TRANSLATING AND REVISING SCRIPTURE Part 4 chapter 3  of As It is Translated Correctly.   Loss of Original Sources. The vast majority of the errors in the NT MSS occurred during the period that is also the most difficult to reconstruct–the first four Christian centuries. Much of the difficulty stems from the work of the earliest Christian copyists. In a time when the majority of people were illiterate and when Christianity periodically underwent severe persecution, there were probably few professionally trained scribes in the service of the church. Moreover, seldom were the scribes possessed by the spirit of the scribes of later times who worked according to the instructions of the Lord given in Deuteronomy 12:32: “Thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish therefrom.” In fact, the opposite seems to have been true of the scribes in the first two centuries. They introduced thousands of changes into the text. To be sure, the majority of their errors were unintentional and are easily discernible slips of the eye, ear, or mind. Hundreds of changes in the text were, however, made intentionally. Yet we should not think of these scribes as having acted from evil motives. If they often took many liberties in copying their texts, apparently they did so in [39] most cases in an attempt to “help out.” They were more interested in making the message of the sacred text clear than in transmitting errorless MSS. Thus, early scribes (and sometimes later ones) often “smoothed out” the Greek of the biblical writer by adding conjunctions, changing tenses of verbs, and changing word order