*
ll^
76 THE PUIXCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
follows tliat botli F and G were transcribed separately from the same older codex, and, except in the places where they differ from 'each other, must be regarded not as two witnesses but one. The text thus pre- served is both ancient and valuable, marked by many peculiarities of its own, and not to be rejected, if re- jected at all, without much thought and some hesi- tation.
In respect to their Latin versions the two are quite independent. Cod. F has a pure form of the Latin Vulgate, as current at the period, in parallel columns on the same page with the Greek, but so arranged that the two Latin should always stand in the outward columns of each open leaf, the two Greek inside, and next to each other. In Cod. G the Latin is of an older type, set over the Greek and much conformed to it. Cod. G also preserves, by me^ins of capital letters in the middle of the lines, the stichometrical arrange- ment of the archet3^3e from which it was taken.
It would be too much to tire your joaticnce by de- scribing other uncial manuscripts of lower date and less eminent merit. For their age, history, and character- istics I must be content to refer you to works which have been specially devoted to the subject, among which the second edition of my " Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament," whatever be its other merits, is at least the most recent. Suffice it to say that the palimpsest fragments (p. 17) Codd.P and Q at Wolf- enbuttel, Cod. R (Nitriensis, see p. 90) of S. Luke in the British Museum, Cod. Z of S. Matthew at Trinity College, Dublin, must be assigned to the sixth century, or the opening of the seventh, and, so far as they carry
GREEK TESTAMENT: COSTIXUEB, 77
us, are only less weiglity than Codd. ^{ABCD. But the coryphaeus of these lesser authorities, though not earlier than the eighth century, is Codex L, or No. 62 in the National Library at Paris, of which we have had occasion to speak in connection with Codex B (pp. 42, 43, 49). In number the uncials amount to fifty-six in the Gospels, far the greater part of which are fragments, and many of them inconsiderable fragments ; in the Acts and Catholic Epistles to six ; in the Pauline Epistles to fifteen, chiefly fragments ; in the Apocalypse to only five ; to eighty-two in all. We do not here include Church lesson-books or Lectionaries, of which about sixty-eight survive in uncial characters ; inasmuch as this style of writing, which became obsolete in other books towards the end of the ninth century, was in volumes used for reading in Churches, for motives of obvious convenience, kept up about two hundred years longer.
I have just said that much of our elder and uncial writing is merely fragmentary. This arises in part from the nature of the case. A few leaves, or per- haps a single leaf, of precious Biblical vellum, had been barbarously mangled to make up the binding of some comparatively modern book. Thus a portion of the beautiful Codex Ruber or Cod. M of S. Paul has been made up into fly-leaves for a volume of small value in comparison, among the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum : Griesbach identified it at a glance as belonging to a fragment at Hamburg, by the exquisite; semicursive waiting and the bright red ink. Again, that interesting leaf of S. Clark's Gospel (W^) which is now arranged on glass at Trinity College, Cambridge, consists
^t
GLOGIGii
SIX LECTURES
ON THE
TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
*'As man is formed by nature with an incredible appetite for Truth ; so his strongest pleasure, in the enjoyment, arises from the actual communication of it to others. Without this, it would be a cold purchase, would abstract, ideal, solitary Truth, and poorly repay the labour and fatigue of the pursuit."
Wakburton. Dedication to the Divine Legation.
SIX LECTURES
ON THE
TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
AND
THE AKCIENT MAKUSCEIPTS WHICH CONTAIN IT,
CHIEFLY ADDFvESSED TO THOSE ^VHO DO NOT EEAD GREEK.
y
By F. H. SCRIYENEE, M.A., LL.D,
RECTOR OF ST. GERRANS.
©am^ritige: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO.
Eonton: GEORGE BELL AND SONS.
1875
PKTNTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY TKESS.
TO THE BARONESS BURDETT-COUTTS
THE FOLLOWING PAGES
BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF POPULAR LECTUPvES OX A BRANCH
OF SACRED LEARNING
IN WHICH SHE TAKES A LIVELY AND PRACTICAL INTEREST
ARE RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY HER GRATEFUL FRIEND AND SERVANT
THE AUTHOR.
November 2, 187i.
..* A Ai \J
CONTENTS.
LECTUEE I.
PAGE TRELIMIXARY CONSIDERATIONS AND GENERAL VIEW OF
THE SUBJECT ... ... ... ... 1
1. Study of Textual criticism neither difficult nor unfruitful. 2. Holy Scripture, like all other ancient books, preserved to our times by means of manuscripts, 3. which, in the course of ages, necessarily came to differ from each other. 4. Extent of these differences roughly estimated. 5. Purpose of this science hence inferred. The sacred autographs utterly lost. 6. Sources of information open to us for the centuries before our oldest extant manuscripts existed, by means of versions and ecclesiastical writers. 7. Vast number of known copies of the New Testament. 8. Necessity for collating them, and mention of certain collators. 9. Modes of discriminating the date of manuscripts. 10. Shape and material of the oldest of them : paUmpsest defined. 11. Styles of writing described : uncial distinguished from cursive. 12. How to detect false or supposititious documents. A visit of adventure to the Bodleian Library.
LECTURE 11.
ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW- TESTAMENT ... ... ... ... 25
Method of notation employed for uncial manuscripts. Codex Vaticanus (B) described : its history, character, date,
viii CONTENTS.
PAGE
and collators. Cod. Siuaiticus (N) similarly described. His- tory' of Constantiue Simonides, who claimed to be the writer of it. Codd. B and K compared, tbeir special exceUenciea and defects. Danger of resting on ancient authorities alone illustrated from Addison, and from examples of tbeir own readings. Cod. Alexandrinus (A) described, its history, date, character, and collators. Specimens in English (and Greek) of each of the three great codices, B, N and A, with observa- tions.
LECTURE IIT.
ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT: SUBJECT CONTINUED ... ... 60
Codex Ephraemi (C), Cod. Bezas (D), Cod. Claromontamis (D of S. Paul), Cod. Sangermanensis (E of S. Paul), and Cod. Laudianus (E of Acts) described and illustrated by specimens in English (and Greek). The sister manuscripts of S. Paul, Cod. Augiensis (F) and Cod. Boernerianus (G : being Cod. A of the Gospels) described and compared. Cod. Begins (L) of the Gospels, with certain palimpsest and other fragments, briefly noticed (for these see Index I). Their needless dis- persion complained of. A few chief cursive manuscripts described (for these see Index I). The notation adopted for them. Remarks on mediiEval scribes.
LECTURE lY.
ON THE ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS FOR
THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT ... ... SC)
1. Principal use of ancient versions and ecclesiastical writers resumed from Lect. i. § 6. The case illustrated from Acts xiii. 18. 2. The chief ancient versions introduced with a caution. 3. Peshito Syriac described. 4. Curetouian Syriac with a specimen. 5. Philoxenian or Harclean Syriac. 6. Jerusalem Syriac. 7, 8. Egyptian versions, Memphitic and Thebaic. 9. Latin versions derive their origin from Africa.
CONTENTS. ix
PAGE
Cardinal Wiseman's investigations. 10, 11. The Old Latin Bible and its extant manuscripts {for thes'c see Index I). 12. History of the Latin Vulgate ; 13. its chief manuscripts and Papal editions. 14. Short notices of the Gothic, Armenian, ^Ethiopic, Georgian, Persic, Arabic, Slavonic, Prankish, and Anglo-Saxon versions {for these see Index I). 15. Critical advantages and defects of ancient translations of Scripture ; 16. as also of ecclesiastical writers. Subject illustrated from Matt. i. 18, 17. and from Luke xv. 21. 18. Great Fathers whose works are most available for critical purposes : Justin Martyr, Irenasus, Clement of Alexandi'ia, Origeu, 19. Euse- bius, Jerome and the Latins, Chrysostom and John Dama- scene in their oldest manuscripts, Cyril of Alexandria and his Homilies in Syriac. 20. Internal distinguished from ex- ternal evidence. Subjective impressions, why they must not be excluded from view. 21. Occasions for the lawful use of internal evidence. Five Canons proposed and illustrated by examples. Cautions reciuisite in applying them.
