The House of the Copyists

From the Lighthouse the road ran inland through sheep country cut up by low stone walls, and for two days Inquirer met nobody. He walked with the Charter in one hand and the old Book under his arm, and at every stop he unrolled the parchment and read it through until he had it by heart. The new lenses made the country look odd to him. Things had edges he had never noticed. A stone wall was grey and lichened and very old, and a sheep was a sheep, not, as he would once have put it, a picture of my own wandering soul. The first time that struck him he laughed out loud, alone in the middle of a field, and the sheep gave him a reproachful look and moved off.

Toward evening on the second day he came to a long low building of yellow stone tucked in a fold of the hills. It had a slate roof, a row of tall windows down one side, and a bell-tower with no bell in it. Over the door hung a sign: The House Of The Copyists. All Pilgrims Welcome. Mind The Ink.

The young woman who answered his knock had ink up to the elbows of her sleeves and a pen behind each ear. She took in the lantern and the pale lenses and the old Book, and her face lit up.

“A pilgrim! From the Lighthouse? Oh, good. Come in, come in, we’re in the middle of something and we could do with fresh eyes. I’m Diligence. Wipe your feet. Mind the ink.”

She pulled him into a room that ran the whole length of the house, full of evening sun from the tall windows. A long table went down the middle, and round it sat thirty or so people, old and young, men and women, every one of them bent over pages. He took them for copyists at first. Coming closer he saw they weren’t copying so much as comparing. In front of each person lay not one book but a pile of them: scrolls and codices and loose leaves, some whole and a great many in fragments, some fresh and some so old they had gone brown and crumbly at the edges. They were laying them side by side, reading a line in one and the same line in another, and making small, careful entries in big ledgers.

At the head of the table sat a very old man with a long white beard and knotted hands and eyes that missed nothing. In front of him lay the biggest ledger of the lot.

“Master Witness, here’s a pilgrim from the Lighthouse.”

The old man looked up. “Ah. Welcome. Sit down. You’ve come at a good hour. We’re working through Mark and we’ve hit a hard place. But tell me your name first, and what you’ve got in that black binding.”

Inquirer told him and handed over the old Book. Master Witness turned the scraped pages very tenderly. Then he did something odd. He took up a magnifying glass and went over a single line for a long time, and checked it against a page in front of him, and smiled.

“A good copy. A very good copy. But a copy, all the same. Did you know that?”

“I don’t follow you. It’s the Book.”

“It is the Book. And it’s a copy of the Book. Both are true. Sit down and I’ll tell you what this house is for.”

Inquirer sat. Diligence pulled a stool up next to him, and several of the copyists put down their pens to listen. They had obviously heard it all before and were happy to hear it again.

“The men who first wrote the Book,” Master Witness said, “wrote it on scrolls of skin and sheets of reed-paper. Moses wrote, and the prophets, the evangelists, the apostles. Those very first sheets, the ones their own hands touched, we call the autographs. Not one survives. Skin rots and reed-paper crumbles, and those first leaves were read until they fell apart, a long time ago.”

Something cold dropped in Inquirer’s stomach. “Then we don’t have the Book at all?”

“Peace.” The old man lifted a knotted hand. “Listen. Before they wore out, they were copied. Then the copies were copied, and the copies of those, on down the centuries, in a great many lands and languages. Every copy was made by a human hand, and human hands slip. A copyist’s eye jumps a line. He mishears a word that’s being read out to him. He spells a name the way they spell it in his village. Now and again he thinks he’s being helpful and adds a word to make a passage plainer. So no two copies are exactly the same.”

“Then how can anyone know what the Book says?” Inquirer had gone quite pale.

“That’s what this house is for. We don’t have one copy. We have thousands. More copies of this Book survive than of any other book from the ancient world, and it isn’t close. Some are very old, within a few lifetimes of the apostles. They come from Egypt and Syria, from Rome and Constantinople, out of monasteries and out of rubbish heaps. Every one has its little mistakes, but they don’t all have the same mistakes. When a copyist in Egypt skipped a line, the copyists in Syria didn’t skip it. So we lay them side by side and compare, and where one has gone wrong the others show us, and by patient work, line by line, we can get back to what the first leaves said with a certainty no other ancient book comes near.”

He put his hand flat on the great ledger. “That’s what’s called establishing the text. It’s the first labor of the road after prayer. A man can’t rightly read what the Book says until he’s sure, as sure as care can make him, which words it says.”

Inquirer let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “And it’s been… kept? Through all that?”

Master Witness smiled and recited, the way a man says something he has said ten thousand times and still loves. “The Old Testament in Hebrew, and the New Testament in Greek, being immediately inspired by God, and, by his singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical. His singular care and providence. There’s the heart of it. We do the work, and He does the keeping. We’re only His clerks.”

