Page 39 - Apologetics Student Textbook (3 Credits)

substantially superior criteria for affirming the New Testament documents than he does for any other
ancient writing. It is good evidence on which to base the trust in the reliability of the New Testament.
(https://carm.org/manuscript-evidence)

Meticulous care was taken by Jewish Scribes to accurately make copies of the Scriptures. The Jewish
scribes conscientiously sought perfection in the transcription of the text. We know that in the Talmud,
rigid regulations were laid down for making copies of Old Testament texts.

1. The copyist was required to sit in full Jewish dress after a complete bathing.
2. Only a certain kind of ink could be used.
3. Rules governed the spacing of words.
4. No word or letter could be written from memory.
5. Lines and letters were methodically counted.
6. If a manuscript was found to have even one error it was destroyed. (This helps explain why only a few
manuscripts survived.)
7. During the copying process, any two words touching each other warranted destruction of that page,
and the page before it (because it had touched that page).

“This strict set of regulations which governed the early Jewish scribes is a chief factor which guarantees
the accurate transmission of the Old Testament text” (Lightfoot, pp. 97-98).

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have Hebrew manuscripts one thousand years
earlier than the great Masoretic Text manuscripts, enabling them to check on the fidelity of the Hebrew
text. The result of comparative studies reveals that there is a word-for-word identity in more than 95
percent of the cases, and the 5 percent variation consists mostly of slips of the pen and spelling.

99.5% of all the manuscripts agree 100%. That means that the copyists were careful not to change the
text throughout the ages of time. Also, there are really only 400 variants that affected the sense of the
passage, and only 50 of these have doctrinal significance. We have over 5,300 copies ancient
nd
manuscripts, some back to the 2 Century. By comparing the various manuscripts, we can pretty much
see when a variant was introduced and why.

Illustration: If we had 10 people in the room make a copy of a church constitution by hand, then
compared them all, we would find differences, but we won’t find the same differences in all 10 copies.
We can use the majority to check the difference. This science is called Textual Criticism. Translators
today compare various ancient manuscripts and are accurately able to determine when a variant was
introduced and what the original author wrote with a high degree of certainty.

For an interesting video on reliability of Scripture:
Isn’t the Bible Full of Errors? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZp7n3s0d6Q

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