Hebrew letters are also numbers. Scribes would copy scriptures and add up the numbers, if the total didn’t match the original total they would destroy the corrupted copies, likewise with damaged/faded copies, ensuring accuracy.
Of the 166 Hebrew words in Isaiah 53, only seventeen letters in Dead Sea Scroll 1QIsb differ from the Masoretic Text . 10 letters = spelling difference. 4 letters = stylistic change. 3 letters = added word for “light” (vs. 11). 17 letters = no affect on biblical teaching.1 The Masoretic Text is 800 to 1,000 years old, the Dead Sea Scrolls are about 2,200 years old.
The only changes we find from translation to translation is the spelling of a word, a difference in writing style, or the clarification of a thought without changing the original meaning, there are no changes in doctrine. We can practically read the authentic original scriptures in English.
If we give a number of people a written paper and have them rewrite it, naturally some will misspell words, others leave words out, some will change the order that some words appear, others might pass on the original thought but update the language. We could then collect all the error filled copies and since not everyone will make the same mistakes, we could compare them and by collaboration, piece together the original intact. Such is the case with the Bible we have today.
Sir Frederic Kenyon wrote:
It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain. Especially is this the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.2
W.O.E. Oesterley and Theodore H. Robinson stated:
In spite of all uncertainties, the great fact remains that the text as we now have it does, in the main, represent fairly the actual words of the authors who lived, some of them, nearly three thousand years ago, and we need have no serious doubt on the score of textual corruption as to the validity of the message which the Old Testament has to give us.3
Some of the Dead Sea manuscripts show textual variance however they represent a “reworking [of the Biblical text] on the basis of its own internal logic, so that the form becomes expanded but the substance remains the same_The underlying attitude is one of explicit reverence for a text regarded as sacred, an attitude of explaining (as we would put it) the Bible by the Bible in the very transmission of the text itself.”4
Russell Bradley Jones wrote:
In 1881, F. J. A. Hort, famous Greek scholar, wrote that, in our New Testament, aside from insignificant variations of grammar or spelling, not more than one thousandth part of it is affected by different readings.5 Not one fundamental doctrine is involved in doubt as far as the text is concerned. Our Bible is a miracle of God’s providential oversight.6
Dr. Bruce Metzger states that for the New Testament there are 5,664 Greek manuscripts. 8,000-10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts. 8,000 Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian manuscripts. For a total of about 24,000 manuscripts.7
Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix note,
The New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book-form that is 99.5% pure.8