Hand-Copying Greek
Eli Evans blogs about hand-copying a Greek version of 2 Timothy. (Also see Part A and Part C.) Others have also blogged about the same project.
Hand-copying, of course, was how the manuscripts that make up the Bible made it through the centuries until the invention of the printing press. Modern people relearning ancient processes makes for fascinating reading.
In particular, all three bloggers mention that they didn’t stop to try to understand what they were copying because it would slow them down too much. That approach led to particular kinds of copying errors.
Each blogger also had specific letters that presented problems to him or her.
You can participate in the experiment if you know Greek fairly well.
You’d still get scribal errors even if you had people copy 2 Timothy in English—they’d just be a different kind of error. In many ways it’s astonishing how few variations are in the biblical manuscripts.
February 15th, 2006 at 2:59 am
Manuscript Copying Project picks up steam!
February 15th, 2006 at 10:36 am
[...] Eli Evans at the Big Slow Eel is blogging his experiments with transcribing Timothy 1 in Greek the “old fashioned way”. (HT: ESV Bible Blog). [...]
February 15th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
[...] I’ve decided to participate in a project started by Rick Brannan at Logos Bible Software that was mentioned on the ESV Bible Blog. The project is to have several people of varying Greek abilities copy a New Testament epistle by hand to see what kind of scribal errors they make. I doubt that anything valuable for New Testament textual criticism will be learned from the study; the anachronisms are too many and too great. It smacks of forcing textual criticism and history into a scientific mold. The value for me, however, will be increased appreciation for the work of scribes in copying the Bible. It will also be an opportunity to learn something about paleography; I’ve already checked out some books. [...]
February 27th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
[...] The blog’s been up and running for almost a year now, so there’s plenty of material to read there. You might start with this recent post on the trials of hand-copying Greek Bible texts (hey, that’s the way ancient scribes did it!), or this older piece about defining “archaic” and “obsolete” language (who hasn’t been tripped up at some point by an obscure vocabulary word in their Bible?) All in all, it looks like a great blog to add to your bookmarks or feed reader. [...]
January 18th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Eli Evans at the Big Slow Eel is blogging his experiments with transcribing Timothy 1 in Greek the “old fashioned way”. (HT: ESV Bible Blog).