VERY COOL

Here's a headline that caught my attention:

Pieces of Rare Biblical Manuscript Reunited

Every time there is a discovery like this, the richness of God's Word and is perseverance comes to life again. One half was in a London Museum and the other one was first in an Israeli Museum (recently moved in 2007 from a rare books library at Duke University in North Carolina.

No one knows why it was torn in half, but this 1300 year old document is one of very few pieces of the Hebrew Bible that survived that era.

It reminds me of how the Apostle Paul's letters were spread around to the various churches in the 1st century A.D. With copying manuscripts so cumbersome and copies relatively unavailable (at first), some letters were spread out in pieces to be shared at different churches. The fact that these pieces have been able to be compiled, and verified for authenticity, spanning the world is remarkable and evidence of their veracity. God's Word will not perish. I have not seen the movie, "Book of Eli", but I understand that it is about preserving the last copy of the Bible in a post nuclear holocaust.

While, much of the Old Testament began as oral tradition, their words were preserved over the ages. The same is true for the New Testament. Although the number of copies were sparse in the beginning, the Bible now is the best selling piece of literature with perhaps more copies in more hands than any other in the world. I read an article from The New Yorker that claims there are half a billion copies sold every year world wide, only 25 million of which are sold in the USA.