Just then the door at the far end of the room opened and two men came in together. You could see at a glance they weren’t friends.

The first was lean and fidgety, in a fashionable coat, with a sardonic mouth and a satchel bulging with papers. He strolled down the length of the table looking at the ledgers as he passed and giving a little laugh at each one. This was Mr. Lost-Original, a lecturer from the Ledge of Learned Opinion, who came down every season to visit the House of the Copyists because nothing on earth amused him more.

The second was a heavy, stern man in black with an enormous brass-bound Book chained to his belt. He didn’t look at the ledgers at all. He scowled at them from across the room as if they were something indecent. This was Mr. One-Manuscript, who lived in a fortified farmhouse a mile down the valley and came every season too, to protest.

“Witness, you old fraud,” said Mr. Lost-Original, very pleasantly. “Still at it, I see. Still pretending you can get back to the originals from a heap of scribbled-over copies.” He picked a fragment up from in front of one of the copyists and held it to the light. “Do you know how many differences there are among your precious copies? Hundreds of thousands. More differences than there are words in the whole Book! And out of that you expect to recover the words of God?” He dropped the fragment. “Admit it. The original’s lost. We can’t know what it said. Each man has to pick the version he likes and stop pretending.”

He turned to Inquirer with an easy, charming smile. “You, pilgrim. Don’t let them waste your time. You’re out of Mine-Own-Meaning, I can tell by the rims of your spectacles. I’ll let you in on a secret. Your old neighbors were right all along. If the text’s lost, all you’ve got left is what it means to you. Go home.”

Inquirer felt the old pull of the city in that, strong as a hand on his collar.

Before he could answer, Mr. One-Manuscript stamped forward and slammed his brass-bound Book down on the table so hard the ink-pots jumped.

“Blasphemer!” he bellowed at the lecturer. Then he rounded on Master Witness. “And you, Witness. You and your ledgers are worse than he is. He says the Book is lost. You say it’s found, but you set about finding it by doubting it! Comparing, weighing, writing down differences! This is the Book.” He thumped his brass-bound volume. “This one, here. My father read it and his father before him. Every word in it is from God, every letter, and every one of your copyists’ differences that disagrees with my Book is the devil’s work. I don’t compare. I don’t weigh. I believe.”

He swung round on Inquirer as well. “You, pilgrim. Don’t listen to either of them. Come down to my farmhouse and I’ll give you a copy of the true Book, and you’ll never need to look at another. All this scratching about in rubbish heaps is the road to unbelief.”

And Inquirer felt the pull of that too. There was something very restful in the thought of a Book that never had to be compared or questioned, that was simply there, in brass and chains.

He looked from one man to the other. The thin sneering one said nothing could be known. The heavy angry one said nothing needed asking. It surprised him how much they reminded him of each other.

Master Witness hadn’t got up. He sat with his hands folded on his ledger and let them both run down.

“Gentlemen, you come every season, and every season I give you the same answer. But we’ve a guest tonight, so I’ll give it once more.”

He turned first to the lecturer. “You say there are hundreds of thousands of differences among the copies. That’s true. What you don’t say is what they are, and that isn’t honest. Diligence, what’s the biggest class of differences in our ledgers?”

“Spelling, Master,” said Diligence at once. “By a mile. A name spelled two ways. A letter added or dropped. A word written short.”

“And after that?”

“Words in a different order. In Greek that mostly doesn’t change the sense at all.”

“And after that?”

“Little words. An and there or not there. A the. Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ.”

Master Witness turned back to Mr. Lost-Original. “You count every misspelled name in every copy as a difference, and then you add them all up as if each one were a hole in the Book. If ten thousand copies spell a word one way and one careless monk spells it another, you’ve found one difference, and you tell your students it’s a crack in the foundations. The overwhelming mass of our differences change nothing whatever in the meaning. Of the ones that do touch the meaning, most can be settled with confidence by careful comparison. The handful that stay uncertain we mark honestly in the ledgers. And not one article of the faith rests on any of them. No doctrine in the Book stands or falls by a doubtful reading. Every one is taught plainly in places where the copies agree.”

The lecturer shrugged. “Pious talk.”

“It’s arithmetic, and you know it. You’ve sat at this table. You’ve seen the ledgers. You choose not to believe them because you’d decided beforehand what you wanted to find. That isn’t scholarship, sir. That’s Mine-Own-Meaning in a better coat.”

Mr. Lost-Original went red and opened his mouth, but the old man had already turned to the farmer.

“And you, my friend. I honor your love for the Book. It’s more than he has. But you’ve mistaken a copy for the autograph. Your brass-bound Book is a good copy, and most of it agrees with ours line for line, but men made it, like every other. When you say every difference from your copy is the devil’s work, you aren’t honoring the Book. You’re honoring your father’s copy of it. Is it the Book that was kept pure in all ages, or only yours?”

