The Bible-Why So Many? - HAS THE BIBLE BEEN CORRUPTED?

Bible copyists, of course, make mistakes.  But none of those mistakes corrupted the Bible.  "No fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading." -Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts.

Jewish copyists made the fewest mistakes.  "The Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the utmost fidelity." -Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

For example, a scroll Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls is 1,000  years older than the previously available texts. How does it compare with the text we have today?  "Very occasionally, the odd word is added or subtracted." -The Book,  A History of the Bible.

Mistakes-such as transposed letters, words, or phrases-made by less meticulous copyists are now easily identified and corrected.  "There is no body of ancient literature in the word  which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament." -The Books and Parchments. 

"Anxious believers can enormously reassured by the almost exact similarity between even the earliest of the Biblical papyri from Egypt and the text as it survived during its descent through countless scriptoria and printing shops of Europe." - The Book. A History of the Bible. 

So, has the Bible been corrupted?  Emphatically, no!

Next time: To be  determined at a later date

From the jw.org publications