Did the Early Scribes Understand John 9:3 Correctly?

The punctuation found in later manuscripts was added by scribes, and is not original to the New Testament. As such, the punctuation that has been passed on to us is the product of the scribes’ own interpretation.

Imagine trying to read a book in which the words are not separated by spaces, and the phrases are not marked by punctuation of any sort, so that all you see is a continuous stream of letters for which you must provide your own word- and phrase-stops. Not only would the unusual condition of the text slow you down a great deal, but you would also, at times, be at a loss to know the precise meaning of certain sentences, because punctuation guides the way in which we interpret texts.

• ^[1] Since my argument is really about the state of the Greek text, this translation follows the Greek more closely than, say, the NRSV. ↩
• ^[2] This article is based on a study that I published in New Testament Studies in 1996. ↩