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 sometimes edited as they copied – smoothing out contradictions, inserting interpretations, merging readings from different sources and, sometimes, just making mistakes.

Over time, these small changes accumulate.

In order to trace how a text evolved, modern-day researchers use a kind of reconstructed manuscript family tree, known as a stemma.

This tree not only helps us approximate the earliest recoverable version of a text; it also reveals how that text was read, reshaped...