Be Convinced That God's "Word Is Truth" - THE BIBLE'S MESSAGE HAS BEEN ACCURATELY PRESERVED-Continue

 Modern scholars have a reliable way to identify errors made by those who copied the Bible text.  To illustrate:  Suppose 100 men are assigned to copy a page of the text by hand. One of the men makes a slight error in his copy.  One way we could detect that error is by comparing his copy with all the others.  Similarly, by comparing a number of Bible manuscripts, scholars are able to identify errors or omissions that one copyist may have made.

Those who copied the Bible manuscripts took pains to do so accurately.  Consider an example that proves this point.  The oldest  complete manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures dates back to 1008 or 1009 C.E. It is called the Leningrad Codex.  In recent times, however, a number of  Bible manuscripts and fragments have been discovered  that are over about 1,000 years older than the Leningrad Codex.  Someone might think that after those manuscripts were copied and recopied over a period of 1,000  years, the text of the Leningrad Codex would bear little resemblance to the text of those older manuscripts.  Yet, that is not the case.  Scholars who compared the earlier manuscripts with the later ones found that despite some relatively slight variations in wording, the substance of the Bible's message was accurately preserved.

Next time: Be Convinced That God's "Word Is Truth" - THE BIBLE'S MESSAGE HAS BEEN ACCURATELY PRESERVED - Conclusion

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