With the advent of the printing press and the subsequent publishing culture that reproduces exact copies of texts en masse, most people who read the Bible today assume that they are reading the very words that Jesus spoke or St. Paul wrote. And yet, for almost 1,500 years manuscripts were copied by hand by scribes - many of them untrained, especially in the early centuries of Christendom - who were deeply influenced by the theological and political disputes of their day. Mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions that continue to plague biblical scholars...