When did copying a Torah scroll became a sacred process?

PROF. EMANUEL TOV: The Torah Scroll: How the Copying Process Became Sacred (TheTorah.com).

For most Second Temple scribes, the Torah’s sanctity did not translate into a requirement to avoid the imprecisions common in all books. The Paleo-Hebrew and Proto-MT scribes were an exception, although the latter were committed to precise copying of all biblical scrolls. Only with the emergence of scrolls containing all five books (2nd cent. C.E.) did Torah scrolls take on their special level of sanctification.

Drew Longacre has comments at the OTTC Blog.

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