How Great is Our God!

haha, as my blog is becoming more personal, it is getting more and more boring. :)

HOWEVER, that's ok. :) And Cheski, girl, you know if you start getting bored, just move on to another blog. I definitely don't do this for hits.
I have been memorizing scripture the last, mmm, almost week!! It is truly amazing how much potential we truly have to do this if we put our minds to it. And I think I want to start memorizing some FACTS as well.

What! Francine, how did you get from scripture to facts? Ok, I mean Bible Facts that relate to scripture. For example:

- The Bible is the best preserved literary work of all antiquity.
- There are nearly 25,000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament Bible discovered and archived so far.
- At least 5600 are in the original Greek.
- The time between the original autographs and our earliest existing fragment is a remarkably short 40-60 years!!

HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD!! That he preserved this work for us. I am looking forward to committing this to memory, in order to effectively defend the Bible from common questions about reliability and just to know for myself. Here's more things I'll try to memorize today

Now, let's compare this to other ancient works:
PLATO - 7 manuscripts, 1300 years elapsed after initial autograph
JULIUS CAESAR'S THE GALLIC WARS - 10 manuscripts, 1000 years elapsed
HERODTOUS' HISTORY - 8 Manuscripts remain, 1,350 years elapsed

- The second most preserved work is Homer's Iliad - it has 643 copies and 743 disputed lines of text.
- The New Testament has only 40 disputed lines and none concerning doctrine.

**Also, I'd like to memorize a few different versions of translations to show the minimal differences. Here is a verse of doctrinal importance:Mark 12:25, I'd also like to do one about love or something that requires less understanding of the Bible.
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King James Version: For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

New International Version (NIV): When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

New American Standard Bible (NAS): For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.


OLD TESTAMENT/RELIABILITY
- The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 and were approx. a thousand years older than our then earliest manuscript of the Old Testament. The fact that there were only very minimal errors is a testament to the way God has preserved His Word down through the centuries, protecting it from extinction and guarding it against significant error.

¹ Josh McDowell, The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999, 71-73.
² Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, vol.1, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1979, 58-59.
³ Ibid. 56-57.
⁴ McDowell, The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, 34-36.
⁵ John Ryland's Gospel of John fragment, John Ryland's Library of Manchester, England. See also, Ibid., 38.
⁶ McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, vol.1, 42.
⁷ F.F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments: How We Got Our English Bible, Fleming H. Revell Co., 1950, 178.
⁸ Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, Moody, Chicago, Revised and Expanded 1986, 366-67.
⁹ http://shakespeare.com/faq/, Dana Spradley, Publisher, 2002.
¹⁰ McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, vol. 1, 50-51.
¹¹ Ravi K. Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? Word Publishing, 1994, 162.

http://www.allaboutthejourney.org/bible-manuscripts.htm