Every Man His Own Scribe
I’ve decided to participate in a project started by Rick Brannan at Logos Bible Software that was mentioned on the ESV Bible Blog. The project is to have several people of varying Greek abilities copy a New Testament epistle by hand to see what kind of scribal errors they make. I doubt that anything valuable for New Testament textual criticism will be learned from the study; the anachronisms are too many and too great. It smacks of forcing textual criticism and history into a scientific mold. The value for me, however, will be increased appreciation for the work of scribes in copying the Bible. It will also be an opportunity to learn something about paleography; I’ve already checked out some books.
Several of the participants have written the project. Below are links to the most interesting articles, especially those containing photographs of the manuscripts that they have produced:
- Eli Evans: Manuscript Transmission Test (A)
- Eli Evans: Manuscript Transmission Test (B)
- Eli Evans: Manuscript Transmission Test (C)
- Rick Brannan: Comparing Text Editions to Determine Common Errors
- Rick Brannan: Manuscript Transmission, Scribal Habits, etc.
- Rick Brannan: Update: Manuscript Copying Project
- Rick Brannan: Manuscript Transmission Experiment: Status
- Rick Brannan: Copying Greek Text by Hand
- Suzanne McCarthey: Manuscript Copying
Posted 17 Feb. 2006 at 12:51 pm | Permalink
That’s interesting. In high school, we had a class in which the students had to copy by hand a full book of the Bible (in English of course). The key, though, was that they had to use some of the error-checking methods of the Hebrew scribes, including reading through the text backwards, letter by letter. Also, the work had to be done in pen, and if they made any mistake (even a punctuation error), they had to restart the entire page of text. I didn’t take the class myself, because they started offering it the year after I was past that grade, but I knew it helped those who did participate gain a great appreciation for the work the scribes took to make sure that the manuscripts were correctly copied.