Page 70 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

During the first 300 years of Christianity, the Church
was under terrific persecution. Many in the church
had to worship underground in isolated pockets.
Copies of the letters of Paul or Luke were scarce and
were all made by hand by people whose profession
and training had nothing to do with copying Greek
Scripture. A great percentage of the textual variants
were introduced in the first 300 years of copies.
In the 300’s, Constantine legalized Christianity and
made it the state religion of Rome. Scribes were
employed by the church to make copies of the
scriptures to be disseminated among the empire.
Scriptoriums were set up and copying techniques
were formalized.

New manuscripts were copied directly from a mother
manuscript. Scribes misspelled a word, left out a
word phrase or whole line due to his eye catching a
similar or similar ending a line or two above on the
page he is copying.

How was the Bible translated?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5QpHK78Szk

Kinds of errors the scribes would make

In the Scriptorium, a master scribe would read from a passage of Scripture while other scribes wrote
what they heard on vellum for sometimes 12 hours or more during the day.

Words were misspelled, omitted. Sometimes whole phrases were omitted.

Harmonization occurred: Ex., Eph. 1:2 in Greek says: Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ whereas Col 1:2 in Greek says: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
Sometimes a scribe would miss a phrase when it was being read, he would realize he has left the phrase
out, so rather than throw away a very expensive piece of Vellum and loose his work to that point, he
would add the missing word in the margin.

Other scribes would make personal comments about a verse or passage or write a parallel passage in
the margin. That manuscript would then be sent to another scriptorium hundreds of miles away and be
used as the mother script. When a copyist would come to a marginal note, word, or phrase, most often
it was added into the text (better safe than sorry). As a result, later copies of the Bible became “fuller”
or longer.

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