, Paul's letters were regarded as scripture in the early church and Paul's letters were regarded as scripture by the other apostles.

So let me ask you a question. Did the apostles understand that what they were writing was holy scripture? Yes or no?

They did.

Now here's why they would have expected that. If there had been an old covenant and the giving of that old covenant was accompanied by the giving of revelation to explain the significance of that old covenant and now that old covenant has passed away and God has now instituted or brought to bear, brought into being, looking for the right words there.

God has now, we're in the new covenant, let's put it that way. Now that we're in the new covenant and the new covenant has come, what would we expect? If the old covenant was accompanied by old covenant writings, we would expect some instructions and explanations of the new covenant, wouldn't we?

And the apostles were promised that the spirit of God would be active in their writing and in their understanding and their explanation of things, that's John chapter 16. The apostles had every reason to expect that and the apostles had every reason to expect that they, as the messengers of Christ with the ability to do signs and wonders, would themselves be the instruments of divine revelation.

And that doesn't mean that they weren't humble, it doesn't mean that they were egomaniacal, it simply means that they understood their calling in the plan of God was to be the vehicles through which divine revelation would come connected to the new covenant.

And so they expected the Christians in the early church to regard their writings as apostolic, as authoritative, as divine revelation, and to treat them as such. And so the early Christians did that. And so number five, letters and books were circulated widely, as widely and as quickly as possible, Colossians 4, 16, when this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans and you for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.

So there's an instruction from the apostle Paul that when this letter is read among you, again, he's assuming that this letter's going to be read in the church, that when this letter's read among you, you also find the one that I sent to the Laodicean church, and you get that letter and may have that one read in your assembly as well.

The Laodicean letter, most people believe, was the book of Ephesians. That that was the one that was considered the Laodicean letter, what we call a general epistle, just sort of written without a particular church in mind, circulated widely amongst many churches.

Ephesians, the book of Ephesians has all the hallmarks of that. So they collected the apostles' writings into collections. They regarded them as authoritative and divinely given. They regarded them as the word of God and used them as the word of God.

Regarded the apostles as instruments of divine revelation and as authoritative men, whose writings should be read in the early church, and then they followed the instruction to circulate these writings, even amongst the first century.

Now, we've gathered all of that just from some of the references here in the New Testament text themselves, right? So they collected these writings and they circulated these writings. So here's what that would look like in kind of a scenario.

Let's say a book was written in the common language, Koine Greek, and let's say it is the book of Ephesians. What do Christians do with writings that they regard to be scripture? What do we do with that?

We cherish it. We wanna read it. We wanna understand it. We wanna memorize it. We wanna teach from it. We want everybody to have access to it, right? This is how Christians view the word of God. We want everybody to memorize it.

We want everybody's lives to be changed by it. We want the word of God to have as public a proclamation and exposure as we possibly can. We don't hide it in a corner. We don't put it in the basement of a monastery and hide it away from people.

We want it out. We want it exposed to people so they can read it and have their lives transformed by it. That's how Christians view scripture. That's how Christians view scripture today. That's how Christians viewed scripture in the early church.

So books would be read and reread and circulated quickly and widely, and they would be copied with a fervency because they were treated as scripture and regarded as scripture, those early New Testament writings.

So you can imagine that in a city like Ephesus, for instance, that, and Ephesus was a major commercial center, imagine that you're sitting, imagine that you are a member of the church at Ephesus, and it's the first century.

And last week at some point, we received a letter from the Apostle Paul. So what are we going to do with that letter? Well, whatever I've been preaching from, we're gonna set that aside for this Sunday, and we're gonna read publicly the Apostle Paul's letter to us, the Ephesian church.

So we're gonna read that publicly this morning. Now imagine that being a commercial center, there are Christians traveling from all over the Roman Empire, and that on this particular Sunday, just like probably any other Sunday, there was a visitor or two in the congregation.

And I stand up and I read the letter to our church. Brand new from the Apostle Paul, attention, here it is. We just got this. I read through the Ephesian letter, maybe a few words of introduction, a few words of explanation here and there, a few words of conclusion, a closing prayer, and we're done for the day.

And then this visitor who was there says, hey, back in our church, we don't have that writing from Paul, and we could really use that. There's some good stuff in there about election and marriage and spiritual warfare and everything.

Our church could really use to hear that. Do you mind if while I'm here this week doing my business, if I took an opportunity to sit down and just copy that letter so I could bring that back to my home church with me?

And then what would I say?

No?

No, I'd say, yeah, that's a great idea. In fact, we've got Paul's letter to the Corinthians here as well, and a couple that he wrote to the Thessalonian church. Would you like to see those as well? Thessalonian letters?