LECTURE Y.
DlSCUSfJIOX OF IMPORTANT PASSAGES IX THE HOLY GOSPELS 118
Comparative purity of the sacred text : Bentley's state- ment. Passages selected for special examination. (1) Matt. V. 22. (2) ih. vi. 13. (3) ih. xi. 19. (4) ih. xvi. 2, 3. (5) ih. xvii. 21. (6) ih. xvii. 20. (7) ih. xix. 16, 17. (8) ih. xxvii. 35. (9) Mark vi. 20. (10) ih. vii. 19. (11) ih. ix. 29. (12) ih. XV. 28. (13) ih. xvi. 9—20. (14) Luke ii. 14. (15) ih. vi. 1. (16) ih. X. 42. (17) ih. xi. 2, 4. (18) ih. xiv. 5. (19) ih. xxii. 43, 44. (20) ih. xxiii. 34. (21) John i. 18. (22) ih. iii. 13. (23) ih. v. 1. (24) ih. v. 3, 4. (25) ih. vii. 8. (20) ih. vii. 53 — viii. 11.
LECTURE YI.
DISCUSSION OF IMPORTANT PASSAGES IN THE PORTIONS OF
THE NEW TESTAMENT WHICH FOLLOW THE GOSPELS . 164
Explanation. Passages selected for special examination. (1) Acts xi. 20. (2) ih. xiii. 32, 33. (3) ih. xiii. 33. (4) ih.
CO^'TENTS,
PAGE
XV. 34. (5) ih. xvi. 7. (6) ih. xx. 28. (7) ih. xxvii. 37. (8) Eom. V. 1. (9) ih. xiii. 9. (10) ih. xvi. 5. {l\)ih. xvi. 25—27. (12) 1 Cor. xi. 24. (13) ih. xv. 49. (14) ih. xv. .51. (15) Phil. iii. 3. (16) Col. ii. 2. (17) 1 Tim. iii. 16. (18) Heb. ii. 7. (19) i6. ii. 9. (20) ib. iv. 2. (21) ih. ix. 1. (22) ih. xi. 13. (23) James ii. 18. (24) 1 Pet. iii. 15. (25) 1 John ii. 23. (26) ih, V. 7, 8. (27) Eev. xvi. 7. General conclusion.
INDEX I.
MANUSCRIPTS AXD ANCIENT VERSIONS OF THE NEW TESTA- MENT DESCRIBED IN THESE LECTURES ... ... 211
INDEX II.
TEXTS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ILLUSTRATED OR REFERRED TO
IN THESE LECTURES ... ... ...214
LECTUHE I.
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS AND GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT.
I AM much afraid that some of those to whom I am about to address a course of Lectures on the Sacred Text, and especially on the ancient manuscripts, of the New Testament, will think that I might easily have chosen a more popular and interesting subject, however highly they may be disposed to estimate its importance as a branch of theological study. Nor am I much encouraged by the representations of a jDious and learned person who has recently laboured, not quite unsuccessfully, over a new version of the inspired writings, and wlio frankly uses the following language in describing his own impressions respecting this kind of- work: "In the translation I could feel delight — it gave me the word and mind of God more accurately : in the critical details there is much labour and little food " (J . N. Darby, iV. T., Preface). Much labour and lit- tle fruit is no very cheering prospect for any one, and I should utterly despair of gaining the attention of my hearers after so plain an intimation of what they have to expect, unless the experience of a life- time had assured me that this good man's op'nion is the very s. L. 1
2 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
reverse of the truth. Is it a small reward for any toil we may have spent upon the investigation to discover the process by which the Scriptures have been handed down to us through threescore generations and more, or the grounds of our assurance that in their present condition the copies which are now preserved are, in the main, not unfair representations of the originals as they left the hands of the holy penmen ? Is it nothing to possess an intelligent, even though it be but a general knowledge, of the critical principles whereby, in doubtful cases, the genuine words of the Apostles and Evangelists can be discriminated from the accre- tions of later times, often and in nearly all capital instances to a moral certainty, always with a degree of probability adequate for practical purposes? Nor need the labour be excessive, or the strain on the attention unduly prolonged. The science of verbal or Textual criticism (for by this name, perhaps, it is best known) has nothing in its nature which ought to be thought hard or abstruse, or even remarkably dry and uninviting. It is conversant with varied and curious researches, w^hich have given a certain serious pleasure to many accomplished minds: it is a department of knowledge in which it is peculiarly easy to learn a little well, and to apply what is learnt to immediate use. The more industry is brought to bear upon it, the larger the stores of materials accumulated, so much the more trustworthy the results have usually proved, although beyond question the full and true application both of its facts and principles calls for discretion, keen- ness of intellect, innate tact ripened by constant use, a sound and impartial judgment. No man ever attained ■
AXB GEXERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT, 3
to eminence in this, or in any other worthy pursuit, without much trouble and some natural aptitude for it: but the criticism of the New Testament is a field which the humblest student of Holy Writ may cultivate with profit to himself and others; it is capable of affording those who have not much time to bestow upon working it, both an early and an abundant reward for their pains. Such is the testimony which more than thirty years' happy devotion to these studies might have given me some right to bear, were not this a matter upon w^hich every person will inevitably j udge for himself. To your verdict the appeal must ultimately be made, and I have a cheerful hope that it will be a favourable one, for the divine science whose claims upon your regard I am thus earnestly pressing. I make with you but a single condition, that I shall be fortunate enough to win your attention to a few simple preliminary con- siderations, the plain and indeed necessary consequence of which may not hitherto have been duly weighed, even by some who are no strangers to the bare facts of the case.
2. The several writings of the New Testament were published to the world at various times during the latter part of the first century of the Christian era; the art of printing was first practised in some German city in the middle of the fifteenth century: the first fruit of t\^ogra,phy, the beautiful Latin Bible known as Cardinal Mazarin's, of which w^e have a copy in the British Museum, appeared at Mentz scarcely before A.D. 1455. During that long period of fourteen hun- dred years, through the fading light of the decline of ancient literature, through the deep gloom of the middle
1—2
4 . PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
ages, even till the dawn of Letter days had almost brightened into the morning sunshine of the revival of learning, Holy Scripture was preserved and its study kept alive in the same way as were the classical writings of Greece and Rome, by means of manuscript copies made from time to time as occasion required, some- times by private students, more often by professional scribes called calligraphers or fair-hand writers, who were chiefly though by no means exclusively members of religious orders, priests or monks, carrying on their honourable and most useful occupation in the scrnj^to- rium or writing-chamber of their convents. And here I must say in passing, that whensoever the mind shall attempt to strike a balance between the good and ill effects of the monastic system during the thousand vears and more which separated the Council of Nice from the dayspring of the Reformation, this one great service rendered by ecclesiastical communities ought to be thankfully remembered, that to their wise diligence we owe, under Providence, all or nearly all that w^e know not of the Bible only, but of those precious remains of profane literature, which so powerfully tend to illustrate our study of the sacred volume, and to enhance, even by way of contrast, its priceless value.
