User talk:SouthWriter/sandbox/An atheist's objections/@comment-1777104-20100810022625

Thanks, McG and Red. Your positive input is a great encouragement. And Red, the OT is even more accurate. Those copyists were "religious" about what they put down. They copied letter by letter, and then counted the letters, marking center word and sometimes even the middle letter.

The copyists of the NT were done by pious men, but their standards weren't always as strict. Most errors, though, are spelling errors (they sometimes wrote down what a reader was reading from the original) and mental slips like leaving a line out or adding a line twice. Missing passages, of which there are a few, were usually reinserted from translations of missing originals. Erasmus himself, with the "trinity passage" in I John, added it back by translating the Latin into Greek! That passage may actually be a late scribal "margin note" that slipped in. Sometimes, unauthorized "study bibles" got into print! :-)

But as Red says, our present Greek texts are very close to the original and we can be sure that we have every word that was meant for us to have. No spurious documents claiming to be "gospels" will be added to our Bibles.