One or two other points regarding the Scribes may be briefly mentioned. As exponents of the Law and of the Scriptures generally the Scribes were as a matter of course greatly occupied with the Hebrew text of these; they thus became, quite apart from their other duties, such as making copies of the Scriptures, the guardians of the text of Scripture, and upon them devolved the further duty of the fixing and the preservation of the Biblical text. This very important function marks them out as the beginners of the textual criticism of the Old Testament. A further practical duty which the study and exposition of the Law brought with it was that of administering it. The Scribe was a lawyer; in the Gospels the two terms are synonymous, for which reason they never occur together. It was as administrators of the Law that the Scribes were represented in the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem; here they sat as judges who assisted in the passing of sentences on those who had broken the Law.[152] After definite parties had come into existence the Scribes belonged, in the main, to the Pharisaic party; but there was no reason against some of them being members of the Sadducæan party; this is, indeed, implied in such passages as Mark ii. 16; Luke v. 30; Acts xxiii. 9. That which constituted the difference between the Scribes and the Pharisees was briefly this: the Scribes handed down the traditional, i.e. the oral, Law as well as the written Law, and explained it; the Pharisees carried out in actual practice what was thus prescribed. This, of course, does not mean to say that the Scribes did not also strictly observe the legal enactments; but that their special duties constituted them a class distinct from the Pharisees is clear from the way in which they are differentiated in the New Testament, for there we read of the “Scribes of the Pharisees” (Mark ii. 16; Acts xxiii. 9), and of “the Pharisees and their scribes” (Luke v. 30), showing clearly that the Scribes were distinct from the Pharisees. The natural sequel to any account of the Scribes is a consideration of the Pharisees; with these, in conjunction with the Sadducees, we shall deal in the next chapter. SUMMARY From the Old Testament _data_ we gather that there were Scribes who were occupied with the written Law in pre-exilic times, though they arose long subsequently to the priests, the prophets, and the _Chakamim_, or wise men; but the pre-exilic scribe was of a very different kind from the scribe of later times. Ezra was not only the first scribe in the later sense of the word, but was also the inaugurator of the scribal system as generally understood. An important point to notice in the activity of the Scribes in the earliest post-exilic period is that as teachers of the Law they interpreted it to the people.