3. Thus then it appears that the several books of the New Testament come down to us through the mid- dle ages by means of manuscrijDt copies. Hence arises •a grave and important enquiry, on the correct solution of which our whole subject depends. Whensoever a book issues forth from the printing-press, all exemplars of the same edition resemble each other in the minu- test particulars, except in the rare instances in which
A^''D GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 5
changes have been deliberately introduced as the work goes on; when once that work is printed off, it remains unaltered as though it had been graven with an iron pen upon the rock for ever. On the contrary, in transcrib- ing with the hand from another document no such per- fect similarity between the copy and the original can be depended upon, nor, in the vast majority of in- stances, does it actually exist. No transcript of any considerable length can well be found which does not differ from its prototype in some small points, and that in spite of all the care and skill which may have been engaged in producing it. Some of the original words or letters will have been mistaken by the copyist, or his eye may have wandered from one line to another, or he may have omitted or repeated Avhole sentences, or have fallen into some other hallucination for which he would find it hard to account even to his own mind. Human imperfection will be sure to mar the most highly-finished performance, and to leave its mark on the most elaborate efforts after accuracy. Now it is obvious that the pernicious effects of this natural fault will propagate themselves rapidly, when several tran- scripts have to be taken from the same original by dif- ferent persons, or by the same person at different pe- riods; and that when the original shall have disappeared, and these several copies shall have become the parents of other copies made independently of each other, the process of deterioration may be carried on for many generations, each separate transcript having its charac- teristic failings, until two several manuscripts, which sprang from the same progenitor a thousand years be- fore, may come to differ from each other very materially,
6 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
and that without any other blame to be imputed to the many scribes who have been employed upon them, save that they were not exempt from the common fail- ings of humanity. It is thus that variations between different copies of the classical authors have arisen — various readings they are usually called — which some- times affect the writer's general sense but little, and may safely be disregarded by the majority of readers, while occasionally, as in the dramas of the Greek trage- dian ^schylus, they prove a serious drawback to our enjoyment of the most sublime passages of a prince among poets.
4. And now comes a still closer and more search- ing question. These natural blemishes and imperfec- tions which prevail in all extant copies of all other works of antiquity, do they extend their baneful influ- ence to manuscripts of Holy Scripture also ? We must, of course, confess that, respect being had to the vast im- portance of preserving a pure text of the sacred writers, the answer might well be looked for in the negative, if we closed our senses to existing facts. God might, beyond a doubt, have so guided the hand or fixed the devout attention of successive races of copyists, that no jot or tittle should have been changed in the Bible of all that was first written therein. But this result could have been brought about only in one way, so far as we can perceive, — by nothing short of a continuous, unceasing miracle : by making fallible men, nay, many such in every generation, for one purpose absolutely in- fallible. That the Supreme Being should have thus far interfered with the course of His Providential arrange- ments, seems, prior to experience, very improbable, not
AiVn GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 7
at all in accordance with the analogy of His ordinary dealings with mankind, while actual experience amply demonstrates that He has not chosen thus to act. If we look, however slightly, into the manuscript copies of the New Testament which abound in every public library in Christendom, we shall find them differing not a little from each other in age and correctness and purity of text, yet the oldest and the very best of them full of variations, such as we must at once impute to the faidt of the scribe, together with certain here and there of a graver and more perplexing nature, regarding which we can form no safe judgment with- out calling to our aid the resources of critical learniDg. As in the case of the classical writings, so with those of the sacred penmen, the great mass of these various readings are in themselves quite insignificant, and scarcely affect the sense at all ; while some to which your special attention will be directed hereafter, are of a widely different complexion. But important or not, the more numerous and venerable the documents within our reach, the more extensive is our view of them. Our great Oxford critic, Dr John Mill, computed them at thirty thousand for the New Testament alone a hun- dred and seventy years ago : those noted up to the pre- sent epoch amount to at least fourfold that quantity.
5. You will, I trust, ere this, have come to under- stand the nature and conditions of the problem which Textual criticism sets itself to solve. It is no less than this: — how best to clear all existing copies of Scripture, whether in manuscript or printed, from the errors and corruptions of later times, and to restore it if possible to the condition in which it first left the hands of the
8 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
original authors. If an autograph of S. John's Gospel, for example, or of S. Paul's epistle to the Romans, as it came from his secretary Tertiiis (Rom. xvi. 22), were yet in existence, criticism would have no function to perform with regard to those inspired productions, except to compare modern reprints with the precious originals. But, in spite of vague rumours in a contrary sense, it can hardly be doubted that the sacred auto- graphs perished in the very infancy of Christian history. The early Church, which was privileged to enjoy the oral teaching of Apostles and Apostolic men, attached no peculiar sanctity to their written compositions. Add to this the circumstance that the "paper," or prepared leaf of the papyrus, spoken of by S. John (2 John 12), which was the usual material employed by scribes at that period, is of so frail and brittle a quality that almost no specimens of it have been preserved, save those that have lain long buried in Egyptian tombs, and other like safe receptacles. Vellum, the manufactured skin of young calves or antelopes, on which all our best manuscripts were subsequently written, was in S. Paul's age reserved for documents or records of exceptional value ; " bring with thee," he writes to Timothy, " the books" (of the Ifihlus oxixtj)yrus plant), "but especially the parchments" (2 Tim. iv. 13). And the self-same fate which befell the autograph books of the New Testament was that also of the earliest copies derived from them, though for a different reason. In the last and most cruel of the per- secutions to which believers were subjected throughout the Roman empire, I mean that of Diocletian, during a shameful period of ten years at the beginning of the fourth century of our era (A.D. 303—312), the tyrant.
ASD GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 0
being resolved, so far as in him lay, to root out the Christian Faith, with a true instinct directed his efforts to the destruction of the Christian Scriptures. They were everywhere sought out and burnt; those who pos- sessed them were bidden to give them up, and that on pain of death. The timid brethren who so far com- plied with the Imperial decrees composed a class nume- rous enough to be designated by a special name of dis- honour : they were called " deliverers up," traditores, of which term our English traitor is the suitable represent- ative. The result was deplorable enough, though in God's mercy the worst effects of the enemy's malice were frustrated. When the Church had rest again, the volumes of Holy Scripture that could be got together were comparatively few. But these were made the archet}^es of a host of others, some of them now sur- viving, whose date may be assigned with certainty to the fourth and fifth centuries. The orderly succession of copy after copy was never broken, although it may be fairly doubted whether any, and certainly but a few inconsiderable fragments of the New Testament still extant, are older than the fiery reign of Diocletian.
6. We are thus compelled by the force of truth to admit that a wide space of little less than three centu- ries separates the lost autographs of Apostles and Evan- gelists from the earliest manuscripts of their works in full yet remaining to us. A vital question is yet to be answered, how this ya\^Tiing gulf is to be bridged over, and the continuity restored between what they ^vrote and what we receive ? W^e are thankful to know that our reply to this reasonable enquiry is at once brief, simple, and wholly satisfactory. We have tAVo.
10 PRELIMIXARY COXSIDERATIONS
other distinct sources of information, besides the evi- dence of Greek manuscripts, whereby the condition of the inspired text during the first three centuries can be readily ascertained, not indeed in complete detail, as manuscripts would have enabled us to do, but to an ex- tent amply sufficient for all practical ends, quite enough to assure us of their general integrity, and of the reve- rence in which they were held in the first ages of the Faith: — and these are primitive versions of their text, and quotations made from them by ecclesiastical wri- ters whose productions yet remain with us. The pre- cise character of the proof afforded us from these sources will most conveniently be dwelt upon in another Lec- ture ; all I now seek is to impress upon your minds their exceeding value for illustrating the literary his- tory of those remote ages, for which direct documentary evidence has failed us. Nor is the great general ser- vice they render us in this respect materially impaired by certain peculiarities to be detailed hereafter, which render it peculiarly necessary to sift their testimony before implicitly receiving it on every point : still less by the fact that manuscripts of the translations of Scripture into Syriac, Coptic, Latin and other ancient tongues, like those of the original Greek and of the Fa- thers of the Church, themselves bear no higher date than the fourth century, and in the great majority of cases are considerably later. It is enough to know that their evidence is entirely independent of the later Greek copies, and has never been assimilated to them since each primitive version was first made or each Patristic work first published. Hence it arises that manuscripts of the Old Latin or Syriac, though themselves of the
AKD GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 11
fourth or fifth century,' express and unmistakeable quo- tations made by IrenoBus in the second, by Origen in the third century, present us for the passages actually before us with a representation of the readings known to them, as reliable as if the Greek text which they used had survived to this day.
