Excerpt from ‘Misquoting Jesus’ by Bart D. Ehrman

Hermas has a vision of an elderly woman, a kind of angelic figure symbolizing the Christian church, who is reading aloud from a little book. She asks Hermas if he can announce the things he has heard to his fellow Christians. He replies that he can't remember everything she has read and asks her to "Give me the book to make a copy." She gives it to him, and he then relates that

I took it and went away to another part of the field, where I copied the whole thing, letter by letter, for I could not distinguish between the syllables. And then, when I completed the letters of the book, it was suddenly seized from my hand; but I did not see by whom. (Shepherd 5.4 )

Even though it was a small book, it must have been a difficult process copying it one letter at a time. When Hermas says that he "could not distinguish between the syllables," he may be indicating that he was not skilled in reading—that is, that he was not trained as a professional scribe, as one who could read texts fluently. One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text. The words godisnowhere could mean quite different things to a theist (God is now here) and an atheist (God is nowhere); 5 and what would it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a normal or a supernormal event?

When Hermas says he could not distinguish between the syllables, he evidently means he could not read the text fluently but could recognize the letters, and so copied them one at a time. Obviously, if you don't know what you're reading, the possibilities of making mistakes in transcription multiply.

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Ehrman, B. D. (2004). Misquoting Jesus. New York: HarperCollins