Sidney Collett shared the following information about the careful and accurate preservation of the Scriptures in his book, All About the Bible (pages 14-17):

"In making copies of Hebrew manuscripts which are the precious heritage of the Church today, the Jewish scribes exercised the greatest possible care, even to the point of superstition—counting, not only the words, but every letter, noting how many times each particular letter occurred, and destroying at once the sheet on which a mistake was detected, in their anxiety to avoid the introduction of the least error into the sacred Scriptures which they prized so highly and held in such reverent awe. Moreover, each new copy had to be made from an approved manuscript, written with a special kind of ink, upon sheets made from the skin of a 'clean'animal. The writers also had to pronounce aloud each word before writing it, and on no account was a single word to be written from memory."

Dr. Collett concludes the section, "And yet in all those voluminous sacred documents, which have been copied times out of number, the highest authorities assure us that, in regard to the New Testament, the variations of any importance introduced by copyists amount to less than one-thousandth of the entire text; while the Hebrew documents of the Old Testament show even less variation still!"