What is Your Approach?

[Angrboda]

I don't think he's biased.. He just doesn't know what he's talking about. For example, he claims any uneducated person made a copy of the original, and the third copy would be a copy of that.. But they actually had scribes who copied manuscripts for a living in Jewish culture. When these scribes converted to Christianity, they would copy the original manuscripts. They would continue to use the original to make copies until the original fell apart from this type of use (ehixh generally took several generations). You then have what are called 'families' of manuscripts. Each 2nd generation copy would be copied from these, and all errors would then be confined to the descendents of an individual family, then tested against members of other families to ensure, up to present day, about 98% consistency in Scripture, of which the other 2% is noted in the bottom of every Bible printed today and, as you will find, accounts for absolutely no justifiable reason to discredit the Bible's message.

In the earlier ages of the Church, biblical manuscripts were produced by individual Christians who wished to provide for themselves or for local congregations copies of one or more books of the New Testament. Because the number of Christians increased rapidly during the first centuries, many additional copies of the Scriptures were sought by new converts and new churches. As a result, the speed of production sometimes outran the accuracy of execution. Furthermore, in preparing translations or versions for persons who knew no Greek, it occurred more than once (as Augustine complained) that "anyone who happened to gain possession of a Greek manuscript and who imagined that he had some facility in both Latin and Greek, however slight that might be, dared to make a translation" (De doctrina christiana, II.xi.16).

When, however, in the fourth century Christianity received official sanction from the state, it became more usual for commercial book manufacturers, or scriptoria, to produce copies of the books of the New Testament. Sitting in the workroom of a scriptorium, several trained scribes, Christian and non-Christian, each equipped with parchment, pens, and ink, would write a copy of the book being reproduced as the reader, or lector, slowly read aloud the text of the exemplar. In this way, as many copies could be produced simultaneously as scribes were working in the scriptorium. It is easy to understand how in such a method of reproduction errors of transcription would almost inevitably occur. Sometimes the scribe would be momentarily inattentive or, because of a cough or other noise, would not clearly hear the lector. Furthermore, when the lector read aloud a word that could be spelled in different ways (e.g., in English, the words great and grate or there and their), the scribe would have to determine which word belonged in that particular context, and sometimes he wrote down the wrong word. (For examples of such mistakes, see pp. 254-5.)

In order to ensure greater accuracy, books produced in scriptoria were commonly checked over by a corrector (…) specially trained to rectify mistakes in copying. His annotations in the manuscript can usually be detected today from differences in styles of handwriting or tints of ink....

— The Text Of The New Testament, 4th ed., Metzger and Ehrman