Try copying a page of text by hand, carefully, and then have someone check it against the original. Unless you are very practised, you will probably find a few mistakes: a word left out, a line skipped, a letter wrong, perhaps a word you were sure was there but was not. Ancient scribes were far more practised than most of us, but they were human, and they made the same kinds of mistakes.

That might sound worrying. In fact it is one of the reasons we can recover the text with confidence. Copying errors fall into recognisable patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can often see exactly how a mistake happened and which reading came first. This article describes the main kinds of error, with examples from both Testaments.

Mistakes of the eye

Most copying errors happen as the scribe’s eye moves between the exemplar and the new copy.

Skipping: same ending, same beginning

The most common major error is caused by two words or lines that end (or begin) the same way. The scribe copies up to the first one, looks back at the exemplar, and the eye lands on the second. Everything between is lost. When the similar endings cause it, this is called homoeoteleuton (“same ending”); with similar beginnings, homoeoarcton. The general term for leaving something out by accident is haplography (“writing once”).

A clear New Testament example is 1 John 2:23: “Whoever denies the Son, the same doesn’t have the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also.” In Greek, both halves end with the same words, “the Father.” Many later manuscripts skip from the first “the Father” to the second and leave out the second half of the verse. Several of the Greek texts printed in the sixteenth century lacked it. The King James translators of 1611 included the words but printed them in italics, the type they used for words they were unsure of or had supplied.

An Old Testament example is 1 Samuel 14:41. In the Masoretic text, Saul’s prayer is very short: literally, “Give a perfect lot” (the World English Bible has “Show the right”). The Greek Septuagint has a much longer prayer, which in a literal rendering runs: “LORD God of Israel, why have you not answered your servant today? If the fault is in me or in my son Jonathan, give Urim; but if it is in your people Israel, give Thummim.” The longer text contains “Israel” twice; a scribe’s eye seems to have jumped from the first to the second, dropping the words between. Many modern translations, such as the NRSV, NIV and ESV, restore the longer reading.

Repeating

The opposite mistake is dittography (“writing twice”): the eye goes back to a point already copied, and a letter, word or line is repeated. These are usually easy to spot and correct, because they produce obvious nonsense.

Letters that look alike

Some letters are easily confused, especially in a worn or poorly written exemplar. In Hebrew square script, dalet and resh, which differ only by a tiny corner, are notoriously alike, as are waw and yod. One result can be seen by comparing parallel passages in the Old Testament. Genesis 10:4 names a grandson of Japheth as “Dodanim”; the parallel list in 1 Chronicles 1:7 has “Rodanim.” The only difference is a dalet or a resh. The Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch support “Rodanim” in Genesis too, and the name may refer to the people of Rhodes.

In Greek manuscripts written in capital letters without spaces between words, certain letters could be confused, and words could be divided in the wrong place. An unbroken string of letters sometimes allows two divisions, and scribes had to decide which was meant.

Mistakes of the ear and the memory

Sounds alike

Sometimes scribes wrote from dictation, and sometimes they spoke the words under their breath as they copied. Either way, words that sounded the same could be confused. In later Greek, several vowels and diphthongs came to be pronounced alike, a process called itacism. In particular, the Greek words for “we” and “you” (plural) sounded almost the same, and they are constantly interchanged in manuscripts.

A famous example is Romans 5:1. Some manuscripts read “we have peace with God,” others “let us have peace with God.” The two Greek words differ only in one vowel, a short o or a long o, which were pronounced alike. Here the “let us have” reading actually has strong early support, but most scholars think “we have” fits Paul’s argument better and is original. It is a good example of how textual critics must weigh both the manuscripts and the context.

Memory and familiarity

Scribes who knew the Bible well might write what they remembered instead of what was in front of them. This is especially common in the Gospels, where parallel passages invite harmonisation. The best-known case is the Lord’s Prayer. Luke’s version (Luke 11:2–4) is shorter than Matthew’s (Matthew 6:9–13): it begins simply “Father,” and lacks “your will be done” and “deliver us from evil.” Many later manuscripts of Luke add those phrases, bringing Luke into line with the more familiar Matthew. The King James Version, translated from such manuscripts, has the longer form in Luke.

Similarly, the doxology “For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen” at the end of Matthew 6:13 is absent from the earliest manuscripts of Matthew. It appears in the second-century church manual called the Didache in a similar form, and seems to have been added from use in worship.

Changes made on purpose

Not all changes were accidents. Sometimes a scribe deliberately altered the text, usually with good intentions, to correct what looked like a mistake or to make the meaning clearer.

Correcting an apparent error. Mark 1:2–3 introduces a quotation, in the earliest manuscripts, with “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,” but the quotation combines words from Malachi 3:1 with Isaiah 40:3. Many later manuscripts change the introduction to “As it is written in the prophets,” which avoids the apparent difficulty. The earliest manuscripts have “in Isaiah the prophet,” and that is almost certainly what Mark wrote.

Clarifying. Scribes sometimes added a name or a word to make a sentence clearer: “Jesus said” where the original had only “he said,” or “the Lord” where the original had only “he.” Such additions are generally easy to spot, because different manuscripts add different clarifications in different places.

Theological changes. In a small number of places, scribes seem to have changed wording for theological reasons, for example to protect or emphasise a belief about Christ. Bart Ehrman has argued in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture that such changes were more common than once thought. Other scholars think he overstates the case. Either way, these changes are detectable, precisely because we have so many manuscripts to compare.

Errors that are hard to see

Some errors leave the text grammatical and sensible. One example is 1 Thessalonians 2:7. Paul says that he and his companions were either “gentle among you” or “infants among you.” The two Greek words differ by a single letter, n, and the preceding word ends in that same letter. A scribe could easily add or drop it. The earliest manuscripts mostly read “infants,” but many scholars think “gentle” fits the following comparison to a nursing mother better. Translations divide, and some mention both. This is the kind of question where careful judgement is needed, and where honest translations show their reasoning.

How we catch them

How can we tell, in any particular case, which reading is the original and which the mistake? The basic principle is this: the reading that best explains how the others arose is most likely to be original.

  • If one reading could easily have produced the other by skipping between similar endings, the longer reading is probably original.
  • If one reading looks like a harmonisation with a parallel passage, the reading that differs is probably original.
  • If one reading looks like a scribe’s correction of a difficulty, the harder reading is probably original.

These principles are applied together with the evidence of the manuscripts themselves: how old they are, how good their scribes were, and how widely a reading is attested in different regions. That combination is the method of textual criticism, described in How textual criticism works.

The important point is that most mistakes leave fingerprints. With thousands of manuscripts to compare, a mistake made in one copy will usually be absent from many others. The errors of individual scribes do not disappear; they are caught, and they become evidence.

Sources

  • Ehrman, Bart D. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr. Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994.
  • 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. Chapter 7.
  • Royse, James R. Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
  • Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012. Chapter 4.
  • Wegner, Paul D. A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its History, Methods and Results. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.