contents, per se, but rather asks if we can even be confident we have anything close to what the author of that document originally wrote. In most cases, the oldest copies we have of a given book date from centuries after it was first written. Nor do very many copies of a given book typically exist from the eras before the printing press was invented. For example, there are only nine or ten good manuscripts for Caesar’s Gallic War, and the oldest derives from nine hundred years after the dates of