The wide range of manuscripts, it is then asserted, provides the means through comparison and now modern computerized compilation methods to establish the contents of those originals. The original text was without error, while later copies will have human errors as a result of the copying process. The key and foundational qualification, however, which undergirds all the rest, is that the texts which make up the Scriptures are without any sort of error only in the autographs, the originals. None of these errors significantly touches any portion of Christian doctrine. Conservative scholars, therefore, will point out that nearly all of these errors are easily identified precisely because of the wealth of textual evidence. Because, again, Protestantism has historically placed the authority in the text itself, this is a significant problem. Every one of these individual manuscripts very clearly contains errors, from misspellings to omitted or added words to whole units of Scripture being missing or relocated. There are, for example, nearly 6,000 manuscripts of New Testament documents. In order to make this position tenable, however, in the face of textual and historical evidence, certain qualifications have been made. While many conservative Protestant scholars have engaged, to varying degrees, with critical methodology, the defining aspect of their doctrinal conservativism for the past century and a half has been the affirmation that the Scriptures are free from error of any and all kinds. Having posited the idea of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures would be, for Protestant communities, the sole infallible rule of faith and life, modern modes of textual criticism became a threat to the entirety of traditional Protestant doctrine. While the Church has always held that the Scriptures are free from error, within the realm of (particularly American) Protestantism, the concept of the inerrancy of the Scriptures came to take on a particularly pointed character in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries.
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