Einstein Letter Critical of Religion To Be Auctioned On EBay

The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.

Looking at the things politicians do today, when it's easier to fact-check and catch them out than ever before, I find it completely believable that people just... mis-copied parts of the bible to justify whatever they felt like doing. It's not like people in the year 900 were going to get on Facebook and compare notes with people in other countries. They'd probably never touched a copy of the Bible. Probably couldn't read. A man with a bible could tell people it said anything. Make some changes in his copy, noone would ever know.

You are way wrong on this.

Transmission [bible.org]

B. The Masoretes

The Masoretic scribes (A.D. 500-1000) in charge of the Old Testament manuscript copying used a very meticulous system of transcription and had a deep reverence for the text. God used their almost obsessive respect for the text to preserve the text?s accuracy. They had specific rules on the type of ink and the quality and size of parchment sheets. No individual letter could be written down without having looked back at the copy in front of them. The scribe could not write God?s name with a newly dipped pen (lest it blotch) and even if the king should address him, while writing God?s name, he should take no notice of him. They were so meticulous that they counted all the paragraphs, words and even letters, so they could know by counting, if they had done it perfectly. They knew the middle letter of each book so they could count back and see if they had missed anything. . .

D. The Dead Sea Scrolls

Since the oldest complete copy of a Hebrew Old Testament in existence is dated about A.D. 1000, that?s a long time after the originals were written (1450-400 B.C.). But there are portions that date back farther. Most significant are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in 1947 by an Arabian shepherd boy. These well-preserved Hebrew text fragments date back to 100 B.C. They include many Bible portions, including some complete books. Their value to the credibility of our Bible is that amazingly, there is virtual agreement between these Hebrew texts and the ones dated 1,100 years later! This proves how accurately the scribes copies for all those years.

The evidence shows that our Old Testaments today are extremely accurate reflections of the original manuscripts.

Meticulous Care in the Transmission of the Bible [bibleevidences.com]

So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today's Bible! (the few differences were "obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling"1).

The scribes who were in charge of the Old Testament text dedicated their lives to preserving the text's accuracy when they made copies. The great lengths the scribes went to guarantee the reliability of the copies is illustrated by the fact that they would count every letter and every word, and record in the margins such things as the middle letter and word of the Torah. If a single error was found, the copy was immediately destroyed. As a software engineer, I can personally vouch that the scribe's method of protecting the text is more rigorous than the common checksuming methods used today to protect software programs from corruption2. . ..

It is also very impressive to note that scholars can recreate all but 11 verses of the New Testament by simply piecing together quotations by the early church fathers of the second and third centuries! . . . More. .. [bibleevidences.com]

Note - the table in this is worth seeing at the web site.

The Transmission Accuracy of the Bible [worldviewweekend.com]

The reliability of the New Testament is also beyond reproach. More than 24,000 partial and complete copies of the New Testament are available today. No other document of antiquity can even come close to such large numbers. Homer's Iliad is second with a mere 643 existing manuscripts. So sparse are copies of ancient classical works that 20 copies would be a lofty number of manuscripts. In addition to the New Testament manuscripts, there are over 86,000 quotations of the New Testament from the Early Church fathers. So thorough are these quotations that all but 11 verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed from this material, which dates less than 200 years after the coming of Jesus.

Not only are the New Testament documents superior because of their great numbers, but also because of the time span existing between the original autographs and their copies. Unlike Buddha, whose sayings were not recorded until 500 years after his death, all the books of the New Testament were probably written within 30 years of the death of Jesus. The earliest copies of our existing New Testament begin at A.D. 125. In comparison, Homer's Iliad has a time span exceeding over 500 years between the time of writing and the oldest manuscript. No book in antiquity can compare with the New Testament in the number of manuscripts or in the interval of time between the originals and the copies. Compare the New Testament with the top works of antiquity in the chart on the following page.

The New Testament in comparison to other ancient manuscripts is virtually free from any corruption. Textual critics have found only one-half of one percent differs. Thus, 99 1/2 percent of the New Testament has no variation. These variations for the most part deal with matters of spelling or word order. Not one single variant has any bearing on a doctrine of faith. In any case, the Church has in its possession 100 percent of the New Testament. Such confidence cannot be attributed to any other piece of classical literature. The accuracy of transmission in the manuscripts of the Bible testifies to their truthfulness.

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels [probe.org]

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/vgbvfVqhutc/einstein-letter-critical-of-religion-to-be-auctioned-on-ebay

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