“They’re the same!” roared Mr. One-Manuscript.

“Then you’ve nothing to fear from comparing them,” said Master Witness mildly. “Truth isn’t afraid of the light. It was the Lord who said, Ye shall know the truth. It’s fear that won’t look.”

The farmer’s face worked. For a moment Inquirer thought he was going to hit the old man. Instead he snatched up his Book and stormed out, and slammed the door so hard a shelf of fragments rattled.

“I have brothers,” Master Witness said after a moment, half to himself, “who weigh some of these readings differently from me. Honest men who love the Book and don’t chain it shut. I can sit at this table and argue with them all night and we part friends. It’s refusing to weigh at all that I can’t do anything about.”

Mr. Lost-Original didn’t leave. He leaned on the wall with his arms folded and a smile on his face, waiting.

“Now then,” said Master Witness to Inquirer. “You’ve heard the two great errors about the text. One says it’s lost and the other says it needs no finding. Let me show you the work itself. It’s better than talk. Diligence, take the pilgrim to Mark.”

Diligence led him down the table to where four copyists had a dozen copies of Mark spread out in front of them, all open at the very end of the book.

“Here’s the hard place. Look. In most of our copies Mark goes on after the women run away from the empty tomb, twelve more verses: the Lord appearing, and the great commission, and the signs, and the ascension. Your Book’s got them, I expect.” Inquirer checked, and it had. “But two of our very oldest copies, the best we’ve got, stop at verse eight. For they were afraid. Then nothing. Some other old copies have a short ending instead, just a sentence or two. Some have both the short one and the long one. And a few of the old fathers who wrote about this Gospel say the most accurate copies they knew of ended at verse eight.”

Inquirer stared at the pages. “So which is right?”

“Ah,” said Master Witness, who had come up behind them. “Now you’re doing the work. Don’t ask which do I prefer. Ask how do we weigh it. Diligence, give him the measures.”

Diligence counted them off on inky fingers. “First, the outside evidence. How old are the copies? How many are there? Where do they come from, and are they from different places, so they can’t have copied each other? A reading you find in old copies from Egypt and Syria and Rome is strong, because they didn’t borrow from each other. Second, the inside evidence. What would a copyist be likely to do? They add more often than they leave out. They smooth over a hard reading more often than they make an easy one hard, so the harder reading is often the older one. And what about the writer’s own style? Does the passage use his words and his way of telling things, or somebody else’s?”

“And here?”

“Here the evidence is divided,” Master Witness said frankly. “The two oldest copies stop at verse eight, and the longer ending uses a lot of words Mark never uses anywhere else, so many of us think it was added later by another hand. But it’s very ancient. It was known within a century or two of the apostles, most of the copies have it, and good, learned men have defended it. So we mark it honestly in the ledgers. We set it off with a note: A reading of great antiquity, whose place in the original is disputed. We don’t tear it out and burn it, and we don’t pretend there’s no question.”

“Does it matter? For the faith?”

“Read the twelve verses and tell me what they teach that the Book doesn’t teach plainly somewhere else, where the copies agree.”

Inquirer read. The Lord risen. Appearing to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples. The great commission to preach the Gospel to every creature. Baptism. The ascension to the right hand of God.

“It’s all in the other Gospels,” he said slowly. “And in Acts. Except…” He frowned. “Except the part about picking up serpents and drinking poison.”

“Except that,” said Master Witness drily. “And there’s a little valley in the hills east of here where a sect has built its whole religion on that one verse. They handle snakes in their worship, and a good many of them have died of it. That’s what comes of building on a doubtful reading. They took a single stone, and not even one that was certainly in the wall, and painted it red. You saw that room in the Lighthouse, I think.”

Inquirer had, and said so.

They worked late that night. Master Witness put Inquirer at the table next to Diligence, and for the first time in his life he did what the copyists did, laying copies side by side and going through them word by word and letter by letter. It was slow, humble work. His back ached and his eyes ran. He loved it. It seemed to him the exact opposite of polishing. At home he had worked to make a page show him. Here he was working to make the page show itself, as near as possible to how it had first been written, with nothing of him in it anywhere.

Around midnight Mr. Lost-Original came and sat on the bench beside him. He had spent the evening reading the ledgers over people’s shoulders without a word.

“You like this,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I do.”

“I liked it once.” Inquirer looked up, startled. “Oh, yes. I sat at this table three years when I was young. Best collator in the house. Ask Witness.”

“What happened?”

