This is ridiculous. Just THINK, OK, just THINK.
The OTHER scrolls ARE proof that there have been no changes as they too are the same texts we have, though not in as good condition as the Isaiah scroll. They aren't as complete and perfect as the Isaiah scroll, which is why it is always made the reference point, but the others are evidence of lack of changes since then too.
Did you read the Sally example in the TheologyWeb discussion that I posted for the second time above?
TheologyWeb Campus
Pretend your Aunt Sally learns in a dream the recipe for an elixir that preserves her youth. When she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs to the kitchen to make up her first glass. In a few days Aunt Sally is transformed into a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of Sally’s Secret Sauce.
Aunt Sally is so excited she sends detailed, hand-written instructions on how to make the sauce to her three bridge partners (Aunt Sally is still in the technological dark agesno photocopier or email). They, in turn, make copies for ten of their own friends.
All goes well until one day Aunt Sally’s pet schnauzer eats the original copy of the recipe. In a panic she contacts her three friends who have mysteriously suffered similar mishaps, so the alarm goes out to the others in attempt to recover the original wording.
Sally rounds up all the surviving hand-written copies, twenty-six in all. When she spreads them out on the kitchen table, she immediately notices some differences. Twenty-three of the copies are exactly the same. Of the remaining three, however, one has misspelled words, another has two phrases inverted (mix then chop instead of chop then mix) and one includes an ingredient none of the others has on its list.
Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe from this evidence? Of course she can. The misspellings are obvious errors. The single inverted phrase stands out and can easily be repaired. Sally would then strike the extra ingredient reasoning it’s more plausible one person would add an item in error than 25 people would accidentally omit it.
Even if the variations were more numerous or more diverse, the original could still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence if Sally had enough copies.
This, in simplified form, is how scholars do textual criticism, an academic method used to test all documents of antiquity, not just religious texts. It’s not a haphazard effort based on hopes and guesses; it’s a careful linguistic process allowing an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any work.
I would reverse the story to make the point I've been trying to make. Say one of the first three Sally sent it to simply lost it and then died. But the recipe had already been copied and sent out to a dozen or so others, and it kept being copied and handed down for a hundred years until one of them came down to you on an index card tucked away in your mother's cookbook. It hadn't been tried for many years and you didn't know if it was the same recipe as the original.
Then you see a story in the local newspaper about this recipe being discovered behind the baseboard of an old house that was being remodeled and you recognize the same recipe. It's dated a hundred years ago. Eventually stories come out about others who have had that same recipe handed down to them too. Some say they remember their grandmother's having it but it's no longer to be found. On editorial pages and on message boards you all get together and compare your versions.
Twenty people are found who possess a copy of this recipe. You discover that they'd all come from different sources than you got yours, and nobody could trace theirs back to the one found in the old house but a couple thought they could trace theirs to one of the other original three whose copies had been destroyed.
Some have a few spelling errors. A couple got the ingredients or the mixing instructions in a different order from yours. One has one less ingredient than yours does. Seventeen of them including those with the spelling errors say exactly what yours says, and the two that reversed the instructions don't affect the outcome of the recipe anyway.
But even with all that certainty some people write in doubting it's the same as the original recipe because after all a FEW of them say something slightly different.
But the seventeen that agree with each other also agree with the one found in the old house.
Would you or would you not be justified in concluding that the copying that was done over those hundred years was very accurate in order for seventeen of you to get the exact same recipe?
Whether or not they are identical to the one "Aunt Sally" originally wrote down can't be ascertained for sure from this of course. This is the point PaulK kept bringing up. But I hadn't claimed any certainty past the one found in the old house as it were.
It's too bad you've been reduced to this in the absence of being able to support your statement.
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