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consider this message in the context that out of thousands of extant manuscripts of Scripture dated to within 400 years of original authorship, even the jot and tittle match between scrolls of varying discovery.

Well, no. For one reason, the great majority of the manuscripts are of the New Testament, the oldest of them are in Greek, and the jot and tittle are Hebrew orthography. For another, there are variations in most of them, but these are the normal types one would expect when 1. copying rapidly (certain letters look like other letters if written rapidly) or under poor lighting conditions (certain letters look like other letters under the best of lighting) or 2. transcribing what is being read aloud (this was the old timey version of a copy machine. A reader would read the text aloud to a group of scribes who would then make copies of what was being read--either the speaker or the listener could mistake one word for another) or 3. mistaking the first letters of the succeeding word or the last letters of the preceding word as part of either, resulting in two different words in succession (much ancient Greek was written in a continuous stream of letters--spacing between words wasn't used. The oldest Greek manuscripts were all written in capital letters as well. So what's this sentence saying: "AFTERSEEINGTHEDOGSHITWETURNEDAWAY"?).

But most of these are all relatively easy to detect through the science of textual criticism. And one is able to trace the origin and succession of manuscripts by the pattern of textual variations. Once certain variants have been incorporated, the manuscript and copies of it are identifiable through these variants. One can also distinguish between manuscripts that have been compiled from more than one source by the unique placement of these textual variations.

In some cases, the variations cannot be distinguished. For example, the word for plural "us" looks almost exactly like the word for plural "you". The first letter looks like a lower case "n" or lower case "u". In writing these by hand, it's easy for one to end up looking like the other or like something in between. The resulting sentence often makes sense regardless of the pronoun, but there are no doctrinal matters that hang in the balance as a result.

The protocols for transcribing a new scroll within the Mesorites (sp?) was fairly rigorous from what I recall. The parchment or lambskin had to be from a kosher fed pure lamb, no blemish in the skin, cured by specific ceremony, then made ready for transcribing. Ink had similar rigorous protocols for its manufacture. Then the scribe was required to have fasted, and on certain lineage, transcribing in a specific fashion after sacrificial systems used to insure holiness. On top of that, the scribes had little poems, songs,..similar to what today's military calls 'jodies' to work by in physical training, except the 'jodies' used by the scribes indicated how many characters per line, lines per page, lines per book, etc as a checking system similar to a Hollorith code to confirm their work. If at any time the copy was in error, it had to be formally destroyed.

Compare that rigor to human ability to still understand meaning even when words are grossly in error as the topic of this post indicates.

The argument I pose is that the textual criticisms levied against Scripture, tend to be made on very legalistic perspectives. Even where they fail legally, they entire appeal to the law seems a bit moot considering the message meant in much of Scripture.