Summary: It is somewhat pointless to believe that the text of the Bible is inerrant because its human authors were divinely inspired, since none of the original manuscripts have survived, and the copies that have survived are demonstrably full of scribal errors, some accidental and some deliberate. (At one point, the author estimates that the number of scribal errors in the earliest extant copies of the Gospels exceeds the number of words in the text.)

Many of these errors are theologically significant and reflect the rapidly changing doctrines and heresies of the various divisions of Christianity in its early years.