So many of us have swallowed the premise of BIBLE transmission from God when it smells fishy.
Without an uncorrupt original text we are left with no standard. We have squat.
By "squat" I mean bald assertions, unfounded conjecture and piles upon piles of "fine tuning" over the centuries.
There is a huge industry called APOLOGETICS fiendishly prolific at calming fears about Bible related problems.
Lee Strobel (The Case for Faith, The Case for Christ)
Josh McDowell (Evidence that Demands a Verdict)
R.C.Sproul (Defending your Faith)
Chuck Colson, Norm Geisler (Apologetics Study Bible)
Dean Hardy (Stand your Ground)
When it comes to the key issue about the disappearance of original texts, to a man it is PASSED over with a flood of non-related noise about how many wonderful COPIES of copies of copies of copies exist.
Blah blah blah, as though it were a non-issue that these "copies" cannot be verified.
On top of this they commit a huge fallacy of Logic by simply insisting God MUST HAVE preserved "His word" free of distortion. Oh, really?
God didn't see fit to preserve His Church without distortion. God didn't see fit to preserve the integrity of the Popes, bishops and clergy who sold indulgences and bribed the laity with promises of forgiveness in exchange for money! The original Bible Text is no less secure!
No, we need an uncorrupt standard to measure the distortion in our modern texts (recopied ad nauseum over centuries.)
Consider this:
How can you verify an inch is an inch without a Standard Ruler?
I use to be a custom picture framer in an Art Gallery. A lady came in and had me build an expensive frame for an oil painting she had at home using the dimensions SHE gave me. I asked her to let me measure it first. She insisted she knew how to use a tape measure, thank you very much!
I delivered the frame and got a phone call a day later.
"This frame does NOT fit!" she complained angrily.
I told her I folowed her dimensions exactly.
"I don't care--it does NOT fit!"
"Please bring in the painting you are framing along with the frame and I'll see what went wrong."
She did.
The painting was measured wrong, of course, by the lady herself.
I asked her what she measured it with.
She reached into her purse and pulled out one of those tape measures a seamstress might use for dressmaking.
She laid it along the edge of the painting and stretched out end to end.
"YOU SEE!" she practically screamed. "Exactly what I told you!"
I took the tape measure from her and stared at it.
IT WAS ELASTIC! As you stretched it tight-----IT STRETCHED!
What kind of nonsense tape measure stretches???
I took out my metal tape measure and laid it on the edge of the painting.
"Watch this" I told her and had her read the dimension I got with the standard tape measure.
She blinked a few times and shrugged.
"Very well. Just cut my painting down to fit it and let's be done with this."
Doh!
Is it not reasonable to expect the same thing has happend for millennia? Using a tampered, corrupt Standard to "prove" various ideas, schemes, doctrines and policies of church and state---the bible has become a lump of non-standard elastic!
Without a STANDARD to compare your so-called Bible Texts against for verification---you have a NON-STANDARD copy that has been STRETCHED for two thousand years to fit whims of doctrine and corruptions of dispute! Throw into the mix how corrupt the men who ran the Church turned out to be and you don't have to be dirty minded to suspect foul play in EVERYTHING they touched....including Scripture.