7. It is time to return from a necessary digression to describe the manuscript copies of the Greek New Testa- ment itself, which will claim our attention for the re- mainder of the present, and in the two next ensuing Lec- tures. After all, antiquity has bequeathed to us nothing else that can be compared with them for interest and intrinsic worth : they have been called by some one "the title deeds of our Christian inheritance," and well do they deserve the name. Now it is very memorable that written copies of the Greek Scriptures, including those of the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, far exceed in age and number those of all the classical "writings of antiquity put together. Homer may be supposed to have flourished at least eight hundred years before Christ, yet we have no complete copy of his two great poems prior to the thirteenth century, although some considerable frag- ments of the Iliad have been recently brought to light, which may plausibly be assigned to the fifth or sixth : while more than one work of deserved and high repute has been preserved to our times only in a single transcript. The case of the Hebrew Scriptures is yet more remarkable. Careful as the Jews have been, at least from the period that their Masoretic notes were formed, and probably long before, to secure minute accuracy in the act of transcribing their sacred books.
12 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
none of their extant manuscripts can be regarded as older than the eleventh century, and only a few are so old : the apparent reason for this unexpected fact being partly found in a Talmudical law which ordains that synagogue rolls which were faulty, torn, or injured through age, should be at once destroyed. Of the Christian Scriptures, on the contrary, we have several copies which may fairly be attributed to the fourth century, at least two with complete certainty ; not a few must be assigned to the fifth and sixth centuries, after which time their number increased so prodigiously, down to the epoch of the invention of printing and a little beyond it, that those known at present to exist in public and private libraries throughout Christendom can hardly be less than from eighteen hundred to two thousand. With regard to manuscripts more recent than the tenth century it may truly be said that, the more they are sought for, the more come to light. The accumulated stores buried in the monasteries of Mount Athos, though they have been largely drawn upon in modern times, even after the sweeping raid made by that ardent collector, the late Lord de la Zouche, better known as the Hon. Robert Curzon, are no doubt very far from exhausted. I have been recently informed on excellent authority that in Roumania, the houses of the noble families whose ancestors fled from Constanti- nople before the last agony of the Imperial city are full of works both Biblical and theological which they brought with them to the land of their exile. From quite a dif- ferent part of the Greek peninsula, from Janina in Epirus, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts has just imported a collection of Greek volumes dating from the ninth to
AXD GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 13
the seventeenth century, whereof between thirty and forty, being about a third part of the whole, relate to the New Testament. Their soiled and mutilated condition tells too plainly their recent history, as being poor reliques snatched from the sack of some Christian convent during the troubles which closed Ali Pasha's rule (A. D. 1822).
8. It will of course have occurred to you that the very abundance of these materials for sacred criticism may easily become a source of embarrassment to the Biblical student. *' The real text of the sacred writers," to cite very well-known words of Richard Bentley, the greatest scholar England has produced, " does not now (since the originals have been so long lost) lie in any manuscript or edition, but is dispersed in them all." Yet to collate the whole mass, that is to compare their mutual variations with some common standard (usually a printed edition) which has been previously agreed upon, would be indeed an herculean task, to which not one life but many must needs be devoted, and which, even when completed, might not be very fruitful of important results. The plan that has been adopted thus far is to expend great pains and labour upon a comparatively small number of manuscripts the most venerable for age, or which otherwise promise to afford more help than the average for the correction of the text. Hence have originated those elaborate facsimile editions of the chief codices (codex, you will be aware, is the Latin word whereby a manuscript is called) by which Tischendorf and other critics have confeiTed on us signal benefit. Every line, every word, every error, every correction of the original scribe and his
14 PRELIMIXARY COXSIDERATIONS
successors, is carefully reproduced, so that the reader at a distance may be put as nearly as possible into the condition of the editor who is working with the manu- script before him. But it obviously would not do to stop here, or to leave the great mass of copies wholly unexamined. Conclusions arrived at by the deliberate shutting out of a large, indeed by far the larger portion of available evidence, must be eminently untrustworthy, and could not stand the test of time and impartial enquiry. Hence have several persons in successive generations undertaken to collate many of those docu- ments of secondary value which it was not easy or perhaps desirable to publish in full. In this quiet and humble labour the pious Archbishop Ussher employed the doleful leisure of his later years, when reduced to silence in the evil days of the Great Rebellion. Our countryman Mill, Wetstein and Matthaei on the conti- nent, to say nothing of the Dane Andrew Birch and other lesser names, willingly gave up ten, twenty, or thirty years together to this task. In our own time it has fired and prematurely worn out the energy of one never to be named but with respect and gratitude, Dr Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. I have striven hard myself to contribute what I have been able, not all I have desired and once hoped for, to the same good cause of sacred learning, and if life and health be granted me, I aspire to accomplish yet a little more. In their selection of manuscripts on which to work from the mass which still lie disregarded and virtually unknown, collators have naturally given the preference to such as seemed to them for some cause or other to possess special claims on their attention : yet as this motive would
AXD GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 15
operate but to a limited extent, I doubt not that my prer^ecessors have mostly followed the same plan as myself, and have studied those copies first which lay nearest at hand, or to which they could obtain most ready access. In this way, at any rate, if we have sometimes taken up a manuscript of little interest or intrinsic value, we have presented to the reader only the more faithful specimen of w^hat would result from a complete collation of the whole mass.
9. It now remains to shew the manner of dis- criminating really ancient codices, written in the fourth and two succeeding centuries, from others of com- paratively recent date ; and this matter is the more important, inasmuch as the older the manuscript, the fewer, in all probability, the successive transcripts between the sacred autograph and the document before us. Indeed we can do little towards forming any con- sistent notion of the history of the text until we shall have made some progress in fixing the age of the principal witnesses which attest to it. Not a few manuscripts have the year of the Greek era, and some- times the proper Indiction of that year, appended by the original scribe in the colophon or subscription of the volume, and thus they form instructive guides for settling the epoch of others which more or less resemble them in style of writing. This advantage however does not attach to codices earlier than the ninth century, and we must dispense with its aid as we best can.
10. Our attention, therefore, should be directed in the first place to the shape and material of the document under investigation. There can be little doubt, as we said before, that the autographs of the
16
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
Apostles were written on the cheap and plentiful Egyptian papyrus, which was employed for most pur- poses in their day. Since this material was manufac- tured in slips which could seldom exceed four inches in breadth and a very few in length, it was the usual practice to join the short and narrow columns laterally, so that each piece might be parallel to each other piece
throughout the book, which was read by gradually unrolling the volume at one end and rolling it up at the other, just as the book of the Law is arranged to this day in the Jewish synagogues. In this manner, the open volume would afford the appearance of several parallel columns exhibited to the eye at once, as may be seen to this day in the Museum at Naples, in the case of the papyrus fragments rescued from the ruins of Herculaneum. As the more durable fine vellum of our oldest extant codices came gradu-
AND GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 17
ally to take the place of the perishable papyrus in transcribing works so important as the Holy Scriptures, this practice of writing in parallel columns, which when the papyrus was used was a pure necessity, seems to have been for some time retained through mere habit, so that on vellum pages of the fourth century we still see three, and in one instance, four columns on a single page, or six and eight on the open leaf. This peculiarity, wheresoever it appears, is very striking, and lends to the document which exhibits it a genuine sem- blance of high antiquity.
