Did scribes of the New Testament ever make astoundingly bad errors when making a copy?

Yesterday I mentioned a rather amazingly bad copy of a Christian text (connected with the Muratorian Fragment).  Anything like that for any of the books of the New Testament, inattention taken to a rather incredible length?

The reality is that most copyists of the books of the New Testament even in the early years/decades/centuries were doing their best mostly to reproduce the text they were copying.  They did make mistakes (more in the early centuries than later) and intentionally changed the text in places (probably, we might assume with good intentions), but copying is by its very nature a “conservative” practice: a scribe is trying to reproduce a text as he has inherited it.

There are some truly major changes in the NT manuscripts, but very few of them are of the rather outrageous sort.  The most egregious one I know of was certainly (surely!) made by accident, and it is rather humorous.  It involves a copy of the genealogy of Jesus as found in Luke 3.

To make sense of the mistake, I need to provide some background that some of you will know and others … not!

Chief among the accidental changes made in our manuscripts are the misspellings, as I’m mentioned repeatedly.  They don’t count for much — usually for next to nothing; though sometimes they matter because the “misspelled” word is sometimes an actual (but incorrect) word.  But even when they don’t matter for anything, they are nonetheless mistakes.

Other kinds of accidental changes were commonly made as well.  It was not at all unusual for an inattentive or careless scribe to leave out a letter, a word, or a line — or more!  Sometimes this kind of mistake arose because of the way books were written in antiquity.  Today we are accustomed to the use of punctuation, paragraph division, and separation between sentences.  But in ancient writing, none of these was common.  Most distracting for us today, the words had no spaces between them, making it hard (at least for us, and presumably for some scribes) to tell where a word began and ended.  Butifsomeonedoesntseparatewordsorusepunctuationitsnothardtoseehowlettersormaybeevenwordsorwhateverswouldbeskipped.

Of yet more importance for the omission of a line or group of words, occasionally two lines of a text would end in the same exact words.  A scribe who copied the words at the end of a line would look back at the page, and sometimes his eye would land on the second line (which ended with the same words), and think that that was the line he had just copied.  He would continue on then copying the words on the next line, and as a result leave out the entire second line.

This happened, for example, in copies of Luke 12, where Jesus indicates that:

Everyone who confesses me before humans, the son of man will confess before the angels of God and  everyone  who  denies  me  before  humans  will  be  denied  before the angels of God

Some scribes who copied the text wrote out the first occurrence of “before the angels of God,” but then when their eye returned to the page at the wrong place thought they had written out the second occurrence, and so when they continued writing, they left out the second line.

The technical term for this kind of “eye-skip” from one set of words to another is “parablepsis” (“looking around”); when the same words end different lines, it is called “homoioteleuton” (“ending the same way”).  And so, as I try to teach my students at Chapel Hill, this kind of mistake is called parablepsis occasioned by homoioteleuton!

BUT, sometimes scribes made accidental mistakes simply because they were not paying attention to what they were doing.  Probably the most notorious instance of this is in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Gospel of Luke known as manuscript 109 (because it was the 109^th manuscript to be catalogued).  This one is a bit mind-boggling.

The scribe of this manuscript was copying a copy of Luke that gave the genealogy of Jesus in two columns on the page.  If you remember, in Luke 3, Jesus’s genealogy is traced through Joseph (“supposedly” Jesus’s father, says Luke), who was the “son of Heli, the son of Matthat,” etc.

The genealogy goes back to “Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham” and further on back to “David, the son of Jesse” and then all the way back to “Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”  An amazing genealogy!  I have an aunt who was a genealogist, who was quite proud of having traced our family line back to the Mayflower.  The Mayflower?!  That’s nothing!!  Here is a genealogy that goes all the way back to Adam — as in Adam and Eve!  And even more: it goes further back, to God himself, the “father” of Adam.

In any event, the scribe of manuscript 109 had a copy of the genealogy in front of him in two columns, the first of which evidently went down to the bottom of the page, but the second of which did not go all the way down to the bottom.  And for some inexplicable reason, our inattentive scribe did not realize that the genealogy was in columns, and so he copied the text not one column at a time, but across the columns.

This, as you might imagine, led to some very interesting results.  In manuscript 109 we learn that the father of the human race was not Adam, but a man named Phares.  And God, whose name now occurs in the middle of the genealogy rather than at the end, is the son of a man named Aram!