copy of an older, barely legible manuscript?

[dashstofsk]

it was too badly distorted by ignorant people when it was copied!

It seems to me unlikely that the manuscript is a copy of an older manuscript and that the copyist was someone who was unfamiliar with the alphabet, with the language and who did not know what the text meant. To have to do it for ~225 pages and ~36000 words and to do it in the full knowledge that no-one would ever be able to understand the text would really have been a thankless task. The copyist would have got bored, got impatient, made mistakes, made corrections, lost enthusiasm, and it would have shown in the writing.

But instead the writing has an effortless flow to it. The writer wrote whole paragraphs without having to pause or to think what should come next. It doesn't seem to show that the writer was having to lift the pen mid-word or between words in order to consult the older manuscript.