The Bible Unmasked

[Wandering Star]

That's actually fairly common. Don't know why they made such a big deal about it.

Greek enforcers in action

 

[Vulcan59]

FWIW, an article on how scholars are using new tools to analyse ancient bible manuscripts.

The genetics of texts

Facing the weight of this information and its complexity, traditional methods can only take us back so far. Instead, scholars have begun turning to tools developed in an entirely different field.

One of the most powerful is phylogenetics - a technique pioneered by biologists to reconstruct evolutionary relationships by analysing how traits are inherited and change over time.

Now, it's being used to untangle the history of texts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists traced the virus's spread by analysing tiny mutations in its RNA. The same principle can apply to manuscripts.

Just as geneticists can reconstruct transmission histories from genetic changes, textual scholars can trace the evolution of a text by comparing its variants.

As biologist Richard Dawkins once observed: "So similar are the techniques and difficulties in DNA evolution and literary text evolution that each can be used to illustrate the other."

Scientific tools are tracing the evolution of ancient biblical manuscripts

Our knowledge of ancient literature comes to us through the hands of scribes. The works of Aristotle, Galen and Ptolemy survived only because generations of copyists reproduced them by hand. But copying was not a straightforward process. Scribes...

www.sott.net