Regard should be had also to the material, as well as to the shape of the volume under examination. As a general rule, the older the document, the more white, thin, and transparent is the vellum : we shall hereafter have to notice two or three books whose skins are conspicuous for their delicate beauty. As we come lower down in the scale of time, the fine vellum de- generates, until in the middle ages it is often no better than coarse parchment made from sheep's skins. Then again, about the ninth century, a rough, brown, un- sightly paper, made of cotton rags, and sometimes called Damascene from the place where it was invented, crept gradually into use. For this, about the twelfth cen- tury, linen paper came to be substituted, which was at once stouter, more white and crisp, than that pre- pared from cotton : when glazed and well-wrought it is especially elegant, and by an unpractised eye can scarcely be distinguished from vellum.
Once more, we may fairly infer the high antiquity of a document, if it be what is called a palivijysest, that is, when for the sake of putting so precious a material S. L. 2
18 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
as vellum to the utmost use, the older writing which it contained has been washed out (a process all the more easy inasmuch as the ancient ink was purely vegetable, without any metallic base), and later matter put over it in its room. In course of time the earlier writing, which had never been entirely obliterated, will come again to the surface, and can thus be read beneath the more modern letters, and may be traced by an attentive and diligent student with more or less facility. Few employments call for so much patience, or task the eyesight and skill of a collator so much as this, but as it almost always happens that the older writing is by far the more valuable, he is pretty sure to find his labour rewarded in the end. In one or two known instances this habit of washing out the first written letters has been twice repeated, and to decipher a double palimpsest (as it is then termed) calls for the masterhood of a Tischendorf When attempts have been made to revive the faded characters by means of such washes as prussiate of potash, the experiment has succeeded for a while, but the palimpsest has too often been rendered illegible ever after.
11. Another and more comprehensive method of approximating to the date of a manuscript is by scru- tinizing the style of its writing. The oldest extant codices of formal works exhibit the whole text in capital or uncial letters, that name being derived from the Latin uncia, an inch, to which size some of them come very near. These uncial letters were originally written without stops or even breaks between the words, and look the more strange inasmuch as the words themselves are divided at the end of the neces-
AND GENERAL VIEW OF TUE SUBJECT. 19
sarih' narrow lines without much regard to the syllables which compose them. Let us take for our example the opening of S. Luke's Gospel, wherein the sentence at first sight hardly looks like English.
FORASMUCHASMA NYHAYETAKENIN HANDTOSETFORTH
and so on. Our earliest extant model of writing of this kind has been preserved by means of that awful catastrophe which the genius of Lytton-Bulwer has made so familiar to us, the burial of the Campanian town of Herculaneum beneath a stream of lava, A. d. 79. The liberality of the kings of Naples (let us speak one good word for a dynasty at any rate not worse than that which has displaced it) has presented to scholars ex^ici facsimiles of papyri, which, scorched and shrivelled as they are, and unfortunately comprising treatises of small interest in themselves, are the only undoubted volumes of the first century which have survived the wreck of time. Certain dissertations of the Epicurean Philodemus which they contain may be used the more conveniently, inasmuch as he was a contemporary of Cicero, and must have written about a century before the fatal event. After making due allowance for the papyrus having shrunk from the heat, these uncials attract the eye for their minuteness as well as for the elegance of their shape. They are authentic specimens of a fashion which prevailed in the first century of our era, the letters square, upright, simple, graceful, singularly clear, none being larger than the rest, or intruding into the margin, without
2—2
20 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
breathings or accents, the stops very rare and only a single point at the utmost, the clauses and sentences being separated from each other either by a very small space or not at all. Between these exquisite relics of the past and the earliest known manuscripts of Scripture little less than three centuries must have elapsed, yet we find that those Biblical codices which most resemble the Herculanean papyri are precisely such as for other reasons we should be led to judge the most ancient. In later ages, letters larger than the rest came gradually into use to serve the same purpose as our capitals at the beginning of sentences ; subsequent- ly they encroached upon the margin, and grew more conspicuous for size and illuminations ; then the shape of the ordinary letters became more and more ornate, the words being separated from each other either by points or by blank spaces, as in modern writing. Then again, as time went on, punctuation became more heavy, and quite as complicated as what we now employ ; breathings and accents were added, at first very irregularly, afterwards with as much uniformity and correctness as in a printed Greek book; and at length, about the ninth century, the letters themselves became no more upright but leaning, like our own handwriting, sometimes to the left, more frequently to the right. This was the last stage of uncial cal- ligraphy, which, about the beginning of the tenth century or a few 3^ears before, gave way to the cursive or running hand, which had been employed all along for ordinary purposes, and was now deemed not unfit to be introduced into copies of Holy Scripture, even those which were most splendidly written on the finest
AXD GENERAL VIEW OF TUE SUBJECT. 21
vellu: 1, and were the most sumptuously furnished with pictures and arabesque scrolls set off in rich pun:)le, vermilion and gold. The cursive style also had its stages and local fashions, not indeed so strongly marked as in the uncial, but well known to adepts ; though it is not necessary for our present purpose to speak much about manuscripts which date as late as from the tenth century downwards.
12. I feel quite sure that, before I have done, some of my hearers will press upon me the awkward question whether we ought to be so very positive about the authenticity of these venerable monuments of re- mote antiquity, especially in an ingenious age, wherein some public and most private Museums are half full of pictures of "the Old Masters" executed by living hands, of spurious medals, and of flint implements made to order. Now on this point I should like to speak ex- plicitly. I believe it to be quite feasible to pass off the forgeries of some clever and intelligent scribe, who may have devised means to imitate so closely the decaying vellum, the fading ink, the precise sha^De and fashion of primitive writings, as to deceive those who ought to be the best, as they are the most experienced, judges. Such a fraud is difficult, but is not impossible to be carried out ; and if I am not mistaken, the archives of the British Museum itself contain some codices, bought at a high price, which never will appear in the Catalogue, or be submitted to public inspection. But while I freely grant that the outward semblance of ancient documents may be assumed by skilful manipulation, I am sure that their internal character will always defy imposture. Over and over
22 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
again it lias been found that manuscripts which from their general appearance have been accepted without scruple, have been found at once to be spurious the moment their contents came to be scrutinized by com- petent scholars. Such was the case with the Egyptian History of Uranius the son of Anaximenes — a purely imaginary person — palmed upon the wise men of Berlin (one likes the Germans to be taken in some- times) about twenty years ago by the notorious Con- stantine Simonides, a native of the Greek isle of Syme. As a work of the calligraphic art it is perfect, but the careful study of the subject-matter but for a few pages sufficed to shew its true nature. With respect to Biblical manuscripts in particular, we may con- fidently assert that there are fifty persons at least now in England, who on internal grounds alone, from their intimate knowledge of what a genuine record ought to and must contain, would at once detect with perfect ease any the most highly finished imita- tion that dishonest skill could execute, provided the document extended beyond the length of a very few lines.
