scribal hack job

[Steven Avery]

The habits of B are difficult to describe in moderate language; still more difficult is it to understand how a scribe so careless and illiterate came to be chosen for such a manuscript. He seems to have had no firm visual impression of Greek, so barbarous and grotesque are the forms which his misspellings can present to the eye, and with such utter inconsistency docs he sway from correct to incorrect. His aberrations extend over the whole field.... Phonetic errors defy reckoning .. Confusion of liquids and of stops frequently occurs ...Pure blunders, like telescoping of words and omission of letters or syllables, are incredibly common ... (p. 54-55) the startling illiteracy of the Prophetic books and Hermas, both written by B .... (p. 56) perversions as those recorded (p. 56-57) the gross errors which disfigure the text of scribe B. Nor can the lapses of scribes A and D, though less startling, be satisfactorily explained except on the same basis. (p. 57) gross carlessness (p. 68) -- Skeat and Milne

(The basis here in the last part is the theory that the text was being dictated.)

"Codex Sinaiticus 'abounds with errors of the eye and pen to an extent not indeed unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in documents of first-rate importance.' On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through very carelessness. Letters and words, even whole sentences, are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately cancelled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament." (John Burgon, The Revision Revised)

Hilgenfeld, covered here in the James Donaldson section of Hermas, emphasized this abject corruption as not being consistent with an early 4th century date.