Misquoting Jesus

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Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
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publishing, electronic means of reproduction, and even moveable type. If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn’t been modified in the process of reproduction?

2
T HE C OPYISTS OF THE E ARLY C HRISTIAN W RITINGS
    A s we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from its very beginning was a literary religion, with books of all kinds playing a central role in the life and faith of the burgeoning Christian communities around the Mediterranean. How, then, was this Christian literature placed in circulation and distributed? The answer, of course, is that for a book to be distributed broadly, it had to be copied.
    C OPYING IN THE G RECO-ROMAN W ORLD
    The only way to copy a book in the ancient world was to do it by hand, letter by letter, one word at a time. It was a slow, painstaking process—but there was no alternative. Accustomed as we are today to seeing multiple copies of books appear on the shelves of major book chains around the country just days after they are published, we simply accept that one copy of, say, The Da Vinci Code will be exactly like anyother copy. None of the words will ever vary—it will be exactly the same book no matter which copy we read. Not so in the ancient world. Just as books could not easily be distributed en masse (no trucks or planes or railroads), they could not be produced en masse (no printing presses). And since they had to be copied by hand, one at a time, slowly, painstakingly, most books were not mass produced. Those few that were produced in multiple copies were not all alike, for the scribes who copied texts inevitably made alterations in those texts—changing the words they copied either by accident (via a slip of the pen or other carelessness) or by design (when the scribe intentionally altered the words he copied). Anyone reading a book in antiquity could never be completely sure that he or she was reading what the author had written. The words could have been altered. In fact, they probably had been, if only just a little.
    Today, a publisher releases a set number of books to the public by having them sent to bookstores. In the ancient world, since books were not mass produced and there were no publishing companies or bookstores, things were different. 1 Usually an author would write a book, and possibly have a group of friends read it or listen to it being read aloud. This would provide a chance for editing some of the book’s contents. Then when the author was finished with the book, he or she would have copies made for a few friends and acquaintances. This, then, was the act of publication, when the book was no longer solely in the author’s control but in the hands of others. If these others wanted extra copies—possibly to give to other family members or friends—they would have to arrange to have copies made, say, by a local scribe who made copies for a living, or by a literate slave who copied texts as part of his household duties.
    We know that this process could be maddeningly slow and inaccurate, that the copies produced this way could end up being quite different from the originals. Testimony comes to us from ancient writers themselves. Here I will mention just a couple of interesting examples from the first century C . E . In a famous essay on the problem of anger, the Roman philosopher Seneca points out that there is a difference between anger directed at what has caused us harm and anger at what can do nothing to hurt us. To illustrate the latter category he mentions “certain inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we often hurl from us because it is written in too small a script or tear up because it is full of mistakes.” 2 It must have been a frustrating

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