Scholars too there are, especially if propitious fortune has cast their lot in the midst of those ma- gazines of literary wealth, the chief public libraries, to whom ripe experience has imparted a kind of intuition, an instinctive faculty of discerning the true from the false at a moment's glance, for Avhicli they can scarcely assign a cause even to themselves : the eye in this case outstrips the slower conclusions of reason and of science. Some of you may be hearing for the first time of the single visit paid to Oxford
AXD GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT. 23
by that Constantiue Simonides of whom we have already spoken. He had just then beguiled two celebrated Pundits indeed ; Professor Lepsius of Berlin, and Sir Frederick Madden of the British Museum, when one morning, unintroduced and then unknown to fame, he presented himself at the Bodleian to Mr H. O. Coxe, now most worthily placed at the head of that magnificent library, as the bearer of certain Greek manuscripts which he seemed willing to sell. He produced two or three, unquestionably genuine, but not at all remarkable either for age or character, and readily agreed with the librarian in assigning them severally to the tenth, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. He then proceeded to unroll, with much show of anxiety and care, some fragments of vellum, redolent of high antiquity, and covered with uncial writing of the most venerable form. Our wary critic nar- rowly inspected the crumbling leaves ; smelt them, if haply they might have been subjected to some chemical process: then quietly handed them back to their vendor with the simple comment that these, he thought, might date from about the middle of the nineteenth century. The baffled Greek forthwith ga- thered up liis wares, walked straight to the railway station, and bent his course to a well-known country- house in Worcestershire, whose accomplished owner became their happy purchaser. Under his hospitable roof I inspected those treasures a few weeks later, and must confess that, regarded as mere specimens of calligraphy, they were worth any moderate sum they may have cost him. There was Anacreon writ small so as to fit into a nutshell ; portions of Hesiod in
24 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS, l-c.
zigzag fashion as the ox ploughs ; and other curiosities more marvellous still, respecting whose price I could get no other answer than this from my courteous host, "I gave little enough for them if they are what I took them to be, a great deal too much if your sus- picions are true."
The prcsent Lecture has of necessity been devoted to the consideration of abstract principles or of broad and general facts. If you think that I have not yet proved against my will the melancholy allegation that my subject promises " much labour and little food," I will next ask leave to introduce to your notice a few of the precious manuscripts of the Greek Scriptures which are the pride and honour of the great libraries of Europe.
LECTURE II.
ox THE P^J^X'IPAL GREEK MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAIVIENT.
Our subject now leads me to present to 3^ou a ge- neral description of the principal Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. You are already aware that these documents are of the very highest value and importance when we come to examine the text of Holy Scripture. Hence, in the case of a few of them that hold the first rank, it will be necessary to enter into some details respecting their literary history, as well as the date and internal character of each, so far as these latter points can be made intelligible to a general company; pre- mising that the uncial or elder codices are commonly distinguished from each other by the several letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, &c. Since Avhat is called Codex A is inferior to two others both in age and intrinsic worth, we will place it but third in our list and begin with the world-renowTied
Codex B, the glory of the Vatican library at Rome, where its class mark is 1209. Whence it came thither, who were its previous owners, in what coun- try it was written, are alike unknown to us, except that, from certain peculiarities in the spelling, Alex-
26 Oy THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
andria has been conjecturally assigned as its native place. All that can be said amounts to this, that the
» Vatican library was founded in 1448 by that eminent scholar and vigorous statesman Pope Nicolas V., and that this manuscript appears in the earliest extant catalogue, compiled in 1475. Until within the last
\ fifteen years it was without a rival in the world, and Tischendorf's great discovery, the Codex Sinaiticus, which will be spoken of next in order, has not much disturbed its supremacy in the judgment of any one, unless we except that illustrious German Professor himself. Codex B is comprised in a single quarto volume containing 759 thin and delicate vellum leaves, and is so jealously guarded by the Papal authorities that ordinary visitors see nothing of it but the red morocco binding. We should not grudge the suspicious care of its custodians, knowing as we do full well the unique preciousness of their treasure, if they had not also withdrawn it from the use of persons the most competent to study it aright. The precautions taken against such a man as Tregelles, who, armed with a letter from Cardinal Wiseman, went to Rome in 1845 for the express purpose of consulting it, would be ludicrous if they were less discreditable. " They would not let me open the volume," he writes, " without searching my pockets, and depriving me of pen ink and paper." The two 2^relati, or dignified clergymen, who had been told off to watch him, would talk and laugh aloud in order to distract his attention, and if he looked at a passage too long, would abruptly snatch the book out of his hand. Dean Alford, who in 18G1 must have been pretty well known even to Roman ecclesiastics,
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 27
states in a letter recently published by his widow in her pleasant Life of him, that having extorted from the minister Cardinal Antonelli a special order " per veri- ficare," to verify passages, he found his license inter- preted by the librarian to mean that he was to see the book, but not to use it. Witii these hindrances to contend against, aggravated by the fact that library hours in the Vatican are only three daily, and that its attendants devoutly keep all Italian Church holidays, we need not wonder if our acquaintance with this noble monument of extreme antiquity has long been superfi- cial and imperfect, and to this hour is far from complete. It contains, as do the next three manuscripts we shall have to describe, the Old Testament in the Greek Septuagint translation as well as the original of the New, but the ravages of time have deprived us of the book of Genesis down to ch. xlvi. 48, of Psalms cv. — cxxxvii., and in the New Testament of the Epistle to the Hebrews from ch. ix. 14 to the end, of the four Pastoral Epistles as they are called (1, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon), which, in this and in the next three copies, were placed after that to the Hebrews, and finally of the Book of the Revelation ; all these last portions being supplied in quite a modern hand of the fifteentli century. Every open leaf presents to the eye six narrow columns of simple, elegant and distinct uncial letters, three columns standing on each page, as we see in a fragment of the historian Dio Cassius also preserved in the Vatican, and in a very few other documents, mostly but not all of the same re- mote date ; a date which, judging not only from the form of the volume, but also from the purity of the
2S ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
vellum, from the faded condition of the ink where- soever the letters have not been retouched, from the j^rimitive shape of those letters themselves, from the complete lack of capitals and from the extreme paucity of the stops, in all which particulars it has very few compeers, and in the whole put together none what- ever except the Herculanean papyri of the first cen- tury whereof we spoke before (p. 19), cannot be placed later than the first half of the fourth century. Indeed, Tregelles, a consummate and experienced authority on such matters, was so deeply impressed with the general appearance of Codex B, as being far more venerable than anything else he had ever seen, that he once told me, what I do not observe that he has ever pub- lished, that while he felt quite sure that it was already written at the time of the council of Nice (a.d. 325), he did not like to say how much earlier it might very w^ell be. Throughout the New Testament it exhibits a division of the text into chapters or paragraphs (in the Acts and Epistles into two separate series) to which we have hardly anything corresponding elsewhere, and w^hich in the Gospels became quite obsolete after the adoption of the sections and canons of Eusebius about A. D. 340, the year when that celebrated ecclesiastical writer and critic died. The mistaken diligence whereby the original writing has been retraced by a scribe who lived not earlier than the eiglith or later than the eleventh century, and who added those breathings and accents and elaborate capitals which now deform the document, has rendered an accurate acquaintance with its true readings a matter of unusual difficulty, de- manding and promising to reward the utmost care and
MAXUSCRIPrS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 20
