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Study Section 12: Methods of Translating the Bible - continued

12.1 Connect.

How would you like to sit and listen to a person read to you for 12 hours and at the same
time, copy exactly what he said down on a piece of paper? Sound interesting? Think you
would enjoy getting up in the morning for a fun day? Oh, and by the way, just before you
enter the room along with 30 other copyists, you have to take a shower.

If when you are copying, you make a mistake, you have to tear your work up and start all
over again, so you try to be very careful not to goof anything up. Then when you all get to the end of
the page, the narrator reads the words backwards from bottom to top and you follow along making sure
every word is exact. Then he counts the number of words on a page, and you count yours. If you are off
by one, you have to throw your copy away. You can probably do about four or five pages per day, and
that’s what you do six days per week. Sound interesting? That’s exactly what the early scribes who
made copies of God’s Word went through on a daily basis. Let’s see how they fared…..

12.2 Objectives.

1. The student should be able to describe the various errors that scribes made in the
Scriptorium when copying the Bible.

2. The student should be able to explain how we can correct the errors found in a copy by using
other copies to determine when and why a variant entered the text.

3. The student should be able to determine how accurate the translations and copies we have today are
from the original manuscripts or autographs.

12.3 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

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