Well - I'm an avid reader and am fortunate to be able to read in a car (I've heard of soooo many people who get car sick. THANK YOU Lord for not allowing this to happen to me!!!) So on the way to Georgia (7 1/2 hours in the car each way) I read two chapters of my Bible study, worked on some Teaching Outlines, read portions of a new book on my ancestors then I decided to look at one of the books on my iPad Kindle app and came across "The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus" and began reading it.
In Chapter One - Section Three under "God-Breathed" ("All Scripture is God-breathed . . ." 2 Timothy 3:16) the author writes "a prophet was a messenger who passed on God's words to the people." and that "what was recorded was precisely what he [God] wanted written." He further states "These men were not free to add their own private thoughts to the message." and refers to 2 Peter 1:20-21 which states ". . . you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along . . ." The author continues to explain the extreme necessity for accuracy as "The prophets wrote God's words on a scroll, usually an animal skin or paper made from plant fiber. . . . Since these autographs [this is what the originals were called] had a limited life span, copies were made of the scrolls. . . . In writing the Hebrew text . . . "They used every imaginable safeguard, no matter how cumbersome or laborious to ensure the accurate transmission of the text. The number of letters in a book was counted and its middle letter was given. Similarly with the words, and again the middle word was noted."
He continues . . . "This was done with both the copy and the original autograph to insure that they were exactly the same. These scribes were so accurate in their transcription that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found [in 1947 by the Bedouin shepherd] (written in 100 BC), and compared with manuscripts resulting from centuries of copying and recopying to a period of time 1000 years later (900 AD), there was no significant differences in the text."
He further wrote, "Josephus, a Jewish historian from the first century A.D., summed it up for his people when he stated" ". . . how firmly we have given credit to those books of our own nation, is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them; but it becomes natural to all Jews . . . to esteem those books . . . divine."
The author goes on to state "These men were absolutely convinced that to meddle with the text was to tamper with God. We have ample reason to be assured that what we have today is essentially the same as what the prophets wrote."