There is a Thessalonian letter? Wow, yeah, I'd love to copy those if I can too. So I'd have him into my office and give him the papyrus or the parchment and a quill and some ink and say, go at it. And he would make copies of these letters for him to take back to his own church.

And that visitor might even say, look, I've got a copy of Paul's letter to the, I'm trying to come up with one that's textually relevant. I got a copy of Paul's letter to the, Colossians wasn't written.

Huh?

Philippians wasn't written by that time either. Okay, in my imaginary center, I got Paul's letter to the Galatians. Let's say the Galatians, there we go, pull that one out. I got a copy of Paul's letter to the Galatians.

I've been carrying that around with me. Do you guys have Paul's copy of the Galatians? No, I don't have a copy of Paul's letter to the Galatians. Okay, well, you let me do the one to Ephesians and I'll let you copy Galatians.

And we would sit down and we would have a little copying session there to copy these manuscripts. And of course we would do it by hand, but I wouldn't want to make a copy of what he had. He wouldn't want to make a copy of what I had.

And that's how those early manuscripts were copied and distributed widely. Yes, Thomas. Say it again, if he didn't have the letter, how would they know whether that was scripture or not? And we'll get into that actually in a later session.

It has to do with, in fact, we're gonna talk about a little bit later in this morning as well. It has, if they knew that the letter came from an apostle and they knew that the letter was accepted as scripture in regard to scripture because it came from an apostle, if they could certify those two things, they would have embraced it as scripture and considered it as such.

The only thing that the early church would have been concerned about, sorry, not the only thing, the primary thing that the early church would have been concerned about was was this written by an apostle?

And if this is written by an apostle and contains apostolic instruction, then I want a copy of it for our church to read as well. That's what they would have been concerned with. Good question. So you can see the letters, how letters and how New Testament documents letters would have been widely circulated, quickly circulated and quickly copied.

And you can also see how major cities, big cities with lots of traffic would have been the places where larger collections of manuscripts would have begun to gather because you had people from all over the Roman Empire who would be traveling to these cities and they would have access then to these ever-growing collections of apostolic documents before they would leave and go back to their church.

And they might go back to their church and say, hey, when I was in Athens, they had seven of Paul's epistles there in Athens and a gospel from the guy named Mark who traveled with the apostle Peter. It's Peter's gospel.

Well, and this would have happened not just for Paul's letters, but Peter's letters, for John's letters, for the gospels, for the book of Acts, et cetera. Those documents which were regarded as scripture were circulated widely, they were collected into collections and the church valued them as scripture.

And so as people came and went, you can see the motive behind that to quickly duplicate these things and spread them wide as quickly and as widely as they possibly could because Christians had a hunger for apostolic writings because they regarded it as scripture.

All right, are there any questions about that before we move on?

Yes.

How did they verify authenticity? I think that there probably would have been more than one way to do that. My suspicion is that it would have been something that was accepted widely amongst various churches.

For instance, the church at Philippi would have known that that letter came from Paul because it would have come, this is why I think Paul's letters were sent with messengers. Many of his letters were sent by messengers.

You'll notice you read through 1 Corinthians and Philippians, Philippians, 1 Corinthians, not Ephesians, I'm thinking through the other ones. They were sent at the hands of Titus or Timothy or Epaphroditus or, one guy's name starts with A.

Anyway, there were various messengers that the apostles had that would send, that would accompany their documents and certify this came from Paul. So it wouldn't have to be necessarily Paul that would deliver it, but if you were, I mean, look, if we knew of a church in Segal that had a copy of one of Paul's epistles, we might even send an emissary there to make sure that if that's genuine, they knew that it came from Paul, we would take their word for it and we would want somebody to go there, make us a copy and bring it back to our church.

And so that's how things could be certified because there was no way of, there's no obviously stamp of authentic certification there. Paul made mention of ways that he would certify his own writings. He would talk about the large letters with which I've written to you and an amanuensis, somebody who would write on his behalf and he would certify that or stamp it with his own seal of authenticity.

So the churches would know what came from Paul and then those churches would bear testimony to what came from Paul. And that's a good question because there were documents that Paul makes mention of in, is it 2 Thessalonians or 1 Thessalonians?

Do not be disturbed as if by a letter from us that the coming of the Lord has already come. There was somebody circulating letters in the hands or supposedly coming from Paul, pseudo epistles that supposedly came from Paul that he warned the churches about.

