We all make mistooks when writing. I made one in teh first sentence of this blog. And the second… (and my word processor informs me that the third is a fragment that I should consider revising…)
"To err is human; to forgive, divine" as the more famous paraphrasing of an Alexander Pope quotation goes; but when that error makes its way through the various stages of the editing process into a final printed copy, it becomes a little more difficult for such an error to be forgotten.
What if you were a scribe charged with copying an important manuscript and in the middle of that copy you have made a mistake - you have placed the Battle of Hastings in 1068 or the Magna Carta in 1212?
Even the most famous and copied of works can see some rather devastating errors creep into its text. In a 1631 edition of the King James Bible, the royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas accidentally listed the 7th Commandment as "Thou shalt commit adultery…"
This led to their published copy becoming known as the Wicked Bible, the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners' Bible. It also saw Barker and Lucas hauled before the Royal Privy Council of Charles I, where they were fined £300 and had their printing license revoked.
Due to its being one of the most reprinted books in history, it is unsurprising that this rather important absent negative was by no means the only error to be found within prints of the Bible. Indeed, there have been enough mistakes over the centuries to coalesce into its own sub-genre of biblical errata… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_errata
Whether they knew it or not, the writers of the TV show Family Guy hinted at this sub-genre in season 2, episode 2…
Fortunately, the Battle of Hastings, Magna Carta and the 7th Commandment do not rely on a single source for the preservation of information about them, so the error of a single copyist, editor or publisher will not have a dramatic affect on the historical record (although the bank balance, standing and career opportunities of Barker and Lucas would decry that it was not necessarily a victimless mistake…).
But what if your copy ended up the only surviving version of an historical source? And your mistake becomes an accepted 'fact', greatly altering the understanding of an important aspect of history? This sounds far-fetched, but there are some important historical sources which ultimately only survive on a single manuscript.
For example, the first six books of Tacitus' Annales only survive on a single copy seemingly written in Germany in around 850 (http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/tacitus/) - what if that copy contained a scribal error which changed a date or fate which we do not recognise as such or cannot disprove due to a lack of other source material? Who knows what historical 'facts' are mistakes from the quill of an inattentive scribe or the stylus of an old man with failing eye-sight and/or copying by candle light as daylight fails?
It is from sources surviving on many manuscripts that we can see just how potentially damaging and extensive such errors can be.
A particularly egregious example of an inattentive scribe appears in a manuscript rediscovered by Lodovico Antonio Muratori, a leading Italian historian of the 18th century, during his time as a dottori of the Ambrosian Library in Milan from 1695 until his death on 23 January 1750.
The most famous part of this manuscript is the 85-line list of New Testament books. Its fame stems from the fact that Muratori considered the manuscript to be 1,000 years old by his time, a consideration largely accepted since. Such a 7th/8th century date makes this the earliest surviving 'canon list' - "that is, a list of books that an author considered to be canonical Scripture, [although] the anonymous author of this fragment also cites a number of writings to be excluded, some of them as heretical forgeries." (Ehrman (2003), 214; Metzger (1987), 191-201; there is also considerable discussion about the date of the original Greek text that the scribe translated into "truly awful Latin" (Ehrman (2003), 241) - late 2nd century or 4th century (Ferguson (1993), Holmes (1994) and Metzger (1994) vs Hahneman (1992))
While the Muratorian Canon itself raises all kinds of questions over the bringing together of the biblical canon we recognise today, its own origins, time period and when and why it was translated/copied onto the manuscript found by L.A. Muratori, for the purposes of this blog, it is the questions it raises over the potential standard of copyists we could be dealing with in regard to the survival of certain classical texts and ultimately our knowledge of certain aspects of the ancient world.
This was a question that Muratori himself sought to highlight, for when he published the manuscript as the third volume of his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevii in 1740, he did so "not so much to illustrate sacred letters, [but] as to exhibit a striking specimen of the barbarism of the scribes of Italy in the ages in which ancient learning had been destroyed" (Tregelles (1867), 2; cf. Ehrman (2003), 240).
We should be wary of such dramatic pronouncements as it tars all medieval scribes with the same brush of 'barbarity.' It should also be highlighted that very little is known about the circumstances of the composition of the original manuscript. That it made its way onto the shelves of the Bobbio monastic library (probably) and then the Ambrosian library does not necessarily mean that it was meant for public consumption. Could it instead have been the result of an educational exercise for this scribe? This in itself might explain a good proportion of the mistakes involved.
The 75 leaves of the manuscript contain not just the canon list of the New Testament, but also "a miscellaneous assortment of texts from various sources" (Metzger (1987), 192), including several Christian creeds and writings from several fourth and fifth century Christian figures - Ambrose of Milan, Eucherius of Lyon and John Chrysostomus.
