We have seen in the last few weeks that scribes made all sorts of errors when copying the text of the New Testament. The vast majority of these are spelling errors. Even the NT writers themselves were not always particularly good spellers. John, for example, spells the exact same verb (third singular first aorist active indicative of anoigoÅ“) three different ways—and all in the space of nineteen verses (John 9.14–32)! Greek students at least should be comforted by the fact that at least one or two of the NT writers had problems with some verb forms.

That the NT writers were not always the best spellers, in fact, gives a partial clue as to why the scribes did what they did. On the one hand, scribes tended toward seeing some uniformity in the text they were copying. If they saw what they perceived to be a mistake in the exemplar they were copying, they would often correct it. Of course, if the exemplar was actually reproducing the original text’s wording, then the scribe unintentionally just introduced an error into the textual transmission. But since no manuscript was perfect, the scribes might naturally feel that they were restoring the original wording when they were in fact creating a new variant.

On the other hand, scribes also were not always attentive to their work. They could be fatigued, cold, have poor eyesight or poor memory, lose their place in the text, have faulty hearing, get distracted, etc. All of these and more conditions would account for unintentional mistakes. When a scribe lost his place in the text that he was copying from, he might find a different line that ended the same way. If that line came down farther on the page, the scribe would then skip some lines that he overlooked. This is known as haplography, or writing once what should have been written twice. Or a scribe could look up above the line he was supposed to copy from and would end up recopying the lines he had just copied. This is known as dittography, or writing twice what should have been written once. The same phenomenon happens because of similar endings on words, similar beginnings, or even similar middles (known as homoioteleuton, homoioarcton, homoiomeson, respectively).

One of the more well-known instances of a likely case of haplography due to line-homoioteleuton is found in 1 John 2.23. A literal translation of the standard Greek text reads:

Everyone who denies the Son neither has the Father.
The one who confesses the Son also has the Father.

Notice the similarity of the two lines of text: both end with ‘has the Father’ (duplicating the Greek). The majority of late manuscripts (known collectively as the Byzantine text-type or Byzantine text), however, drop the entirety of the second line. Yet that positive statement is found in the oldest manuscripts for this passage as well as the earliest versions and more than one early patristic writer. Further, the Byzantine text is prone to add material, smooth out the wording, expand on the text, etc., while the earlier manuscripts, especially the Alexandrian manuscripts, are not prone to any of these tendencies. Yet, in this instance the Byzantines omit and the Alexandrians add. What happened then? Most likely, the original editor of the Byzantine text committed the blunder of haplography. However, some might argue that the positive statement is too loose, that is, it gives assurance to someone who simply offers lip-service to God by ‘confessing the Son.’ But this argument won’t do: 1 John 4.15 is saying almost exactly the same thing (the one who confesses the Son is in God and God is in him), and the positive assessment is found in the Byzantine manuscripts there, too.

Other examples of unintentional error can be found by a glance at any Greek New Testament manuscript of sufficient length. A single late manuscript says, “we became horses among you” (!) in 1 Thess 2.7 instead of “we became little children” (which is probably the original wording) or “we became gentle” (another possibility for the original wording). How on earth could such a mistake happen? The word for ‘horses’ in Greek is hippoi, while the word for ‘gentle’ is eœpioi and the word for ‘little children’ is neœpioi. The inattentive scribe simply changed the text slightly, but the result was disastrous.

In another manuscript, Luke 5.39 has been inadvertently altered. The standard Greek text can be translated, “No one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘the old is fine.’” This seems to imply that the ‘wine’ that Jesus was speaking about was fermented (old grape juice is hardly something that someone would consider better than new grape juice). That’s offensive enough in some Christian circles today. But one medieval manuscript makes things even worse. It reads, “No one after making old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘the old is fine.’” Here Jesus would not just be speaking of wine-drinkers, but also of wine-makers. The difference in Greek is a single letter: pioœn vs. poioœn. It is of course possible that the scribe who committed this singular blunder might have been recently assigned to tend to the monastery vineyard and he was really looking forward to becoming a vintner! Hence, he added the omicron by way of a Freudian-like slip. But more likely, the scribe simply erred by adding a letter to the participle since that, too, was a word, and one that he had already written four times in the same chapter of Luke, three of which were in the previous dozen verses (5.6, 29, 33, 34).

All this is simply to illustrate that scribes were humans, too. They often created errors in their manuscripts unintentionally. But precisely because not all the same scribes committed the same errors in the same place, accidental errors are not a sufficient grounds for thinking that we cannot recover the wording of the original text.

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