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The Scribes and the Book of Revelation: How Do You
Copy a Book Full of Bad Grammar?
Page 3 of 4
3. Bring in the Scribes
As you already know, before the invention of printing, books were
made by hand. The spread of Christian churches created a huge demand for
copies of the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Acts, the other
letters, and the Book of Revelation. Huge numbers of handmade copies
were therefore produced, and in this way the text of the New Testament
was transmitted through all those centuries before the printing press.
(To say nothing of the Hebrew Bible, the church’s Old Testament, but
that is another story for another time.)
In the earliest period, copies were made on a more or less informal
basis. In the case of the Book of Revelation, its initial publication
consisted in its being copied out seven times and sent round to seven
churches in Asia. Thirty years later a
fellow named Papias seems to have had access to the book in the region
where it was published (he was from there himself). Forty years later a
Christian philosopher named Justin encountered the book, probably in
Ephesus, and when he moved to Rome,
he had access to a copy, either because he brought along his own copy or
because one had reached Rome before him. Eighty
years later the Christian scholar Irenaeus, born in
Smyrna, one of the seven churches, went to school in
Rome, and when he became bishop of Lyons
carried his books with him into southern
France—among them a copy of Revelation.
Meanwhile the book had reached Egypt as well, for a little papyrus
fragment of it has turned up from the second century (p98),
and even more substantial fragments from the third century (p18,
p47, and
p115 unless it is fourth century). The manuscripts from this
early period reveal their nature as private copies made by individuals.
For instance, the copyist of p18 happened to have a scroll of
the Book of Exodus that was blank on the reverse side, so he or she used
it to copy out the Book of Revelation.
By the fourth century the process had become more formalized, and the
manuscripts show it. The question of canon (that is, which books were
acknowledged as Scripture) was not as fluid now as it had once been, and
books were copied in standard groupings: the four Gospels went together
into a single volume, the letters of Paul including the Pastoral Letters
and Hebrews went into a single volume, Acts and the Catholic Letters
went into a volume, and Revelation went into a volume by itself. Someone
was even wealthy enough here and there to produce manuscripts that
contained the entire Bible, both Testaments, in a single codex! But this
is extremely rare.
The methods of book production changed, too. Manuscripts were more
and more copied out by people who did it as a career specialty and less
by the private souls who simply wanted a book. Scriptoria were
established in major Christian centers. Surely one existed in
Alexandria
by Dionysius’ time, since the catechetical school was there, and Alexandria was the
intellectual center of the Empire at that time, and had the greatest
library in antiquity. In a scriptorium, several scribes would be set up
with pen and ink and a blank book, and they would write as someone read
the text out loud to them slowly and carefully. In this way multiple
copies could be made at the same time.
There is, by the way, a variant reading in Revelation that must have
arisen in a scriptorium when some scribes heard one thing and other
scribes heard something else. It is in 1:5, and here are the
possibilities: (1) “to him who loosed—λύσαντι—us
from our sins”
p18
א
A C 1611 2050 2329 2352 and the manuscripts with the Andreas commentary
and (2) “to him who washed—λούσαντι—us
from our sins” P 1006 1841 1854 2053 2062 and the manuscripts of the
Koine type. The two words are sounded the same, or almost the same, so
it would be easy to take one for the other.
A part of the formalization we are discussing now was the tendency of
the Byzantine church to standardize the text as something immediately
suitable for liturgy. (The same tendency motivated Jerome’s revision of
the Western church’s Latin Bible, which did not transmit a Greek
Testament at all, but the Vulgate.) This uniform edition is now known as
the Byzantine text, or the Koine text. It was a revised and, to some
extent, edited text, but the contents were not altered and the revisions
were mostly stylistic and—in the Gospels—harmonistic.
So we have a complete copy of Revelation from the fourth century in
Codex Sinaiticus (the fragments from the second and third centuries used
to be complete when they were made, of course, but they did not
survive complete). Then we have Codex Alexandrinus in the fifth
century, and so forth and so on, up until the last handwritten copy that
was ever made, whichever that was, a thousand years later—almost three
hundred surviving manuscripts in all.
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A fragment of p115, a third- or fourth-century manuscript of Revelation.
The entire manuscript may be viewed at the Oxyrhinchus site by clicking
here.
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