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Differences in Ancient Copies of the Bible
Thousands of years ago, people wrote the books of the Bible. Other people then copied these books by hand and translated them. They did this work very carefully. Over the years many people made thousands of copies. However, people who looked at them later saw that there were small differences between the different copies. Some copiers left out some words by mistake. Some copiers wrote down a wrong word. Sometimes they added words or even sentences. They did this either by mistake or because they wanted to give more details about something. The Bibles that Christians have today are translations of the old copies. Some modern Bibles have some of these sentences that were added. In the ULB, these added sentences are usually written at the bottom of the pages of the Bible.
Bible scholars read many old copies and compared them with each other. For each place in the Bible where the Bible scholars found differences, they talked about the words that are different.Then they decided which words are most likely correct. The translators of the ULB used the words that scholars say are most likely correct.
For example, some Bibles have these words: “For the Son of Man came to save that which was lost” (see: Matthew 18:11). Scholars think that these words most likely were not in the original copies of the Gospel of Matthew. Therefore these words are not in the text of the ULB. They are talked about at the bottom of the page instead.