Sacred Books - Textual Corruption
All the imperfections which adhere to human productions adhere also to scriptures. By the slow and laborious process of copying and recopying the manuscript by hand, in course of time so much of the original must have been changed, so many interpolations and additions must have been added to it, that if the original writer should be confronted to-day with his works, he would probably deny his authorship.
It is hard enough to be accurate now, in the age of printing; what must it have been when books had to be copied by the pen. Suppose the copyist, without any special instruction or guide, simply sat down to make a transcript, probably writing from dictation, of the MS. which he had bought or borrowed. In the first place, he was almost certain to make some slips, either of the pen or of the ear; but, besides this, in all probability the volume before him would contain slips of the previous copyist. Was he to copy these mistakes exactly as they stood, and so perpetuate the error, or would he not in very many cases think himself able to detect and correct the slips of his predecessor? If he took the latter course, it was very possible for him to overrate his own capacity and make a new mistake. And so, bit by bit, if there were no control, if each scribe acted independently, and without the assistance of a regular school, errors were sure to be multiplied, and the text would be certain to present many variations.
Manuscripts were copied and recopied by scribes who not only sometimes made errors in letters and words, but permitted themselves to introduce new material into the text, or to combine in one manuscript, without mark or division, writings composed by different men. It was a widespread practice to make on the edges of manuscripts notes of other matter, perhaps found in other manuscripts, that seemed relevant and important. A subsequent copyist was not unlikely to embody these in the text. And so variations and corruptions of the original text multiplied.
How a common or received text was finally formed is not certainly known; but that it was by no adequate critical process is certain. Instead of collecting all possible texts, and compiling one from these, according to sound critical rules, it is probable that the scribes chose some single manuscript as a standard, that all subsequent copies were made from this, and that all other existing texts were as far as possible destroyed. Thus, instead of giving a text that can be relied upon, by cutting off sources of comparison they made it impossible ever to get such a text.
The man who had bought or copied a book, if he could make it more convenient for use by adding a note here, putting in a word there, or incorporating additional matter derived from another source, had no hesitation in doing so. In short, every ancient scholar who copied or annotated a book for his own use was very much in the position of a modern editor, with the difference that at that time there was no system of footnotes, brackets, and explanatory prefaces, by which the insertions could be distinguished from the original text.
There can be no doubt that the standard copy which was ultimately selected, to the exclusion of all others, owed this distinction not to any critical labor which had been spent upon it, but to some external circumstance that gave it a special reputation. The very errors and corrections and accidental peculiarities of the MS. were kept just as they stood when it was chosen to be the archetype of all future copies.
In the earlier centuries copies of the Bible circulated and were freely read even by learned men like the author of the Book of Jubilees, which had great and notable variations of text, not inferior in extent to those still existing in the New Testament MSS. In later times every trace of these varying copies disappears. They must have been suppressed, or gradually superseded by a deliberate effort, which has been happily compared by the German scholar Noldeke to the action of the Caliph Othman in destroying all copies of the Koran which diverged from the standard text that he adopted.
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