How do we know The Bible wasn't lost in translation?

There's a lot of rumors out there about Christianity in general and The Bible more specifically. A lot of them involve the translation process; some claim that the evil Catholic Church changed the Bible in medieval era in order to control the people (despite the fact that the majority of Catholics couldn't even read) while others of the more anti-Semitic variety claim the Jews changed their own scriptures in order to control both their own people and the whole world (which makes a lot of sense when less than 5% of the worlds population believes in God at the time...oh wait no it doesn't.)

But seriously, isn't it true that the Bible had been translated so many times into different languages that its true meaning was lost? Well for a long time there wasn't strong historical evidence that this wasn't the case, but then we found the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Scrolls were a number of scrolls found around the Dead Sea in the 20th century. They date back as far back as one hundred years before Jesus was born. They included many pieces of Biblical books, in fact they gave us a record of every Old Testament book except for Esther. Using this ancient version of the Hebrew Bible experts compared the text with the modern Bible and get this: there was no more than a 98% difference. That means that within about 2000 years the Hebrew Bible (not including Esther) was almost perfectly preserved; the parts that were different weren't major issues either.

"What about the New Testament?" you might ask. Well due in large part to the activities of the Romans (such as the fire of Rome--ironically blamed on the Christians or the destruction of Judea after the Jewish revolt in about the year 70 A.D) we don't any first century manuscripts for the New Testament. And so we must rely on a different method to determine the reliability of the New Testament books: textual criticism.

Textual criticism involves looking at the earliest manuscripts we do have and then comparing those manuscripts to our modern translations. It turns out that the New Testament we have today is also more than 98% accurate, this is especially true of modern translations like the New International Version which bases it`s translation on our most reliable manuscripts.

So my dear anti-organized religion psychos and neo-nazis: both the Old and New Testament are more than 98% the same as they were 2000 years ago.*

So we can trust The Bible.

*With the exception of the book of Esther.