The epilogue of this reading helped adjust the viewpoint that I will hold as we go forward with this class. It is important to acknowledge the changes that have and will continue to take place in the manuscripts of the Bible. Growing up going to the same church my whole life and religion classes at that church, I was never taught about the changes that have been made to the Bible. It was always presented to me as a complete, infallible record of history.
This reading taught me much more about the changes that have been made. In more recent years, I learned that things had been changed but not how or why. This article explained that there are both intentional and unintentional changes. The accidental ones that have been made were generally the result of a lack of technology to make exact copies. The lack of a printing press for a large majority of the manuscripts' existence led to many alterations being accidentally made throughout history.
Then there have been intentional changes made. These are made for a larger number of reasons, some of which include correcting mistakes that the transcriber believes were present, addressing social problems, and inserting the transcriber's own beliefs. These are all surprising to me because I have always thought that the people who would have been making copies of the Bible would dedicated to preserving the original manuscripts. This reading has helped me realize that everything read, even in the Bible, cannot just be taken as it is, because there will almost always be some sort of bias present.
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