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with the similarities in the way the Greek letters are written and with the primitive conditions under which scribes worked, it would seem inevitable that copying errors would creep into the text, eyeglasses weren't invented until 1373 in Venice, compounded by the fact that it was difficult under any circumstances to read faded manuscripts on which some of the ink had flaked away, and there were other hazards, inattentiveness on the part of the scribes, etc., so although the scribes were scrupulously careful, errors did creep in, but there are factors counteracting that, Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language, meaning it makes a big difference in English if you say, "dog bites man" or "man bites dog", sequence matters in English, but in Greek it doesn't, one word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence, consequently, the meaning of the sentence isn't distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order, some variations among the manuscripts exist, but generally they're inconsequential variations like that, still the number of "variants" or differences among manuscripts was troubling, estimates as high as 200,000 of them, the number sounds big, but it's a bit misleading because of the way variants are counted, if a single word is misspelled in 2000 manuscripts, that's counted as 2000 variants, how many doctrines of the church are in jeopardy because of variants? none, the variations, when they occur, tend to be minor, rather than substantive and scholars work very carefully to try to resolve them by getting back to the original meaning, the New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book - a form that is 99.5% pure ...