of the printing press, "New Testament books first circulated in hand-copied form, and hand-copying by monks." Inevitably, hand copying fostered human error:
Anyone who has copied by hand knows how easily letters, words, and even whole lines get dropped out or repeated. The New Testament manuscript tradition was not exempt from this.
Also, it is clear that some copyists facing what they thought were miscopyings made what they thought were corrections. Some of these copyists added in the margin amplifying words and sentences that the next copyist put into the text itself, thinking that was where they belonged.
The foregoing suggests that the remarkable thing about the texts that were included in the Biblical canon in the age of handwritten manuscripts is that they were so much alike, not that they differed in details. In any case, to declare that the Bible is not inerrant on the ground that the equivalent of typographical errors make for error inappropriately trivializes the level of discourse about inerrancy with respect to fundamental Christian belief. In that regard, Bloesch comments that that Bible bespeaks "God's will and purpose for the world. It bears the imprint of human frailty, but it also carries the truth and power of divine infallibility." That idea touches on inspiration, to which this research shall return. For the moment, it will be useful to turn to more substantive issue fronts regarding the subject of inerrancy.
The overwhelming evidence of Biblical texts is that they were an expression of faith and of the serious purpose of identifying, making, and explaining meaning. That does not point up the value of "perfect accuracy or mechanical dictation" but instead refers to the notion that "the words of human beings are adopted to serve the purposes of God." In other words, a divine voice or essence can be discerned in the text that is unique to the Bible as to no other text or set of texts, with the link betw...