Behind | Scribes: The Anonymous Heroes

The Bible’s scribal tradition represents a long lineage of anonymous sacrifice and lives that were dedicated to the preservation of the Bible. In some ways, these scribes are the forgotten heroes of the biblical tradition, but the role of scribe was not without its conceptions of glory or heroism. According to the Roman statesman Cassiodorus, writing in the sixth century, “Though seated in one spot, the scribe traverses diverse lands, through the dissemination of what he has written.”

The immediate sacrifice acknowledged by one anonymous scribe, “Three fingers write, but the whole body labors,” was offset by a lofty view to a type of immortality, as evidenced in another scribal footnote: “The hand that wrote this molders in the tomb, but what is written abides across the years.”

Beyond the desire to leave a handcrafted personal legacy, the labor of biblical transcription was understood to have a cosmic significance, and to place scribes at the forefront of a conflict of good and evil. According to Cassiodorus, it was the job of the scribe to ““”fight the illicit temptations of the Devil with pen and ink: for every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a wound inflicted on Satan.”

The description of the good scribe, offered centuries later by Johannes Trithemius in 1492, reflects the grandness of this agenda: 

The dedicated scribe . . . will never fail to praise God, give pleasure to angels, strengthen the just, convert sinners, commend the humble, confirm the good, confound the proud and rebuke the stubborn. 

Altogether, biblical scribes are the only reason we have the Bible today. Their personal sacrifice, and their grand view of their role in the life of the Bible, is an often-overlooked tradition of not only skilled craftsmanship, but of religious zeal.

Sources: Lecture by Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Heritage Collections, The British Library;
Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of New Testament, 2005, p. 30;
Virginia Brown, Terra Sancti Benedicti: Studies in the Palaeography, History and Liturgy of Medieval Southern Italy, 2005, p. 552;
Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography, 1981, p. 20;
Marvin Perry, ed., Sources of the Western Tradition, 2013, p. 214;
Evelyn Tribble and Anne Trubek, Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age, 2003, p. 470.