Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

by Bart D. Ehrman

The copying practices we have considered thus far have been principally those of the first three centuries of Christianity, when most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation, able to read and write and so called upon to reproduce the texts of the community in their spare time.1 Because they were not highly trained to perform this kind of work, they were more prone to make mistakes than professional scribes would have been. This explains why our earliest copies of the early Christian writings tend to vary more frequently from one another and from later copies than do the later copies (say, of the high Middle Ages) from one another.

First three centuries copies tend to vary more between themselves because nonprofessionals