ACCURATE TRANSLATION
Page 2 of 3

Careful copies

Very old copies

Section: The Bible > No Mistakes >Accurate Science > Translation 2

CAREFUL COPIES

• The Old Testament

The copies were hand-written, by men called Scribes (hand-writers). That is 
why the Bible came to be called 'The Scriptures' (hand-written). To make absolutely sure that a 
copyist had made no mistake, he would count every letter of his copy and check if it was the same as the number of letters in the original. Then he would check the middle word and the middle letter of 
that word, to see if it was the same. Only then was the copy passed as accurate.
That way, when copies were made from that copy, and checked in the same way, there was no 
chance of mistakes being added in and copied, down the centuries.

• The New Testament 

This was also copied by hand. But, because many people wanted copies , many scribes got together to work at the same time. The Chief 
Scribe would read out from the original and a group of scribes would write it out. Today we have about 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. This is far more than are available to check the accuracy of other writings of that time. 

As Christianity spread throughout the world, the Bible was translated into many languages like Latin, Egyptian, and later European languages. There have been many English versions, for example: The King James Bible and The New International Version.

The best translations took the original Hebrew and Greek and translated directly from that, rather than simply improving someone else's translation. But some people still said: 'The old documents you are using are copies of copies. They must have many mistakes.'

If Bible scholars could only find a really old copy, one of the earliest to be made, they could check it against the later ones from
which our translations came, and prove them completely accurate. This did indeed happen.

Click here to go forward, and read how it happened!  This will also reveal why a goat is here!

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