Bittorrent uses SHA-1 to make sure information isn't corrupted in...

[DreamstuffEntity]

...transmission. What methods did the scribes..? ...who copied the different books of the bible use to make sure their copies matched the originals?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1

[Neil5624]

Often, there were deliberate alterations of the text, such as adding and deleting sections.

Read anything by Bart Ehrman PhD for more information.

Verily I say unto thee, the Jesus story is a myth.

Rev. Neil

[RichardHawkins]

They followed everyone around for years with truck loads of parchment & quill pens.

[TheVillageAtheist]

Death.

Their work was reviewed by a master scribe who had the right to kill them if their work was in error.

[WooWoon]

Character counting, proof reading, textual matrices, retroactive referencing.

It's a very specialist field.

Why?

[Navi™]

HEY!
They used pixie dust!

[Drew]

The average scribe didn't, and because of this we have a large number of manuscripts with several differences. Most of these amount to spelling errors of no real importance. There are however, several instances where the text is significantly different, and this causes problems when textual critical scholars comb over the various manuscripts to piece together the original text.

In similar parlance to SHA, what the textual critic does is maximum likelihood decoding in which we view the manuscripts as the output of a noisy channel given prior assumptions on why the channel corrupts certain passages.

And, to be honest, most of the questions regarding the original text of the Bible are pretty well answered. There are some problematic passages that are still debated, but these amount to minutiae. The bigger theological questions are, for the most part, resolved. Basically, we have copies Biblical manuscripts from diverse places and textual families in the ancient world and have a surprising amount of agreement between them. Where we don't, textual critics are able to do a pretty fabulous job and finding the original text by looking at the differences and understanding why the differences occur. As I said before, these are usually (99%) spelling errors that are easily fixed. When substantial differences occur, it is usually because a particular scribe is trying to smooth out a passage or cause it to agree with their own theological biases. These are usually sorted out by finding older manuscripts that retain rougher readings.

[Frankinsense]

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Proof reading -

and if a mistake was discovered the copy was destroyed . . .


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