David wrote, “Your word, O Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens”
(Ps 119:89). This verse from the whole of Psalm 119 is about the beauty and authority
of the Scriptures. All Evangelicals/Pentecostals believe that the Bible is the
inspired Word of God. This doctrine has five parts: Revelation is the means by which God himself has revealed himself through
the recorded truth of his word. This process of revelation has ceased, and no
more inspired books of the Bible are being added. Inspiration is the belief that the Spirit of God moved upon men to
write the sixty-six books of the Bible. Authoritative
is the belief that the Bible carries in its words the divine authority of
God. For this reason we believe that there are universal laws such as the Ten
Commandments that transcend all cultural barriers. Inerrancy is the belief that because Scripture was given by divine
inspiration, it is inerrant and infallible. Illumination
is the process by which the Holy Spirit opens the minds of men and women to
understand the spiritual truth of God’s Word.
This doctrine of inspiration is being rejected today by many in the
church who no longer view the Bible as divinely inspired. This is a slippery
slope for the church and one which will continue to divide the church. For
those of us who believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, there are so
many ways to see the hand of God in the preservation and transmission of the Scriptures
to our present day.
One of the ways the Scriptures have been persevered is through the
meticulous scribes of ancient Israel.
Before there was a printing press, every copy of every manuscript had to
be made by hand, and this was a painstaking process. Every page, every line,
and every word had to be right. So much effort and precaution were used because
errors could be introduced if the copy was not made carefully, and so the Jews
developed rules for preventing scribal errors in scrolls.
·
Each day a scribe would make sure his reed
pen was writing well by dipping it in ink and writing the name Amalek and then
crossing it out.
·
All materials had to be made according to
strict specifications. Parchments had to be made from the skins of clean
(kosher) animals and quills made from feathers of clean birds. The ink must be
black and prepared according to scribal specifications.
·
No word or even a letter could be written
from memory. A scribe must have another scroll open before him and pronounce
every word out loud before copying it.
·
Before writing the name of God, a scribe
must reverently wipe his pen and say, “I am writing the name of God for the
holiness of His name.”
·
Every letter had to have some space around
it. If one letter touched another or
if a letter was defective because of incorrect writing, a hole, a tear, or a
smudge so that it could not be easily read, the scroll was invalidated.
·
Each column must have no fewer than
forty-eight nor more than sixty lines and must be exactly like the manuscript
being copied.
·
Within thirty days of completion, an editor
would review the manuscript, counting every letter and every word as a way of
checking. The editor would also make sure that the middle word on each page of
the copy was the same as the middle words on the manuscript being copied.
·
Up to three mistakes on any page could be
corrected within thirty days. If more mistakes were found or if mistakes were
not fixed within thirty days, the entire manuscript had to be burned. If a
single letter was added or a single letter left out, the manuscript had to be
fixed or burned.
This is just one of the many ways that God preserved the accuracy of the
Scriptures so they could be handed down through the centuries. When you take up
a copy of the Bible in your language, you are reading God’s Words to you.[i]
