Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 2. The Copyists
How copies drift without anyone intending it
In short
- 1.**Periblepsis / homoeoteleuton** — a scribe's eye jumps from one line-ending to an identical one and a line vanishes.
- 2.**Itacism** — vowels that came to sound alike were confused, changing words.
- 3.Ancient Greek was written *scriptio continua*, with no spaces or punctuation between words.
- 4.Nomina sacra abbreviations and marginal notes copied into the body produced further changes.
The claim being examined
Variation is imagined as either deliberate corruption or nothing at all.
The Islamic position
Most variants are innocent, and saying so protects your credibility for the variants that are not.
Analysis
Ehrman classifies changes as accidental or intentional and works through the mechanics of the accidental ones. His example of the twelve verses at the end of Mark makes the distinction concrete: a line can be lost by a slip of the eye, but twelve verses cannot be added by one. The practical lesson for dialogue is to grant the accidental category freely — it costs nothing and earns the right to press on the intentional cases in chapters 5-7.
Sources
Bart D. Ehrman · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 2, pp. 55-69
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