The Transmission of the Biblical Writings – Common Textual Errors Part 1

In these blog posts, we are looking at the transmission of the Biblical texts. Last time we saw that to get copies of the texts, highly skilled individuals had to laboriously make individual copies by hand. The people doing this prior to and during the time of the New Testament were known as scribes. During the history of the Church, this task was eventually taken over by monks. Today we will begin to look at common errors that those copying the texts made.

Both Hebrew scribes and monks took great care to protect against errors when they made copies of texts. However, it was inevitable that mistakes would be made in the copying process. This could happen in many ways. However, several common mistakes were made. We take a brief look at these.

The first common mistake was simply confusing letters that looked very similar to one another. For example, consider how similar these Hebrew letters look to one another:

After hours of copying, it is easy to see how eyes could become tired and these letters could be confused with one another! Unfortunately, confusing these letters can create an entirely different word! Thus, a mistake would creep into the manuscript, and any future copies made from that copy would contain that error as well.

The second common mistake was the wrong division of words. This is because words were often written with little or no space between the words. This was done to save space, for the materials containing the texts were expensive and precious. However, when the copyist tried to read the words to remember them and then write on the new copy, sometimes they broke the word down incorrectly. Furthermore, over time manuscripts did leave space between words. In such cases, decisions had to be made when copying from the previous text that had little or no space. Imagine trying to copy a page of English writing with little or no space between the words and creating a copy with spaces between the words. When you read GODISNOWHERE – is it ‘God is now here’ or ‘God is nowhere’? This is what copyists had to deal with for hours on end.

Below is an example of a photo of a page from a New Testament manuscript. This will give you an idea of what it was like to look at and copy manuscripts. This should again remind us to give thanks for the people God used to copy His Word down for us! It was hard work!

In Christ,

Bret