The lecturer didn’t answer at first. “I found the first real difference,” he said eventually. “Not spelling. A real one, one that touched the meaning. And I thought, if there’s one, there might be a thousand. If the copyists could get this wrong, what else did they get wrong? So I went looking, and I found more, and every time I found one I thought, there, the whole thing’s rotten. I stopped seeing the ten thousand places the copies agreed. I only saw where they didn’t, and after a while I couldn’t see anything else.” He laughed, and it wasn’t a nice sound. “Then I went up to the Ledge. They pay very well up there for a man who can prove nothing can be known.”

Inquirer didn’t know what to say to that. In the end he took the little grey pebble out of his pocket and put it on the table between them.

“I was given this at a spring under a Cross, to grind my lenses with. The One who gave it to me said every man has lenses and the only question is whether he’ll let the Book grind them. I think you came here wearing a lens that was looking for cracks. And the Book let you find what you were looking for. It always will, if you won’t let it grind you.”

The lecturer looked at the pebble a long while. Then he got up without saying anything and went out into the dark. I don’t know what became of him. Inquirer told me he looked for him all along the road and never saw him again. Diligence thought he’d gone back up to the Ledge. But Master Witness said that sometimes, late at night, a lamp would be burning at the far end of the long table that nobody had lit, and in the morning a ledger would be lying open at a page somebody had been working on. And the work was good.

There was one more adventure at the House of the Copyists, and it came just before dawn.

Inquirer had fallen asleep at the table with his head on a page of Mark. He woke to Diligence shaking his shoulder and whispering, “Quiet! Look!”

At the far end of the room, where the oldest and most precious copies were kept in a locked press, a small light was moving. Three figures were crouched in front of the press. They had the door open and were bent over the oldest copies with pens in their hands.

“Gloss-Smugglers,” Diligence breathed. “They come every few years, from the sects up in the valleys. Each of them has some pet doctrine that isn’t quite in the Book, and they try to write it into the margins of the oldest copies so later copyists will think it was part of the text and copy it in. That’s how half our worst variants got started, long ago. Somebody’s helpful note in a margin.”

Inquirer didn’t stop to think. He grabbed the iron lantern, opened the old Book in front of it, and ran the length of the room with the white flame blazing. The three spun round, and in the lantern light he saw their faces, and the pens, and the wet ink in the margins of the ancient page.

One of them was writing a long sentence next to a verse about baptism, explaining exactly which way it had to be done. One was writing the date of the end of the world beside a verse in the Revelation. And the smallest of the three, in the margin of John’s Gospel, next to God so loved the world, was adding and especially our congregation.

They went out through the window as he reached them, scattering pens. Diligence and two of the copyists came running with blotting-sand, and they saved the page, though one corner of the margin carried a faint brown stain from then on.

“That’s why we compare,” said Master Witness, when he had come down in his nightcap to look at the damage. “Not because we doubt the Book. Because we love it, and there are always hands itching to add to it. Add thou not unto his words. The copyists before us didn’t always keep that command, and we can’t undo every mistake of a thousand years. But we can catch most of them. And because the copies are so many and scattered so far, no smuggler can ever get at all of them. One man’s addition in one valley gets shown up by ten thousand copies in other countries that never heard of him. That’s the Lord’s singular care and providence too. He scattered the copies so widely that nobody could ever corrupt the lot.”

In the morning, when Inquirer was getting ready to leave, Master Witness came to the door with him, and Diligence with a parcel.

“We’d like you to have this,” said the old man.

Diligence untied it. Inside was a Book, not black-boarded like the one from the cellar or brass-bound like Mr. One-Manuscript’s, but plain and sturdy. When Inquirer opened it he found it was in the original languages, the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New, with small notes at the foot of every page: Here some copies read thus. Here the oldest copies omit. Here the reading is certain.

“It’s the Book as near as we can establish it,” said Diligence proudly, “with all our honest notes. We made it for whoever came next. You can’t read it yet, but you will. It’s waiting for you over the river.”

“What river?”

“The Babel,” said Master Witness. “You’ll reach it in two days, and on the far side you’ll start learning the tongues. The copies give you the right words, my son, but they aren’t your words. They’re Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, and before you can understand them you have to carry them across into your own language. There are ferrymen on the Babel who’ll offer to do that for you. Pick yours carefully. Some of them sink more passengers than they land.”

Inquirer took the Book. It was heavier than the old one, and he’d have to carry both of them now. He found he didn’t mind.

“Will you keep the old one?” Diligence asked. “The one from the cellar?”

He looked at the black boards and the scraped pages, with faint ghosts of silver still at the edges where his blade hadn’t reached.

“I think I’ll carry it. It’s where I started. And it’s a good copy.” He smiled. “But only a copy.”

Master Witness laughed, a dry old laugh like pages turning, and blessed him, and Inquirer set off down the valley toward the river. In the first mile he passed a fortified farmhouse with its shutters closed and a heavy chain across the gate. From inside came a big voice reading aloud from a Book, very loudly, as though it were trying to drown out some other sound. He didn’t stop.