The first Christian copyists

Every surviving manuscript of the New Testament was copied by someone. For the first three centuries of the church, these were not monks in a monastery scriptorium, and certainly not printers. They were Christians, and sometimes paid professionals, copying books for their own churches, for friends, or for themselves, in a world where Christianity was a small and sometimes persecuted movement. What do we know about them, and how good were they at their work?

Who copied?

In the Roman world, books were copied in several ways. Wealthy households owned educated slaves trained as scribes. Professional copyists could be hired. Private individuals with good handwriting copied books they wanted to own. There were bookshops in large cities, but most literature circulated through networks of friends: you borrowed a book and had it copied.

Early Christian books seem to have circulated in the same way. Kim Haines-Eitzen, in Guardians of Letters, argues that the earliest Christian scribes were mostly people who were also copyists in ordinary life: literate men and some women who handled documents, letters and literature, and who used their skills for the church. Many early Christian manuscripts are written in a clear, practical hand rather than the elegant book hand of a luxury edition. Colin Roberts described this as a “reformed documentary” hand: the writing of someone used to business documents, making an effort to write a book.

That does not mean the copies were careless. It means they were made by people for whom these were working books, to be read aloud in worship and studied.

Signs of a Christian scribal culture

Several features of early Christian manuscripts show shared habits, a kind of Christian scribal culture that formed very early.

The codex. As described in Papyrus, parchment and the codex, Christian scribes overwhelmingly used the codex for scripture, at a time when others still preferred the scroll.

The sacred names. Christian scribes wrote certain words in abbreviated form with a line drawn above: God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, and later Spirit, cross, Father, son, man and others. These are called the nomina sacra (“sacred names”), a term coined by the scholar Ludwig Traube in 1907. “Jesus,” for example, was written with just its first and last letters, or first two and last, with a line over the top. This practice is found in virtually every early Christian manuscript, from the earliest papyri onwards, across different regions. Larry Hurtado argues that it was a deliberate expression of reverence, perhaps influenced by Jewish treatment of the divine name, and that its consistency shows the scribes were part of a connected movement with shared conventions.

Reading aids. Many early manuscripts have features that help a public reader: wider spacing, larger letters, marks dividing sense units, and occasional breathing and accent marks. These were books meant to be read aloud in church.

How careful were they?

The best evidence comes from the papyri themselves. Because scholars can compare each manuscript with many others, they can identify readings found only in that one manuscript, called singular readings. Most singular readings are probably the copyist’s own slips. By studying them, scholars can describe each scribe’s habits.

Ernest Colwell pioneered this work in the 1960s, and James Royse completed a massive study, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (2008), of the six largest early papyri. His findings include:

• P75, containing much of Luke and John and dated around 200 CE or somewhat later, was copied with great care. Its scribe made relatively few mistakes, and its text agrees very closely with that of Codex Vaticanus, copied a century or more later. That agreement shows that a text very like Vaticanus’s was already being copied accurately much earlier.
• P66, a copy of John from around the same time, has many errors, but also many corrections, most of them made by the original scribe checking his work against his exemplar. It is a window into a scribe at work, making mistakes and catching them.
• P45, a third-century copy of the Gospels and Acts, has a scribe who seems to have copied phrase by phrase, sometimes smoothing or shortening the wording while keeping the sense.
• P46, a copy of Paul’s letters from around 200 CE, has a large number of slips, many of them simple errors such as skipping a word, but its text is generally regarded as early and valuable.

One surprising conclusion of Royse’s study is that these early scribes were more likely to leave words out by accident than to add them. That overturned a long-held rule of thumb that “the shorter reading is to be preferred,” and has made textual critics more cautious in applying it.

The overall picture is of scribes with varying skill and varying care, most of them trying to reproduce their exemplar, and some of them very good indeed. Their mistakes are the ordinary mistakes of hand-copying, which are described in How scribes made mistakes.

Early Christians on careful copying

Early Christian writers knew that copying could go wrong, and some took steps to prevent it.

The book of Revelation ends with a solemn warning against adding to or taking away from “the words of the prophecy of this book” (Revelation 22:18–19). Whatever else it means, it shows awareness that a text could be altered in copying.

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons around 180 CE, ended one of his works with a direct appeal to anyone who copied it. As Eusebius preserves it, Irenaeus adjures the copyist, by the Lord Jesus Christ and his coming in judgement, to compare the copy with the original and correct it carefully, and to copy this appeal as well (Eusebius, Church History 5.20.2). If Irenaeus asked this for his own book, we can assume that Christian communities cared at least as much about their scriptures.

Origen, the great third-century scholar, complained that the differences among copies of the Gospels had become great, “either through the carelessness of some scribes or through the perverse audacity of others” who added or removed what they pleased (Commentary on Matthew 15.14). His complaint is evidence of the problem, and also of the solution: he and others compared manuscripts to establish the best text.

Correctors and scriptoria

From the fourth century, with the church legal and growing fast, copying became more organised. Bishops and wealthy Christians commissioned large, expensive Bibles. Around 331 CE the emperor Constantine wrote to Eusebius of Caesarea asking for fifty copies of the scriptures, written on fine parchment by skilled professional scribes, for the churches of his new capital, Constantinople (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36).

Caesarea in Palestine had a famous Christian library, founded with Origen’s books and expanded by the scholar Pamphilus. A note in Codex Sinaiticus, added by a later corrector at the end of the books of Ezra and Esther, records that the text had been checked against a very old manuscript corrected by the martyr Pamphilus himself. Sinaiticus as a whole shows the work of several original scribes and numerous later correctors, who made many thousands of changes over the centuries (see Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus). Correction was a normal part of the life of a manuscript.

In the Middle Ages, copying moved largely into monasteries. Byzantine scribes produced the great majority of surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts, from the ninth century onwards, in a careful, standardised minuscule hand, and their text became increasingly uniform.

Why this matters

Knowing who the copyists were helps us weigh their work fairly. They were not infallible machines, and they were not careless amateurs either. They were people who valued these books highly, did their best to reproduce them, sometimes made mistakes, often caught them, and occasionally tried to improve the text in ways that we can now detect. The thousands of manuscripts they left behind are what make it possible to check their work, which is the subject of the articles on textual criticism later in this series.

Sources

• Colwell, Ernest C. “Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P45, P66, P75.” In Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 106–124. Leiden: Brill, 1969.
• Eusebius. Church History 5.20.2; Life of Constantine 4.36.
• Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Hill, Charles E., and Michael J. Kruger, eds. The Early Text of the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.
• Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Origen. Commentary on Matthew 15.14.
• Roberts, Colin H. Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt. Schweich Lectures 1977. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1979.
• Royse, James R. Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 36. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
• Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.