The Confession starts with the doctrine of revelation, or how people can know about God. The divines believed knowledge of God was available to people through nature as well as the Bible, but they also believed that the Bible, or Scripture, is the only way in which people attain saving knowledge of God. The doctrine of Scripture was also a particularly important area of debate at the time. Scholars had begun to argue that the Hebrew vowel points, marks added to the text to aid in pronunciation, of the Old Testament were probably not part of the original. This caused significant debate between Reformed polemicists and Roman Catholics. Catholics argued that such a discovery demonstrated the need for an authoritative magisterium to interpret the Bible as opposed to the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity, that the essential teachings of the Bible could be interpreted by anyone. English Reformed writers in particular took up the work of defending the Reformed doctrine. The divines had a strong view of the inspiration of the Bible, and believed that God revealed himself in the propositions found in Scripture. While the issue of biblical inerrancy, the belief that there are no errors in the Bible, did not arise until the eighteenth century, the divines clearly did not believe the Bible to contain any errors. Many of the divines held a rather mechanical view of biblical inspiration, believing that not only the words and ideas but also the letters and vowel points of the Hebrew text were inspired by God. On the other hand, they acknowledged that the text was written by humans in their own styles. They did not make any distinction between essential and incidental matters with respect to biblical inspiration.