skill of an experienced collator. The work of the first hand can best be judged of in those places which the later pen has left untouched, as being or presumed to be errors of the pen, but the cases are probably very- few wherein leisurely examination by a thorough scholar would leave any considerable doubt as to testimony of the original manuscript. The misfortune is that oppor- tunities for such an exhaustive study of its contents have of late years been granted only to those who were quite incompetent to make the best use of them. We need not here repeat the curious history of the several attempts that have been made to collate the Vatican Codex, from the time that the Papal Librarian Paul Bombasius sent some account of it to the great Erasmus in 1521, down to the abortive Roman editions which vainly struggled for existence after the death of another Papal Librarian, Cardinal Mai, in 1854. That dis- tinguished person, whose services rendered both to classical and ecclesiastical learning are justly re- nowned throughout Europe, devoted his scanty spare hours for ten whole years in carrying through the press five quarto volumes, professing to represent the contents of our manuscript both in the Old and New Testament. He subsequently added a reprint of the New Testament portion in a cheap octavo form. Yet although his main work, to wdiich the interest of Christendom had been invited by many a puff pre- liminary, had been completed as early as 1838, it was not published till three years after the Cardinal's death, and it was then perceived at once by those who had any knowledge of the subject, that it never would have appeared so long as he lived. If Angelo Mai had neither
30 ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
the patience nor tlie special skill to accomplish well his self-imposed task, he was far too good a scholar not to know that he had done it very ill : so ill in fact that it would be hard to account for his numberless blunders and glaring incompetency did we not re- member that Biblical criticism, by reason of the rigid impartiality and exactness that it calls for, is so alien to the taste and mental habits fostered by the theology of the Church of Rome, that examples are rare indeed wherein it has been cultivated in her communion with even moderate success : from among living names, Ceriani, curator of the Ambrosian library at Milan, occurs to the memory as a solitary exception. The untrustworthy character of Mai's attempt was manifest from the first, yet it was not till nine years after, in 1866, that the dauntless Tischendorf resolved to re- present its demerits to Pius IX. in person, and to seek from him permission to undertake a fresh and more satisfactory edition, at least of the New Testa- ment. The Pope could not deny the substantial truth of his impeachment, but evaded the heretic's request by declaring that he reserved a better edition as a work for himself to carry out, while yet he gracefully allowed Tischendorf to consult the manuscript in such pas- sages— and they are pretty many — as present any special difficulty, or respecting which previous collators had been at variance. For eight days our critic freely enjoyed this valued privilege, but in the course of his task he could not refrain — few of us perhaps could have refrained — from copying at length sixteen of these precious pages. Such a licence being not unnaturally regarded as a breach of covenant, the
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 31
manuscript was then taken from him, but on appealing to the generosity of Yercellone, to whom the Pope had entrusted the care of the projected work, he was permitted to resume his labours for six days more, the Italian being always present at this latter period, and receiving instruction for the preparation of his own volumes by watching the processes of a master workman. In spite of all his disadvantages, these fourteen days of just three hours each, used zealously and intelligently, enabled Tischendorf to put forth a representation of Codex B far superior to any that pre- ceded it. Five superb volumes of the Roman edition have since appeared, whereof the genial and learned -Yercellone lived long enough to superintend two, that containing the New Testament happily being one. The rest have fallen into other and obviously less skilful hands. The concluding volume, which may perhaps be looked for in the course of the present year, will be that which is at once the most important, and will test most decisively the capacity of the editors ; it is that which will attempt to discriminate the ori- ginal readings of the manuscript from the corrections of later scribes. If we trace in this department of their labours anything approaching to critical discern- ment we may rest content for the present, and await that unrestrained access to the document which future and hardly distant events will not fail to gain for Biblical students. It is not very pleasant to reflect that, during the most brilliant period of the first French Empire, this great treasure was deposited for years in the Royal Library at Paris, unexamined and uncared for save by one who proved hardly able
32 OX THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
to do its merits complete justice, the Roman Catholic J. L. Hug, whose treatise on the "Antiquity of the Vatican Manuscript," which appeared in 1810, first attracted general attention to its remote date and paramount importance, although Tischendorf pithily observes that he adopts its conclusions "non propter Hugium sed cum Hugio," in Hug's company, though not for the reasons assigned by him. But the internal characteristics of Codex B will be more conveniently discussed together with those of its most considerable rival, which stands next on our list, namely
Codex Sinaiticus, at St Petersburg, rather awk- wardly designated as Alepli ({<), the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This manuscript was happily lighted upon by Tischendorf in the Convent of St Catharine on Mount Sinai only fifteen years ago. The history of its discovery is so romantic as to have seemed at first almost incredible, but there is no reason to doubt that the first accounts that reached the public ear were in the main correct. When travelling in 1844 under the patronage of his own sovereign, Frederick Augustus of Saxony, a bountiful friend of learning and of learned men, Tischendorf states that he picked out of a basket full of papers destined to light the Convent oven, some forty-three leaves of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, whose high antiquity he recognised at a glance, and which he published in 184G under the name of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus. These leaves he got at once for the asking, but findingthat further portions of the same manuscript still survived, he rescued them from their probable fate by giving the monks some notion of their value. He repeated his
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 33
visit to Sinai in 1853, hoping that he might be allowed to purchase the whole volume; but his hints had alarmed the brotherhood, and he could gather no further in- formation about it. He even seems to have concluded that his prize had been secured by some more fortunate collector and had already been carried away into Europe. Returning to the Convent once more early in 1859, no longer as an obscure private traveller, but as an accredited agent of the Emperor of Russia, the gracious protector of the Eastern Church, the treasure which he had twice missed was, on the occasion of some chance conversation, spontaneously laid before him. Mutilated as the Codex then was, it still consisted of more than 300 large leaves of the finest vellum, with four columns on every page and eight on the open leaf, containing, besides certain portions of the Septuagint version, the whole New Testament, followed by the Epistle of Barnabas and a considerable fragment of the Shepherd of Hernias, two works of the Apostolic age or of that which immediately followed it, v/hich were read in the Church Service as Scripture up to the latter part of the fourth century. Tischendorf touchingly describes his surprise, his joy, his midnight studies over the priceless book — for indeed it seemed a sin to sleep on that memorable 4th of February 1859. The rest was easy; he was allowed to transfer his prize to Cairo, to copy it there, and ultimately to take it to Russia, as a tribute of duty and gratitude to Alexander 11. The Russian Emperor's munificence enabled him in 18G2 to publish a costly edition of the manuscript, partly in facsimile, with an elaborate Introduction and critical notes.
The remote locality of its present resting-place, s. L. 3
34 ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
and some little difficulty in . obtaining access expe- rienced by visitors at St Petersburg, have rendered us largely dependent on Tischendorf s own representa- tions for our knowledge of the Codex Sinaiticus. Yet Tregelles and other very competent judges examined it carefully when it was for a while at Leipsic in Tischendorf's possession, and never entertained a doubt that it was a genuine relic of the fourth century, thousfh not, as its discoverer seemed to imacfine, more ancient than its competitor at the Vatican. Almost every mark of extreme age which we noticed in the latter, may be seen also in the copy at St Petersburg : ■ — the papyrus- like arrangement of several columns on the open leaf; the singular fineness of the material, Avhicli consists of the skins of young antelopes; the extreme simplicity of the characters employed; the total absence of capitals (although in both an initial letter occasionally stands a little out of the line after a break in the sense), of breathings and accents ; the rare occurrence even of the single stop. While the I presence of those venerable uncanonical books of Barnabas (whose Greek text is- here read complete \ for the first time these thousand years) and of Hermas' i Shepherd might seem to indicate a prior date for the ( Sinaitic, yet, on the other hand, the peculiar chapters ;■ of the Vatican book have now made room for the Eusebian sections and canons, which are placed in the margin of the Gospels in their accustomed ver- milion ink, if not by the original writer (for the rubricator was seldom the same person as the scribe), yet certainly by a contemporary. The age of Codex Aleph is thus brought down to the middle of the
2IAXUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 3o
fourth century, tliougli it is not at all necessary, or indeed reasonable, to refer it to a later generation than that in which Eusebius flourished.
