Free Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman Page B

compare his transcription with the copies from which he made it. 12
    These are dire threats—hellfire and brimstone—for simply changing some words of a text. Some authors, though, were fully determined to make sure their words were transmitted intact, and no threat couldbe serious enough in the face of copyists who could change texts at will, in a world that had no copyright laws.
    C HANGES OF THE T EXT
    It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another. Scribes could be incompetent: it is important to recall that most of the copyists in the early centuries were not trained to do this kind of work but were simply the literate members of their congregations who were (more or less) able and willing. Even later, starting in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian scribes emerged as a professional class within the church, 13 and later still when most manuscripts were copied by monks devoted to this kind of work in monasteries—even then, some scribes were less skilled than others. At all times the task could be drudgery, as is indicated in notes occasionally added to manuscripts in which a scribe would pen a kind of sigh of relief, such as “The End of the Manuscript. Thanks Be to God!” 14 Sometimes scribes grew inattentive; sometimes they were hungry or sleepy; sometimes they just couldn’t be bothered to give their best effort.
    Even scribes who were competent, trained, and alert sometimes made mistakes. Sometimes, though, as we have seen, they changed the text because they thought it was supposed to be changed. This was not just for certain theological reasons, however. There were other reasons for scribes to make an intentional change—for example, when they came across a passage that appeared to embody a mistake that needed to be corrected, possibly a contradiction found in the text, or amistaken geographical reference, or a misplaced scriptural allusion. Thus, when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow. But the changes were made nonetheless, and the author’s original words, as a result, may have become altered and eventually lost.
    An interesting illustration of the intentional change of a text is found in one of our finest old manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus (so named because it was found in the Vatican library), made in the fourth century. In the opening of the book of Hebrews there is a passage in which, according to most manuscripts, we are told that “Christ bears [Greek: PHERŌN] all things by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). In Codex Vaticanus, however, the original scribe produced a slightly different text, with a verb that sounded similar in Greek; here the text instead reads: “Christ manifests [Greek: PHANERŌN] all things by the word of his power.” Some centuries later, a second scribe read this passage in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word manifests to the more common reading bears —erasing the one word and writing in the other. Then, again some centuries later, a third scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!”
    I have a copy of the page framed and hanging on the wall above my desk as a constant reminder about scribes and their proclivities to change, and rechange, their texts. Obviously it is