To christians – how do you explain?
First, most of those who copied, or assisted in copying, the Bible had great respect for it and its Divine Author. The Masoretes (a group of Jewish Bible scholars who lived between the sixth and tenth centuries C.E.) are known to have painstakingly counted every individual letter of the Bible text so as to avoid making any mistake or even omitting a single letter from the Holy Writings. This reliable method may have been used even long before their time to avoid making mistakes in copying the Bible. It was possibly in reference to this habit of copyists that Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount: “Sooner would heaven and earth pass away than for one smallest letter or one particle of a letter to pass away from the Law by any means and not all things take place.”—Matthew 5:18. This endeavor by copyists to maintain the purity and accuracy of the Bible text explains why the Dead Sea Scrolls of the first and second centuries B.C.E., containing among other things the entire book of Isaiah,
