Simply Come Copying: Direct Copies as Test Cases in the Quest for Scribal Habits

Over 5,000 copies of the New Testament exist today and not one matches the other exactly. Determining how a copyist made changes to a manuscript - or, a scribe’s habits - is an essential step in recovering the original text of the New Testament and for appreciating how it has changed over time. For the vast majority of manuscripts, there is no way to know which manuscript copied from which manuscript or, which manuscript is the child manuscript and which is the parent manuscript. Alan Taylor Farnes, however, has discovered twenty-two child manuscripts whose parent version is still known today. His letter-by-letter examination of four of these manuscripts sheds invaluable light on how scribes went about their work and provides a methodology for future studies. Now we can virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder and watch the work as it unfolds.