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'Many of the apparent contradictions of the Bible may be explained by the mistakes of transcribers, or in some other way equally natural; but, as the Bishop of London has well remarked, 'When laborious ingenuity has exerted itself to collect a whole store of such difficulties, supposing them to be real, what on earth does it signify?
We have here likewise an instance of the way in which ancient manuscripts, first illustrated by commentaries, became interpolated, by successive transcribers adopting those illustrations into the text; and how many fabricators of story, first misled by these additaments, and afterwards misleading the public through a vain desire of producing a morsel of eloquence, although continually quoting original and contemporary authorities, have acquired the undeserved fame of excellent historians, while a multitude of the incidents, which they relate, have no foundations whatever in the truth of record.
How could Polycarp hope to keep up a correspondence with his brethren of Philippi, if he sent his letters to the distant East by any one who might be going there? It is pretty evident that the Latin version has preserved the true original of this postscript, and that the current reading, adopted by Dr. Lightfoot and others, must be traced to the misapprehensions of transcribers.
It was, in good part, his villainous transcribers, who made monstrosities of Mandeville's travels. And though all liars go to Gehenna; yet, assuming that Mandeville died before Dante; still, though Dante took the census of Hell, we find not Sir John, under the likeness of a roasted neat's tongue, in that infernalest of infernos, The Inferno. But let not the truth be postponed.
The names of places, however, in these early travellers, have been so confounded by ignorant transcribers as often to defy all criticism. This seems an ill-collected account of Sago. The Pacific Ocean, the navigation of which was then so much unknown, that those who ventured to navigate it never returned. Probably Siampa, called likewise Ciampa, and Tsiompa.
Thus, his good fortune stood steadfastly by him all through his extraordinary forgery; at its initiation as well as during the subsequent stages of it. There was in his time a regular profession of transcribers, who may be looked upon as the precursors of printers.
But the transcribers of those statutes seem frequently to have thought it sufficient to copy the regulation as far as the three or four first and lowest prices; saving in this manner their own labour, and judging, I suppose, that this was enough to show what proportion ought to be observed in all higher prices.
Forster considers this place to be Scasse or Al-shash, on the river Sirr or Sihon, perhaps the Tashkund of modern maps, in the province of Shash. The distances given by Marco must be strangely corrupted by transcribers and editors, or Marco must have forgot when he wrote his travels, perhaps twenty-six years after he passed this country, when only a boy.
These blunders we may fairly father on the monkish transcribers, the more so as their handiworks abound with faults, arising from one of these four causes, inability of perceiving propriety of expression; which people call "stupidity"; disinclination to the requisite exertion; known as "laziness"; misunderstanding the meaning of the author, or destitution of knowledge.
The errors that spring from ignorance are the most striking; they show the purely negative state of the transcribers' minds; how uninformed they were of facts, and how uninstructed in arts, literature or science. Having thus seen the nature of the errors committed by the transcribers, we may now pass on to what we must consider as the errors of the writer.
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