As I have studied textual criticism at the graduate level and have investigated for myself some of the documents from which the New Testament was translated, I am awed at how God has protected His Word. However, when I was in LDS seminary, teachers compared textual transmission to the child’s game of “gossip”— in which a line of people whisper a message from person to person and see how, at the end of the line, a message can be changed beyond recognition. However, such analogies do not apply to the history of Bible transmission. There are “families” of papyrus documents from all over the Eastern world – some of which date to within years of the death of the last apostle. Comparison between them has operated as a checks-and-balances system to ensure that no essential information was lost, and no critical heretical information was inserted, in the hundreds of years since the close of the New Testament. In addition, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has provided proof positive that the passage of time and multiple scribes had minimal effect on manuscript transmission of the Word of God.
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today (Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
