Free Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living (cf. Hermas, above); they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation who could make copies (since they were literate) and wanted to do so.
    Some of these people—or most of them?—may have been the leaders of the communities. We have reason to think that the earliest Christian leaders were among the wealthier members of the church, in that the churches typically met in the homes of their members (there were no church buildings, that we know of, during the first two centuries of the church) and only the homes of the wealthier members would have been sufficiently large to accommodate very many people, since most people in ancient urban settings lived in tiny apartments. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the person who provided the home also provided the leadership of the church, as is assumed in a number of the Christian letters that have come down to us, in which an author will greet so-and-so and “the church that meets in his home.” These wealthier homeowners would probably have been more educated, and so it is no surprise that they are sometimes exhorted to “read” Christian literature to their congregations, as we have seen, for example, in 1 Tim. 4:13: “Until I come, pay special heed to [public] reading, to exhortation, and to teaching.” Is it possible, then, that church leaders were responsible, at least a good bit of the time, for the copying of the Christian literature being read to the congregation?
    P ROBLEMS WITH C OPYING E ARLY C HRISTIAN T EXTS
    Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes, 8 at least in the first two or three centuries of the church, but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations who could do the job and were willing to do so, we can expect that in the earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription. Indeed, we have solid evidence that this was the case, as itwas a matter of occasional complaint by Christians reading those texts and trying to uncover the original words of their authors. The third-century church father Origen, for example, once registered the following complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
    The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please. 9
    Origen was not the only one to notice the problem. His pagan opponent Celsus had, as well, some seventy years earlier. In his attack on Christianity and its literature, Celsus had maligned the Christian copyists for their transgressive copying practices:
    Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2.27)
    What is striking in this particular instance is that Origen, when confronted with an outsider ’s allegation of poor copying practices among Christians, actually denies that Christians changed the text, despite the fact that he himself decried the circumstance in his other writings. The one exception he names in his reply to Celsus involves several groups of heretics, who, Origen claims, maliciously altered the sacred texts. 10
    We have already seen this charge that heretics sometimes modified the texts they copied in order to make them stand in closer conformity with their own views, for this was the accusation leveled against the second-century philosopher-theologian Marcion, who presented his canon of eleven scriptural books only after excising those portions that contradicted his notion that, for Paul, the God of the Old Testament was not the true