It has sometimes been claimed that words of Jesus were reproduced particularly carefully and reverently by scribes. This claim is based on the belief that his words were regarded as so sacred that, while errors of all kinds might be found in less important passages, sentences and phrases, they were handled as reverently as the Massoretic tradition preserved the oracles received by Moses. The claim owes everything to piety, and nothing to the study of the manuscript evidence. Examine any edition of the Gospels that extensively details the manuscript evidence, and you will find that the number of variant readings in a narrative is small. Come to a block of sayings, and the number rises dramatically. The complexity of interpreting Jesus' sayings led to an increase in variant readings. We have encountered this already in the Lord's Prayer, which one might expect to exist in a single form if anything did. But we come now to a problem more thorny and to a situation more tangled than those we have studied so far.

The basic reason for the complexity in the passages we are to study and in many others of Jesus' sayings is precisely the importance accorded them. A recent major study (whose title neatly makes the point) has illustrated how much copyists might change the text in order to bring out the meaning which they believed to be correct.