monks

A new young monk arrives at the monastery and as with all new monks he is assigned to help the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church  by hand.

He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies, not  from the original manuscript. So, the new monk goes to the headabbot to  question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up. In fact, that error would be  continued in all
 of the subsequent copies.