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The Bible for Blockheads accurate copies of the original writings because the Jews and later the Christians who copied the text took extreme care in their work. They were fanatics about accuracy! So many copies (manuscripts) have survived that we can compare the places where minor discrepancies occur. Less than 1 percent of the accuracy of the New Testament text, for example, is seriously questioned. That is just one word out of every four thousand words. More significantly, none of the teachings of the Bible are affected by any variation in the text. Over four thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have survived. Compare that to some other ancient writings: • Homer’s Iliad has the most surviving copies of any other ancient document — 643 manuscripts. Five percent of the text is questionable. • Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars rests on only ten surviving copies. • Tacitus wrote seventeen books of Roman history. Only four and one-half books survive in two copies. Two of the oldest complete New Testament manuscripts that survive were copied about AD 350 — some 250 years after the New Testament was completed. In addition we have fragments of various New Testament books that can be dated 100 to 200 years earlier, to within 150 years of the writing of the New Testament. Other ancient writings don’t even come close. Scholars of the Greek dramatist Sophocles tell us that we have an accurate text of his seven surviving plays. But the manuscript on which
CHAPTER AND VERSE The books of the Bible were not divided into chapters until the year 1214. Stephen Langton, who was England’s leading clergyman, proposed chapter divisions that were adopted not only by the Christians but also by the Jews. Verse divisions didn’t appear until 1551. Robert Estienne, a French printer, decided to divide the chapters of the Bible into smaller
sections. His son later wrote that Estienne had constructed the verse divisions while on a journey on horseback — which may explain why some of the verse divisions appear in such unexpected places! The New International Version of the Bible is divided into 1,189 chapters and 31,086 verses. It contains 726,109 words — and a vocabulary of 14,462 words!