Day 00: How was the Bible copied?

Here are some interesting facts on the Bible. It gives information on how the Bible was copied, the men who recorded God's words, why we can be confident the Bible we hold in our hands is an accurate copy of the original. 

As I learned about how it was written these were some of my thoughts ...

-> The Old Testament writers (scribes) were meticulous about their job. Can you imagine taking a bath ever time you wrote the name of God? For example: Psalms chapter 7 has 17 verses & the word God appears 7 times. That means they washed their bodies & their pens 7 times to write 17 sentences.

-> When a scribe copied Genesis, which contains 32,046, they had to look at ever word before they wrote it. When they were done they would count to the middle word. If it was wrong they would bury the entire copy

->  We have over 25,000 copies, either whole or parts, of the New Testament.  

Hope you enjoy the information, Carol
　

The following information was found at http://gotquestions.org/


Facts on the Bible:The Bible is broken into two parts: Old Testament and New Testament. It is a collection of 66 books, written by 40 or more different men over a period of 1,600 years. As you read it, you will see it is clearly one Book, with perfect unity and with one consistent message. The Old Testament and the New Testament are about actual people and events. The historical facts have been confirmed in the past & are still being confirmed to this day. It is the message of God’s plan to bring us back to Him and eventually be brought into Heaven. 

Old Testament:The first book was written by Moses almost 3,500 years ago. The copies of the original Old Testament were hand-written by men called Scribes. Because they were responsible for accurately passing along God’s Word they needed to make sure the copy perfectly matched the original, it could be clearly read and recopied later. Their system for making copies was precise and painstaking. These are some of the rules they had for making a copy of God’s Word:
-No word could be written from memory. The scribe had to look at each word before writing it.
-They had to say each word aloud while they were writing.
-The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other.
-The middle paragraph, word and letter must match the original document.
-They had to clean their pen and wash their bodies before they wrote the word “Jehovah” (God).
-They would not use a pen that was newly dipped in ink to write the name of God. This was to make sure the pen didn’t drip while writing the name.
-If one, two or three mistakes were found, the mistakes were fixed. If four or more mistakes were found the copy was "put away."
-They would never destroy any document containing God’s Word. Instead they would store or bury them in a "hiding place" (usually a synagogue or a Jewish cemetery.)
-The scribe’s job was not taken lightly. It was highly honored and had little room for error. Their job was to pass on God’s Word to future generations and the Old Testament we hold in our hands is a proof of their determination. 

New Testament:The New Testament is amazing because it has as many as 25,000 hand written copies (either all of the original words of parts of them). To help us understand how amazing this is let’s compare it to second place: Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad has 643 copies. It’s not even a “close” second. 
The New Testament was written by the eyewitness or someone who documented the eyewitness account. All of them chose to suffer and die rather then deny what they wrote. Here’s a partial list of the writers. The fact that all of the apostles were willing to die horrible deaths, refusing to renounce their faith in Christ – is tremendous evidence that they had truly witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ: 

Matthew - death by a sword in Ethiopia.
Mark - dragged by horses in Alexandria, Egypt until dead.
Luke - hanged from an olive tree in Greece until dead.
John - suffered by being boiled in oil and later forced to work in the mines on Patmos. He was the only one who died an old man.
Peter - crucified upside down.
James the Just - thrown off the Temple peak and fell over 100 feet. He survived, but was beaten to death after fall.
James the son of Zebedee - beheaded in Jerusalem. The Roman officer who listened to James defend his faith knelt beside James and was beheaded as well. Before the officer was beheaded he declared his faith in the truth.
Bartholomew - whipped to death in Armenia.
Andrew - whipped before being tied to a cross in Patras, Greece. He was on the cross for two days before he died. During the two days he continued to tell people about the truth.
Thomas - missionary stabbed to death with a spear in India.
Jude - killed with arrows when he refused to deny the truth.
Matthias - stoned and then beheaded.
Barnabas - stoned to death at Salonica.
Paul - imprisoned, tortured and then beheaded in Rome by Nero. 

　
Below taken from:  http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=1049

Another reason for the reliability of the Old Testament Scriptures is that their preservation was committed to professional scribes. When a scroll had been used to its limit, it was copied with extreme care. The checks on accuracy of the copy were strenuous. Letters of each word were tallied for each line, each column and each scroll. The middle word and the middle letter were located and recorded. Even the number of times each letter of the alphabet appeared in the scroll was tallied and compared. If one, two or three mistakes were found, these mistakes were sought out and corrected; if more than three mistakes were found by these tallies, the faulty copy was immediately destroyed.
　 Some would attempt to deceive the world, shaming it into thinking that the Bible is unreliable, but they ignore the amazing facts about the preservation of the Scriptures. Today we have seven manuscript copies of Plato's works, the earliest dating from A.D. 900, more than 1,200 years after their original recording. We have 52 copies of Aristotle's works, the earliest dating from A.D. 1100, over 1,400 years after their composition. We have three manuscripts of Catullus, dating from A.D. 1550, more than 1,600 years after they were first written.

Compare this to the New Testament: We have in excess of 25,000 manuscripts, the earliest of which dates from A.D. 130 (by latest estimate)—a mere 80 years removed from its original! In fact, the New Testament is by far the best-attested ancient work, the runner-up for the prize being The Iliad. Homer's first major work exists in some 644 copies, the earliest of which is all of 500 years removed from its original.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, late head librarian at the British Museum, wrote: “The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established” (The Bible and Archaeology, 1940).