Toto

From your link:

mountainman

Were the scribes who copied the new testament "original manuscripts" christians themselves, or were they Greek literate "slaves" of Christians, or were they 3rd party non christian contractors? Or was this copying job important enough for the attention of the "Early Christian Bishops" themselves?

Did the NT get copied in Latin before Nicaea? How do the Latin Christians such as Tertullian get their copies? Eusebius is the only source. What does he say?

Obviously scribes were human and made many mistakes, especially if there was a great deal of work pressure (eg: like when Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Bible from the scriptoria managed by the Bible's Editor-In-Chief Eusebius). The oldest surviving Greek codices exhibit a huge amount of scribal errors and many conjecture that these codices are either some of the originals, or copies of the original 50 Constantine Bibles. But before the 4th century, who can say?

Does Ehrman deal with the indentity and "class" and role of these scribes? eg: were they Christian or "slaves" -- before the 4th century?

Baalazel

Your "must have" has meaning only if there were few mistakes but in fact there were thousands. Ehrman says there are more variations than there are words in the NT. In the 18th century at least 30,000 had been published and it was estimated at the time that there were hundreds of thousands already found.

There were no paid scribes until well into the fourth century. Until then all copies were made by amateurs and often poorly educated ones (though well meaning) at that.

It is absurd to assume that someone who had spent months copying a text would then spend months proofing it when they weren't being paid.
They made mistakes. Maybe they caught some. Many were not caught. It is not as if there was a delete button on the inkwell. The only real choice was to start over.

As I said above your "must have" is meaningless. It is not evidence as to the accuracy of the copyists. It is merely wishful thinking.

Minimalist is correct. You should read Ehrman.

Baal

MarkA

Some ways error could plausibly creep into scribal copying.

If a scribe was some way into a page and made an error, either because they were tired, or through lack of attention, etc, is it likely that individual would scrap the entire work done up to that point and start over? The material being used to write on was expensive and the work was dull. They may be in more trouble if they reported the error than not.

If a scribe came across a word or phrase they were unfamiliar with would they simply copy it as is or would they assume an earlier scribe had made an error and 'correct' it?

If a scribe came across a word or phrase that made no sense to them, either because it did not fit in with the stories they had been told about a particular individual or event, or the word had changed meaning over time and now did not mean what it did in the past, would they change it?

aa5874

You may be dealing with "Chinese whispers". Please read up on "scribes". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe

You think scribes were idiots?

Now, a Jewish scribe must verbalise each word LOUDLY and there was a review every 30 days.

And you need to understand that people actually read manuscripts in antiquity that were copied by scribes just as people today read books that were printed in a printing press.

aa5874

You don't know what you are talking about. Please read up on scribes from a non-christian source.

IT is not really known who first copied the Jesus fables or who first wrote any version of the Jesus fables.

Who knows? The first Jesus fable could have been written in an underground cave only at nights to conceal the identities of the authors.

And if Jesus believers were being persecuted then perhaps no real scribe ever copied the Jesus fables until the 4th century.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe

Toto

Why do you keep quoting this when it states that "many variations and errors occurred" in the transmission of the Hebrew scriptures? Were the Christian scribes any different?

aa5874

You said scribes were slaves BUT the link claims scribes were of the socially elite and well educated in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

You said scribes were not paid but scribes did not only copy books they had other functions and appear to have been gainfully employed.

And why do you ONLY state "many variations and errors occurred" when when the first part of the very passage state "the texts on the whole testify to the accuracy of the scribes copying down through the ages".

Toto

We're talking about the Roman Empire here, not the earlier societies.

It depends on the society.

The quote implies that "accuracy" includes variations and errors. Writers who want to support the accuracy of the texts emphasize how few errors there are. No one has ever claimed that there were no errors - except you.

mountainman

All these assertions while true are essentially superfluous to discussion because the texts and manuscripts being compared are aknowledged by consensus to be from the late fourth century and relate to analysis of the Vaticanus, the Alexandrinus and the Sinaticus.

From this analysis many people have commented on the in some cases attrocious erros made by scribes. However many have also pointed out that these oldest of the Greek manuscripts of the NT are likely to be one of, or copies of, the original 50 codices ordered by Constantine c.330 CE. We might expect such errors in such a momentous task of copying the Constantine Codex fifty times.

But none of this relates to the scribal activity before the 4th century, since we do not have any major manuscripts with which to make the comparison to the earlier mentioned codices.

What source tells us this? Porphyry preserved Euclid in the early 4th century. Furthermore the scribes under the instruction of Constantine and the management of Eusebius are described as "professionals".

They would obviously proof each page as they went. One class who were literate in Greek and writing were the various members of the "Sacred College of Pontifices" (ie: the upper Graeco-Roman priesthood) and their associates who attended to day to day business of the running of the state. The major Graeco-Roman temples were generally associated with major libraries, and thus were equipped for the copying of texts.

How the "Early Christians" copied their texts is highly conjectural, since the earliest texts appear to be 4th century remnants of Constantine's Codices. The papyri fragments from the rubbish dumps of Oxy are presumed to be earlier than the 4th century, but do not present contiguous texts.