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@NEETzsche @caekislove It’s a good example, but it assumes a cross contamination that wouldn’t have existed across different regions in early manuscripts unless the edits happened very early on.

This effect is demonstrated by the existence of different text families for the New Testament. Certain types of mutations remain localized to Alexandria, or the Byzantine mainland, or wherever.

Once one manuscript is translated into Coptic, it has inherited whatever errors every Greek copy prior to that point had, no one is going to translate it into Coptic again, so it’s preserved from any further errors from the original Greek. Instead, it will have its own family of mutations, completely separate from its origins.

I don’t have a good literature term for this, so I’m just going to borrow from biology and call it speciation. One this family speciates, it will, generally speaking, be immune to any attempts at revision. Especially if it’s far away from Rome and Constantinople. However, when text critics analyze these different species, the deviation is, by most accounts, over 95% identical, and most of those differences are typos.

If there was an attempt to edit all of them, it would have to be a worldwide conspiracy, as actually did happen with the Quran.