The Trustworthy Scriptures

The most groundless of all of the assumptions of the radical critics with regard to the text of the Old Testament Scriptures is that the text, as it emerged into historic times, had already been so changed from its original form as to be utterly unrecognizable by its own composers.

Yet what convincing evidence is there to prove that such radical changes were ever made in the original text of the Old Testament? None whatsoever, except an analogy derived from the Egyptian and Babylonian liturgies and legends. No trace of any such radical changes can be found in the parallel portions of the Old Testament, nor in any statements of the Scriptures, nor in any tradition of the Jews. On the contrary, so far back as we can go with manuscripts and versions (i.e., to 200 B. C), the evidence is overwhelming and convincing, that in general no changes, even in sporadic cases of consonantal letters, have been made in the text of the Old Testament; except such as might occur in the copying or translating of any document, especially one of a long past age. The Egyptian papyri, recently discovered and published, some of them more than 2,000 years old, show that some of the fragments of the Classics differ by not a single letter from the texts of the ordinary text-books now used in the preparatory schools

-- Robert Dick Wilson (February 4, 1856 – October 11, 1930. American linguist and Presbyterian scholar, who devoted his life to an attempt to prove the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. In his quest to determine the accuracy of the original manuscripts, Wilson learned 45 languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 AD).