Textual criticism involves more than simply determining the original text. It also entails seeing how that text came to be modified over time, both through scribal slips and as scribes made deliberate modifications. The latter, the intentional changes, can be highly significant, not because they necessarily help us understand what the original authors were trying to say, but because they can show us something about how the authors’ texts came to be interpreted by the scribes who reproduced them. By seeing how scribes altered their texts, we can discover clues about what these scribes thought
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