Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script/Notes:

Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens.

Psalm 119 verse 89, NIV

Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

2 Peter, chapter 3 verses 15 and 16, NIV

VK: I’m Victoria K and today on Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books we are continuing our discussion on the importance of the Bible today with RD Fierro, author and the Founder Crystal Sea Books. RD, would you like to say hello to everyone?

RD: Hello, Everyone.

VK: Ah. My kind of greeting. Straight and to the point. Oh, well. It means we can get going faster. For the last couple of weeks we used one of our humor pieces to do a slightly longer introduction of Crystal Sea than RD did of himself – again. But there are probably some listeners who didn’t get a chance to hear those pieces so we’d like to start today by listening to another humor segment Crystal Sea has produced just to tell you a little more about what we do.

---- Branding Piece 3

VK: Obviously, you and Jerry really have entirely too much fun with each other – literally. Is it really like that when you’re working on pieces together?

RD: Yes. Literally.

• VK: Oh my, we’re in for it today. All right. In the humor segment you were emphasizing that God made everything and sustains everything through His power. We learn that from the Bible. So a big question that we didn’t get into last week is which version of the Bible is the correct one? Because there are lots of different versions that have been produced throughout the ages.

◦ The verbal plenary inspiration applies to the original manuscripts, also known as the autographs. It was the originals that were penned by the prophets and apostles that were given by God, authoritative, and divinely directed. Presently we have copies of the original manuscripts but the copies are not perfect, though close to it. So, we have copies of inspired documents and for all intents and purposes the copies are inspired.

◦ Insofar as we know none of the autographs are extant today.

• This then raises the question about the reliability and accuracy of the transmission of the text down through the ages. The first books of the Bible were probably written over 1,000 years before Jesus was born. So the autographs are the records or writings that we consider to be inspired. How were those records created? Or, in other words, how did God give His word to the original writers?

◦ In a few cases “face to face.”

◦ Visions and dreams

◦ Extraordinary phenomena – burning bush

• This whole subject is something that is rarely discussed. But if we want to be able to really understand God’s word, the Bible, it is important to know how it came into being. How can we sure that we have an accurate copy of what we call today the Old Testament? You say that an awareness of the inspiration of the Bible led to a process of dedication, concentration, systemization, and therefore preservation of the Old Testament. What do you mean by each of those? Let’s start with dedication.

◦ Life revolved around their faith

• So life in ancient Israel revolved around their faith and the people in the Jewish community of that time knew that they were the custodians of God’s revelation. So you say that this dedication to their faith and scriptures produced a degree of concentration upon the scriptures that would be uncommon today.

◦ Ancient copyists displayed the same level of concentration as any highly qualified professional of today, e.g. financial analysts, sports analysts, beauty and fitness consultants

• So all this concentration – this focus – on the scriptures meant that, as time progressed, the Jews developed specific systems for ensuring that when the scriptures were copied they were copied precisely. What were some of the elements of those systems?

◦ Jedi copy master

◦ (Consult the article by the International Bible Society available at biblica.com) Moses wrote the first 5 books of the Bible. He is thought to have lived between 1500 and 1300 BC.

◦ (Consult the article by Josh McDowell available at josh.org) The Scriptures were so important to the nation of Israel, that a special class of scholars called Soferim developed during the Second Temple period. From about 500 BC to 100 AD, the primary task of these scribes was to preserve Israel’s sacred traditions, which served as the foundation of the Jewish nation.

◦ Scholars believe these Jewish men were possibly of priestly descent, as most sofer whose geneology is known were priests. As such, the Soferim were intimately acquainted with Scripture and other sacred documents. They likely specialized in the biblical manuscripts they transcribed and the topics they wrote about. We know that various rabbinic rules — including the selection of writing materials, the preparation of leather (parchment), error correction, transcribing of divine names, the storage and reading of scrolls, and measurements of sheets, columns, and margins — all point to the reverence that rabbinic scribes had for biblical text.

◦ Again, the scribes revered Scripture so highly that, through the ages, they took meticulous care in their work. One example: scribes may have known their biblical texts from memory, but they were forbidden from copying Scripture without a vorlage (the manuscript being copied) in front of them. While this did not ensure a flawless transmission of the text, it did provide a structural safeguard.