And there were ways that the end church, Paul alludes to this with ways that he would sign his own letters. There were ways for churches to understand what came from an apostle and what didn't. And Paul obviously wanted to guard the authenticity and the integrity of his own writings.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about the ways and how do you know that something is canonical? How did the early church decide or did they decide what was scripture and what wasn't? I'll give you a little hint.

The early church did not decide what books were scripture. The early church discovered what books were scripture. God writing it decided which books were scripture. The task of the early church was not to decide which ones we're gonna regard as scripture but to discover which ones God had actually written.

There's a process behind that. And once you understand what that process was, of course, the Da Vinci Code and all the other nonsense goes right out the window in terms of who determined what books we have and what books we don't.

Yeah, was there a question over here?

Yeah, yeah.

And for those of you who couldn't hear, she was just saying the spirit of God obviously was present at that time. Certifying and indicating which books would have been scripture, yeah. All right, so there's an objection that some critics raise and this is letter E.

They would say that not all Christians recognized all of the books of the New Testament as scripture from the beginning. That's true. Not all Christians would have recognized all 27 books of the New Testament as scripture from the beginning.

I'm gonna shock you, it took a bit of time before 2nd and 3rd John and Hebrews and Revelation were regarded widely as scripture. And by some time, I'm not talking about a couple weeks, talking about decades, even 100 years before it was widely accepted.

Does that disturb you?

It shouldn't.

We're used to things happening just like this, right? If that book is not regarded as scripture today, right now, I can't wait for that to happen. We're people who pace back and forth in front of our microwaves because our water's not heating up fast enough.

We want everything instant. Well, in the ancient world, things like that didn't happen instantaneously. There was no internet that you went to to find an authorized list of books. So it did take a little bit of time for Christians to recognize all the 27 books on a wide scale, all 27 books, that we today affirm as our New Testament canon.

Do you have a question? Was there more controversy over the book of James than other, it would depend on what section of the church you were in, not in the Western or the Eastern church, which would have been Jerusalem and the areas around where James ministered.

That wouldn't have been as controversial. But in the Western church, probably a little bit more controversy over that one in the early church. Yeah, Hebrews was another one. Why wouldn't we, why wouldn't, didn't they immediately recognize the book of Hebrews, do you think?

Why do you think there was some questions over the book of Hebrews for a while? There's no author, we don't know who wrote it, right? That's a pretty big hangup.

We don't know who wrote that.

Now, do you doubt that Hebrews is scripture? Going through it and reading it, do you doubt it? You see the work of the Spirit of God all over those pages, I hope. If I'm doing my job right, you're seeing the work of the Spirit of God on every page of the book of Hebrews.

But it would take a little while for all Christians to accept that. Even some of the smaller, shorter books whose authenticity might have been questioned early on, like 2nd and 3rd John. Can you understand why some books might have, some books even whose author, today we understand and recognize why some books would have taken longer to be recognized as scripture in other parts of the Roman Empire?

Wouldn't it have to do with the wideness and the rapidity with which they were circulated, copied and circulated? Imagine that you're, say, 150 AD, and you're a Christian in Spain, and it's 150 AD, and an epistle shows up, and we call this 3rd John.

And you've never seen this before. Your dad did not know that 3rd John existed. In fact, your grandfather did not know that 3rd John existed, because 3rd John is just now reaching the westernmost parts of the Roman Empire.

What are you gonna do with 3rd John? Accept it as scripture? Would you immediately accept it as scripture, or would you have some questions that you would want to have answered, right? So you can understand why it is that some of these books took time to be embraced universally across the early church.

All right, number three, big Roman number three, the copying of books. There was the need for copies. Originals needed to be replaced from much use. Some were very well used before being copied, and some were copied quickly after being received.

Other manuscripts might have never been copied. You might have had a manuscript that was circulated and widely circulated and never ended up getting copied for one reason or another and then ended up being destroyed or burned in a Roman persecution for some reason.

Some manuscripts had few copies made from them. Other manuscripts had multiple copies made from them. And by the way, when we talk about the discipline of lower criticism, that is the discipline of looking at ancient manuscripts and determining which type of copying trains does this manuscript come from.

Was this a manuscript that is 3rd or 4th generation, or is it a 10th generation manuscript, or is it really close to the original? Those men who do that, those scholars who handle those ancient manuscripts and determine those things, that's what we call lower criticism.

And it's a good discipline and one that is healthy for the early church. Higher criticism is not healthy. Higher criticism is, well, we just don't think Paul wrote 2 Timothy. That's a higher critical view.

It's sort of the liberal theology. Lower criticism is the act of taking these manuscripts and saying, look, we think that these two manuscripts here might have come from this other manuscript, and they may have been copied in such and such a location and used widely and probably never copied again, or they became the grandfather of a whole bunch of other manuscripts.

