Page 46 - Yahwehs Book

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The Mistakes of Copyists
1. Errors of Hand and Eye - The mistakes of scribes are of many kinds and of varying importance.
Sometimes the copyist confuses words of similar sound, as in the English we sometimes find our
correspondents write there for their or here for hear. Sometimes he passes over a word by accident;
and this is especially likely to happen when two adjoining words end with the same letters.
Sometimes this cause of error operates more widely. Two successive lines of the manuscript from
which he is copying end with the same or similar words; and the copyist’s eye slips from the first
to the second, and the intermediate line is omitted. Sometimes a whole verse, or longer passage, may
be omitted owing to the identity of the first or last words with those of an adjoining passage.
Sometimes, again, the manuscript from which he is copying has been furnished with short
explanatory notes in the margin, and he fails to see where the text ends and the note begins, and so
copies the note into the text itself.

2. Errors of Mind - ... Errors of the mind are more dangerous, because they are less easy to detect.
The copyist’s mind wanders a little from the book he is copying, and he writes down words that come
mechanically into his head, just as we do nowadays if people talk while we are writing and distract
our attention. Some words are familiar in certain phrases, and the familiar phrase runs off the pen
of the copyist when the word should be written in some other combination. A form of this error is
very common in the manuscripts of the Gospels. The same event is often narrated in two or more of
them, in slightly different language; and the copyist, either consciously or unconsciously, alters the
words of the one version to make them the same as the other... Thus in Matt. xi.19 the Authorised
version has “But wisdom is justified of her children,” as in Luke vii. 35; but the Revised Version
tells us that the original text had “works” instead of “children” here, the truth being that the
copyists of all but the earliest extant manuscripts have altered it, so as to make it correspond with
the account in St. Luke... In Matthew xxiii. 14 a whole verse has probably been inserted from the
parallel passages in Mark and Luke, and so with Mark xv. 28. In Luke vi. 48 the concluding words
of the parable of the house built on the rock, “because it had been well builded,” have been altered
in “many ancient authorities” in accordance with the more striking and familiar phrase in St.
Matthew, “for it had been founded upon the rock.” Errors like these increase in the later copies...

3. Errors of Deliberate Alteration - An untrue hand or eye, or an over-true memory may do much
harm in a copyist; but worst and most dangerous of all is when the copyist begins to think for
himself. The veneration in which the sacred books were held has generally protected them against
intentional alteration, but not entirely so. The harmonisation of the Gospel narratives, described in
the last paragraph, has certainly in some cases been intentional; and that, no doubt, without the
smallest wish to deceive, but simply with the idea of supplementing the one narrative from its equally
authentic companion. Sometimes the alterations are more extensive. The earliest Greek translation
of the Old Testament contains several passages in the books of Esther and Daniel which are not
found in the Hebrew. The long passages, Mark xvi. 9-20 and John vii. 53-viii. 11, which are absent
from the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament, must have been either omitted in these, or
inserted in others intentionally. If, as is more probably the case, they have been inserted in the later
copies, this was no doubt done in order to supplement the Gospel from some other good source, and
the narratives are almost certainly authentic, though they may not have been written by the