◦ Paul D. Wegner, professor of Old Testament studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California, shares further safeguards and protocols that aided scribes in their copying and storage of biblical texts:

◦ ~ Jewish writings mention that the temple employed correctors (meggihim) who scrutinized the scrolls to safeguard their precision.

◦ ~ At some point during the talmudic period (100 BC to AD 400), meticulous rules were developed to preserve the Old Testament text in synagogue scrolls. These included only using parchment made from clean animals, using only black ink, lining the page before adding letters, and establishing a set column width and word spacing (the space of a hair between each consonant, and the space of a consonant between each word). Too, the scribe had to be freshly bathed and in full Jewish dress before beginning to copy the scroll.

◦ Writes Wagner, in an article titled “How Did We Get the Old Testament?” for Credo Magazine: “These scribes made meticulous notes regarding the text, from recording the number of letters used in a book, to indicating the middle letter of a book. They also made careful notations along the sides of the Hebrew text in multiple other volumes concerning the reading and pointing of these texts.”

◦ Later, an entire treatise was created to guide scribes on the proper procedure for preparing a sacred scroll and producing an accurate text. It seems that the various communities of scribes began to unify at the end of the first century AD. This ultimately led to a standardization of authoritative biblical text that, albeit not intentionally orchestrated, was an inevitable result of historical circumstances.

• What is the role of textual criticism in ensuring that we have accurate copies of the Bible?

◦ Textual criticism – haplography – writing once what should have been written twice; dittography – writing twice what should have been written one; metathesis – an inadvertent exchange of the proper order of letters or words. There are other well-known errors for which scholars know they have to be alert: inadvertently missing words, confusing similar looking letters, or errors based just on vowel points since ancient Hebrew did not use letters for vowels. (Consult the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Dr. Gleason Archer)

• Is there any evidence that these rules and protocols were successful at preserving the accuracy of the text? (Consult the article on the Dead Sea Scrolls by Dr. Patrick Zukeran available on Probe.org)

◦ Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

◦ The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.

◦ With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by about one thousand years. Scholars were anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents would match up with the Masoretic Text. If a significant amount of differences were found, we could conclude that our Old Testament Text had not been well preserved. Critics, along with religious groups such as Muslims and Mormons, often make the claim that the present day Old Testament has been corrupted and is not well preserved. According to these religious groups, this would explain the contradictions between the Old Testament and their religious teachings.

◦ After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text. Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.'”

◦ A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.

◦ One of the most respected Old Testament scholars, the late Gleason Archer, examined the two Isaiah scrolls found in Cave 1 and wrote, “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”

◦ Despite the thousand year gap, scholars found the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls to be nearly identical. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable evidence that the Old Testament had been accurately and carefully preserved.

• Ok. So we consider the Bible – the Word of God - to be inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And we saw last time that we can be confident that the text we read in our Bibles today is the same as that that was contained in the original documents – the autographs. So a big question that we didn’t get into last week is how can we know that the Bible is the word of God?

◦ I think that scripture possesses a variety of attributes that demonstrate that it is the word of God. And while this is a huge topic that it’s impossible to cover in a 30 minute program, today I just want to at least introduce four lines of reasoning that help demonstrate these attributes:

▪ First, The Bible has verifiable historical origins.

▪ Second, the Bible displays a remarkable unity, harmony, and consistency for a book that originated over a period of 1,500 years and was written by over 3 dozen authors.

▪ Third, we have the evidence that lives are changed when people read the Bible, often in dramatic and powerful ways.

▪ Fourth, the Bible contains an extensive body of fulfilled prophecy that makes it unique among all books.

VK: Sounds to me like a good time for a prayer. Today's prayer comes from another one of Crystal Seas’ offerings, the book Purposeful Prayers and is dedicated to the Messiah who was promised in Genesis 3:15:

---- Adoration of the Holy Spirit, radio version.

We hope you’ll be with us next time and we hope you’ll take some time to encourage some friends to tune in too, or listen to the podcast version of this show.

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”

Scriptures Included

Psalm 119, verse 89, NIV

2 Peter, chapter 3 verses 15 and 16, NIV

Internet Resources Cited or Recommended

https://www.josh.org/faithful-transmit-old-testament/

https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/when-was-the-bible-written/

https://probe.org/the-dead-sea-scrolls/