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“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” (Geisler
               and Nix, p. 382).

               F. F.  Bruce said, “The new evidence confirms what we had already good reason to believe—that the
               Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the
               utmost fidelity” (F. F. Bruce, Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 61-62).

                                                                                             nd
               We have in excess of 5,600 ancient manuscripts of the Bible some dating back to the 2  century, 10,000
               Latin manuscripts, and 9.300 manuscripts in various ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic,
               Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian.   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 only 400 variants
               (differences) that affected the sense of the passage, and only 50 of these have doctrinal significance.   By
               comparing the various manuscripts and the age of the manuscripts, we can pretty much see when a
               variant was introduced and why.   This science of comparison is called textual criticism.  It provides for
               us a means to know that the copies of the Bible we have today are 100% reliable, and while we cannot
               say our copies are inerrant or that the very words are inspired, we can say that God’s Word has been
               preserved and we can trust it as reliable.

               We have to remember the inspired words were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  We possess
               translations of those original languages and therefore the words in our translation are not the words
               God originally penned when writing the Scripture.  Scholars seek to carefully select words in our
               language that best reflect the meaning of the original words.

               We will study more about textual criticism in the future in this course.  At this point, we need to
               understand that the copy of the Bible we have today is totally trustworthy.

                                    Are there Errors in the Bible?


















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