The Copying Of The Scriptures
THE COPYING OF THE SCRIPTURES
We have none of the original autographs of the Scriptures today. That is to say that we do not have the original copy of Paul's epistle to Galatians that was signed in large letters with his own handwriting. That does not mean the Scriptures are lost to us, for they have been copied and recopied many times over, often with great care. The Ministry of the Masorites. Their name: We have already noted that the name Masorite comes from the Hebrew word masorah, meaning “tradition.” They were guardians of Jewish tradition. Their rise: Hundreds of years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Masorites rose up in the Jewish community of Tiberius where work was being done in copying the Hebrew Text. This group eventually worked out a system by which they counted each letter of each page of the Scriptures. They could tell you what the first letter was on any given line of any given page of any given scroll. Nathan Ausubel gives this summary: The Masorites had a passionate concern with their special statistics. They went into a bizarre counting successively of letters, words, verses, sections and chapters in each Scriptural writing and in all the twenty four books of the Bible." (1964:272).
Vowel Pointing: The Masorites also worked up a system of vowel pointing for the Hebrew Text. This helped to fix the pronunciation of the Hebrew words (the Hebrew language contains no written vowels). The Copying of the Old Testament. The Talmud contains a strict set of rules for copying the Old Testament Scriptures. An examination of these rules will show that it was very difficult for errors to creep into the codex. A synagogue scroll was to be...
Written on the skin of a clean animal.
Prepared by a Jew.
Fastened together with strings taken from clean animals.
Lined and spaced so that each page had a certain number of columns. The codex must meet the following requirements... The length of each volume must extend not less than 48 lines and not more than 60 lines and the breadth must consist of 30 letters. The whole copy must first be lined; if three words were written without first being lined, the copy must be discarded. The ink must be black, developed according to a special recipe. The transcriber could not deviate the least from the original. No word or letter, not even a yod, could be written from memory. The scribe must look at each word before writing.
Between every consonant, the space of a hair or thread must intervene.
Between every new paragraph or section, the breadth of nine consonants must intervene.
Between every book, three lines must intervene. The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line.
Besides this, the copiest must...
Sit in full Jewish dress.
Wash his whole body. Not begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink. Should a king address him while writing that name, he must take no notice of him.
If a mistake were made in the copying, he was not allowed to erase it or cross it out, but must throw the ruined page away and start anew. With this kind of care being taken to insure a perfect copy, it is no wonder that the scribes considered the new copy to be just as authoritative as the original.
Copying of the New Testament.
What about the New Testament? Unfortunately, the scribes who copied the New Testament did not go to such great lengths to insure that errors did not creep into the text. However, through the efforts of modern archaeology, we have discovered thousands of manuscripts, some dating to within 100 years of the writing of the original text. At the time of the translation of the King James Version of the Bible (in 1611), the oldest Old Testament Manuscript was a Masoretic Text dating back only a few hundred years. The oldest New Testament Text was dated at about 1000 A.D. This has all changed in recent years with a number of archaeological discoveries.