That's the discipline of lower criticism. Now, I hope this doesn't shock you, but we have no original manuscripts in our possession. No original manuscripts in our possession. Does that disturb you? We do not have the actual piece of paper that the Apostle Paul wrote on.

With his sweat, his tears, his DNA on it, his handwriting, we do not have the original copy of any one of Paul's letters. The actual piece of paper.

Yeah, Garrett.

Yeah, we refer to those as the autographs, or we even call them the original autographs. Yeah, so that's a better phrase for it. We do not have any of the original autographs. We have, in fact, it's not just true of the New Testament, that's true of all ancient documents.

We don't have the original autograph of Homer or Caesar or Pliny or any of those ancient authors. We don't have the original autographs of any of those. And we don't think we need the original autographs, and I'll show you why here in a moment.

Number four, the process of copying. The process of copying. The first letter A is the Talmudist period. It's between AD 100 and 500. I wanna describe to you, I'm gonna read to you here the discipline of copying ancient manuscripts that the Talmudists used.

The Old Testament was copied by Talmudists during this period of 100 to 500 AD, and they had laid down strict guidelines for the copying of manuscripts. Now, I'm gonna read this to you. This comes from Norm Geisler's and Nix's book, From God to Us, it's called.

And here's what they describe as the guidelines for the copying of ancient manuscripts. Now, I want you to imagine you're a Jewish scribe. Your job is to make a copy of the book of Isaiah or the first five books of Moses.

That's your job for this month or this year, I guess, if you're copying the first five books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. It's gonna be your task for this year is to copy those five books.

Here are the guidelines for that. A synagogue scroll must be written on the skins of clean animals, prepared for the particular use of the synagogue by a Jew. These must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals, and every skin must contain a certain number of columns equal throughout the entire codex.

I wanna stop there for a second. Listen, already they have described the type of skins to be used, right? No pig skin, no writing manuscripts on footballs. These had to be clean animals. The skins had to come from clean animals.

The skins had to be prepared by a Jew, and they had to be fastened together in a codex. Remember, we're talking about a book that's bound together by strings in a binding. They had to be fastened together with strings, that is, strips of skin taken from clean animals.

Every skin must contain a certain number of columns equal throughout the entire codex. The length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than 60 lines, and the breadth must consist of 30 letters.

So remember we talked about how they were justified on the right hand and the side hand? It has to be 30 letters across in each of these columns. The whole copy must be first lined, and if three words are written without a line, it is worthless, and so they would scrap the document.

They considered it worthless. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other color, and be prepared according to a definite recipe. An authentic copy must be exemplar from which the transcriber ought not, in the least, to deviate.

The original must be exemplar, it must be a perfect, the original must have no doubt as to what is written there. In other words, it can't be missing pages, it can't be missing lines, it can't be creased in the middle so you can't read down the middle of the page.

The original copy from which you were copying had to be in fantastic condition. That was a requirement. No word or letter, not even a yod, must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him.

Between every consonant, the space of a hair or a thread must intervene. Between every new parsha or section, the breadth of nine consonants, and between every book, three lines. The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line, but the rest need not do so.

So the fifth book of Moses had to terminate with the full line, had to be all 30 letters across the bottom of it. These are the guidelines for copying scripture. Besides this, the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, not begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink, and should a king address him while writing that name, he must take no notice of him.

Why would they not want the name of God to be written with a pen newly dipped in ink? It would make a blob at the beginning of the word, right? So you had to be so fastidious, they had to be so fastidious in copying those manuscripts that when they started the name of God, they had to pace themselves in such a way that they didn't need to dip their pen freshly in ink when they started that name.

So you can imagine how slowly it would take to make these copies when you have gone through that much detail. The next was the Masoretic Period, that's between 500 and 900. M-A-S-O-R-E-T-I-C, the Masoretic Period.

Masorets treated the text with the greatest imaginable reverence and devised a complicated system to safeguard against scribal slips and errors. Sir Frederick Kenyon, who's an expert on ancient manuscripts, he writes this, quote, imagine doing this, but listen to this.

Quote, besides recording varieties of reading, tradition, and conjecture, the Masorets undertook a number of calculations which do not enter into the ordinary sphere of textual criticism. They numbered the verses, words, and letters of every book.

They calculated the middle word and the middle letter of each. They enumerated verses which contained all the letters of the alphabet or a certain number of them, and so on. These trivialities, as we might rightly consider them, had the effect of securing minute attention to the precise transmission of the text, and they are but an excessive manifestation of a respect for the sacred scriptures, which in itself deserve nothing but praise.