While Muratori's entire third volume highlights "words and sentences containing almost every possible error of grammar and orthography" (Tregelles (1867), 2), a particularly damning example of inattentive copying comes in the text of Ambrose's De Abrahamo.
In section 1.3.15, the scribe has copied out the same thirty lines of text twice, one after another. It could have been that the 7th/8th century scribe was simply repeating a copying error from the original writer of the text he was copying (Westcott (1886), 522). This would suggest that the scribe was tired or became distracted and then failed to read through his finished work in order to miss such a glaring error.
If the repetition of these thirty lines of text were the only issue with this section of Ambrose's De Abrahamo in the Muratorian manuscript, then we would forgive the scribal error. However, there being two copies of the same Ambrosian section allows us to delve a little more deeply into the copying abilities of this particular scribe… what we find does not make for pretty reading… quite literally in fact.
Beyond the aforementioned "truly awful Latin", there is far more than one error in this Ambrosian doublet…
Looking at the repeated sections, we can see just how inaccurate the scribe was when it came to copying the text he had in front of him. Indeed, the divergence between the two supposedly identical sections is significant. In just thirty lines, "there are thirty-three unquestionable clerical blunders, including one important omission, two other omissions which destroy the sense completely… one substitution equally destructive of the sense, and four changes which appear to be intentional and false alterations." (Westcott (1886), 523-524)
Such an overwhelming wealth of errors in such a short passage suggests that the scribe was more than inattentive, tired or distracted; he seems to have been generally "unable or unwilling to understand the work which he was copying." (Tregelles (1867), 25). Could it even be so bad that there was a point behind it? Was the scribe creating his own exam for others to find his errors? This seems unlikely, but is the kind of query that can be raised by such myriad and blatant mistakes.
When so many errors take place within such a short section, it makes you question just how many mistakes the scribe made in other sections of the Muratorian manuscript. Indeed, it likely played a role in L.A. Muratori's decision to bring together an entire volume devoted to terrible scribes from his finds in the Ambrosian library.
Thinking back to the first six books of Tacitus' Annales mentioned earlier, which survived only in a ninth century manuscript… are there some important errors in that manuscript which change established 'facts' about the reign of the emperor Tiberius? Such potential errata plays a role in the sheer amount of amount of depth that goes into commentaries on works such as the Bible or those of Tacitus and in the very foundations of the discipline of Classical Philology (although the ancients have themselves been involved with such linguistic and textual investigation virtually since historical sources were being written down).
Such academic scrutiny of the Classics has been invaluable to the study of these texts and the subjects they record. Errors such as those of our anonymous 7th/8th century scribe of the Muratorian manuscript or of the original Greek author can be investigated against other sources of information to check their integrity and repair the historical record when necessary.
We should also be careful not to dismiss such errors, particularly 'factual' ones, as entirely meaningless. Could there be a political, religious, social or educational reason for such factual or textual mistakes? Is the original author or his later scribe reflecting a dissenting opinion?
We should also remember that while scribes may make mistakes, they will also be making corrections to the errors of the original author, beginning the philological process hundreds of years before more modern commentators.
Of course, we should also be somewhat wary that the translating, copying, editing and commentating processes across the centuries, with the combination of restorative and damaging effects they can have, increases the distance from the original text, for better or worse.
And we need not think that in our computer age that we are immune from such copying and editing mishaps. If anything, things like the 'copy and paste' and 'find and replace' functions can make errors, when they happen, far more widespread. No doubt you will find an error or two (entirely my own) in this blog regardless of the numbers of eyes that have cast their editing gaze over it…
Bibliography
Ehrman, B.D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford (2003)
Ferguson, E. 'Review of Hahneman (1992),' JThS 44 (1993), 691-697
Gallagher, E.L and Meade, J.D. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: texts and Analysis. Oxford (2017)
Guignard, C. 'The Muratorian Fragment as a Late Antique Fake? An Answer to C. K. Rothschild,' Revue des Sciences Religieuses 93 (2019) 73-90
Hahneman, G.M. The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon. Oxford (1992)
Hill, C. E. 'The Debate Over the Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon,' Theological Journal 57 (1995), 437-452
Holmes, M.W. 'Review of Hahneman (1992),' Catholic Bible Quarterly 56 (1994), 594-595
Metzger, B.M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance. Oxford (1987)
Metzger, B.M. 'Review of Hahneman (1992),' Critical Review of Books in Religion 7 (1994), 192-194
Sundberg, A.C. 'Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List,' HThR 66 (1973), 1-41
Tregelles, S.P. Canon Muratorianus: The Earliest Catalogue of the Books of the New Testament. Oxford (1867)
Westcott, B.F. A General Survey of the History of the Canon. London (1866)
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