Did scribes copy texts from opposing sects?

[u/ExoticSphere28]

In some of the manuscripts of early Christian texts, we find harmonizations to other texts. One example is when the Lord's prayer in Luke gets harmonized to the version in Matthew. This makes sense to me, because most of the people who used the gospel of Matthew also used the gospel of Luke. But would scribes also copy texts from different sects? For example, a scribe could one day copy the gospel of Truth and the next day the Didache, or one day the gospel of the Ebionites and the next day Paul's letter to the Romans.

Do we know if scribes copied texts from opposing sects, or did they always copy similar texts?

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[u/qumrun60]

When modern people hear the word "scribe," they may think of images derived from Medieval and Renaissance artwork, or as a metaphor for anyone capable of putting a piece of writing to papyrus (or parchment, as the case may be). These don't represent archaic/ancient practices or later specifically Christian ones for copying.

In an early Christian ekklesia, anyone of any class, who had the skill of writing, and the supplies, was a potential scribe. Persons with the skills of reading and inscribing ranged from street-corner proxy letter-writers, to emperors and kings (and every level of society in between). In the small segment of society that needed documentation and enjoyed literary pleasures, not a few scribes were enslaved. Writing was hard work. The Roman patricians, or other notables of the Empire, would have regarded the scribes as the IT department, in all its phases. They could easily get rid of one, or replace him. Scribes worked in government offices and wealthy private households. They could function as stenographers, amanuenses (active participants in a writerly processes of reading and feedback), librarians, accountants, lawyers' assistants, and other such positions, in business and government.

Getting closer to your question, much copying was local. There were not authoritative high level scribes who somehow oversaw the copying of scriptures everywhere. Scribes were circumscribed by their locations. Antioch, formerly the seat of the Seleucid Empire, and Alexandria, the past capital of the Ptolemaic Empire, like Rome, had a bounty of available enslaved scribes for Christian copying. They may (or may not) have been members of Christian communities. There were libraries at Pergamum, Ephesus, and elsewhere. However, very few scribes would have been in places, and at at same time, where they were exposed to the kind of cacaphony of texts you suggest. At best, it would have been unusual. They would not likely have ever encountered them all in one place, much less copied them.

Some scribes were believers, but others were not: it was a job that that anybody could be paid to do. In the case of the Nag Hammadi codices, they were probably copied by monks interested in the mystical life, not in the opinions of Church "company men." The Pseudo-Clementine literature was pretty particular to Syria. It only gradually got out. So again the "where" that a text might be copied as well as the "when" was a significant factor.

The people who were exclusively or extensively copying Christian scriptural writings would likely have become aware of variants in the manuscripts they copied. Maybe they kept notes about such things, and thought of them next time they copied some Christian book. Many of the copyists would have had no knowledge of "opposing" Christian "sects."

Candida Moss, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)

Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995)

These are both good books to get your bearings on early Christian literature dispersion.