The strangest part of this remarkable story has yet to be told. You remember Constantine Simonides, of Syme, his History of Uranius the son of Anaximenes, and his bootless visit to the Bodleian. Certain of his earlier mis- adventures "had brouoiit him into collision with Tischen- dorf, to whose researches he had first rendered some real aid, and whom he subsequently but in vain endea- voured to deceive. No sooner had the German issued in 1860 his earliest facsimiles of Codex Sinaiticus than Simonides at once declared that venerable monu- ment of early Christianity to be the work of his own hands ; making merry, as you may suppose, with those self-called critics, who after rejecting the old manu- scripts in his possession as modern forgeries, had proved ignorant enough to receive as genuine remains of extreme antiquity a book innocently copied by a youth who neither wished to mislead, nor had imagined that its true character could be mistaken by any one. Like the gay old beadsman in Scott's Antiqiiai^y Simo- nides " minded the bigging " of this marvellous relic of long-past ages, and w^as in truth himself the builder. Among the many accomplishments of his pregnant wdt, he alleged that he w^as gifted with exquisite skill as a calligrapher, and on this point at any rate there can be no mistake. Hence he was naturally selected by his uncle Benedict, head of the monastery of Panteleemon (" the All- merciful") on Mount Athos, whom he went to visit in November, 1839, to make in manuscript, from a printed Moscow Bible, a copy of the whole Scriptures,which might
3—2
36 OX THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
be worthy of the acceptance of the Russian Emperor Nicolas, in dutiful acknowledgment of benefits he had conferred on that house. The letters were uncial, the material vellum, the style antique. He had gone through both the Old and New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and the first part of Hermas, and would have added the whole of the Apostolic Fathers, but tliat in August 1840 his materials failed and his uncle died. He therefore broke off his task by simply writ- ing an inscription purporting that "the whole was the work of Simonides," and though he retained the dedication to the Emperor in the beginning of the volume, he found another patron in Constantius, ex- Patriarch of Constantinople and Archbishop of Sinai, who in 1841 accepted the gift in a fatherly letter, with which he sent his benediction and 25,000 piastres, some £250 sterling. In 1844 Simonides heard from the lips of Constantius himself that he had long since sent the Codex to St Catharine*s on Mount Sinai, where the scribe saw his own work in 1844 and again in 1852.
It is humiliating to recall the circumstances of the controversy which ensued in England, wdiere our Greek was then sojourning, for elsewhere the fable was re- ceived with blank and absolute incredulity. One of our so-called religious periodicals, which we will name, if you please, " The Illiterate Churchman," without absolutely committing itself to the correctness of Simo- nides' statement, persisted to the last in regarding it as a matter demanding the gravest investigation. Tliat love of Biblical study, which is the glory of our nation, leads many to take a deep interest in this class of
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 37
subjects wlio have received no such special training as would enable them unassisted to form a true estimate of the facts of a case like this : not to mention the honest prejudice excited, as the controversy went on, in favour of a stranger who was single-handed and obviously over-matched. It soon appeared, however, that living witnesses on his behalf he could produce none. Constantius the ex-Patriarch, whose evidence would have been unexceptionable, had died only the year before (1859) : a prelate so liberal in rewarding the labours of a poor student was plainly not long for this world. The monks at Mount Sinai, including him who had been librarian from 1841 to 1858, protested that they had seen or heard of no such person as Simonides ; and declared that the manuscript had been duly en- tered in the ancient catalogues. For anything that appears to the contrar}^ it might have been brought thither at the foundation of the monastery by the Em- peror Justinian, about A.D. 530, though by what means those precious leaves which comprise the Codex Fride- rico-Augustanus came into the place where Tischendorf found them is as perplexing as ever to account for. When the story of Simonides came to be more closely examined, and its internal probabilities minutely scruti- nized, nothing came to light which could compensate for its lack of external support. In the first place it was observed that at the period when he undertook, in November, 1839, what must certainly be regarded as a considerable task, he could only have been fifteen years old, since it is stated in his Life written by one Mr Steuart but circulated by himself that he was born "about the hour of sunrise, Nov. 11, 1824." This date.
38 ON THE PRIXCIPAL GHEEK
however, was soon explained to be an error: it was, lie alleged, the birthday of his brother Photius, his own being four years earlier, on "Nov. 5, 1820, the sixth hour before noon," and he supports this suspicious correction by publishing a letter he wrote to Mr Steu- art, pointing out the mistake, dated in January 1860, before he laid claim to the authorship of Codex Sinai- ticus. Another difficulty, started at the time, w^hich does not involve the credibility of a second person, you will form your own judgment about. It is easy to reckon that our manuscript, when complete, must have consisted of no less than 700 leaves or 1400 pages of con- siderable size, and that to have finished it as Simonides declares he did within the space of eight or nine months, he must have written at least twenty thousand large and separate imclal letters every day. When this fact was represented to him, the Greek frankly acknowledged it, and offered to execute the same task again for the modest stake of £10,000. Wagers, we know, are not wise men's arguments, and no one was found weak enough to close with his proposal ; yet before we pronounce his success impossible, we should bear in mind the wonderful exploit of a certain " Nico- demus the stranger," who records in a manuscript containing both the Old and New Testament, recently seen at Ferrara by Mr Burgon, that beginning his work (certainly in the cui'sive or running hand, not in uncials) on the 8tli day of June, he ended it on the 15th day of July 1334, " working very hard" he adds, which beyond question he must have done. Could Briareus the hundred-handed have achieved more ? But in truth it is useless to waste words about
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 39
the mere accessories of the case, when tlie main issue is so plain and immistakeable. It is absolutely im- possible that the best scholar in Europe — to say nothing of a lad of fifteen or nineteen, — could have drawn from a modern Moscow Bible, or from any other source at that time open, the sort of text which is exhibited in the Codex Sinaiticus. In many respects that text is questionable enough, but it is evidently very ancient and unique in its faults no less than in its excellencies. In not a few places we find a few words left out, whose omission reduces the passage to mere nonsense, but which would just fill up a line in an old papyrus, the error being palpably due to the shifting of the copyist's eye from one line to the next: accidents like these making it clear that the scribe had before him for his model no printed book, but a roll answering to the manuscript line for line. Then again. Codex ^^ is full of itacisms, that is, of instances of false spelliDg, especially through the substitution of one vowel or diphthong for another which in process of time had grown to resemble it in sound. In this respect it agi-ees more or less Avith every other genuine Greek manuscript known to us, especially those of very remote date, but then these orthographical blunders have no place in printed works, and no sane copyist would have introduced them save for the purpose of deception, whereas the charge of fraud is here excluded by the nature of the case. Simonides assures us that he had no thought of misleading any one : — it is through mere ignorance and stupidity on the part of Tischendorf and the rest of us who call ourselves scholars or critics that his exercise in penmanship has been mistaken for a
40 Oy Tim PRINCIPAL GREEK
real relic of antiquity ! But it cannot be necessary to pursue this enquiry into further detail, and it shall be dismissed with one word about the person whose strange history has detained you so long. Those of us who had pressed him the hardest were rather shocked to learn in 1867 that Constantino Simonides had just perished at Alexandria of the cruel disease of leprosy : — he had died and given no sign ! Pro- portionably great was our relief about two years after to be told on the authority of the Rev. Donald Owen of St Petersburg that he had turned up again under a feigned name in that capital, where we will gladly leave him in the hope that, like Psalmanazar, he has found grace and time to amend his ways. You will all know something of George Psalmanazar, who ap- peared in London as a foreigner above a century ago, and proved quite as clever and rather more successful than our Simonides. The poor man pretended to be a native of the Chinese island of Formosa, and published a most plausible description of that country, its re- ligion, customs, and manners : he even devised a new alphabet and a new .language, and translated the Creed and tlie Lord's Pra^^er into Formosan. Very few doubted his integrity, and to those few he triumphantly replied in the Preface to a second edition "answering every- thing that had been objected against the author and the book." At length came remorse, then contrition, then reparation as its meet fruit. AVho and whence he was have never been clearly ascertained, nor ought we to be curious about what he had a right to conceal if he pleased. But his fraud was publicly recanted : henceforth he earned his bread by honest labours of
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 41
his pen, and long before his death in 17G3 his meek and simple piety had power to edify even Dr Johnson, who hated a lie as he hated the father of lies.
Our digression fairly ended, we come at length to consider the Vatican and Sinaitic manuscripts, each of them productions of the fourth century of the Christian era, in reference as well to the resemblances as to the contrasts exhibited by their text. In both respects they are very peculiar, and will call for and (as I hope) be found to repay our best attention. Codex ^, as was manifest on our first acquaintance with it, is very roughly written, being full of gross transcriptural blun- ders of the pen, of the eye, and of the mind : the habit I mentioned just now, that of leaving out whole lines of the original whence it was derived, is but one specimen of an over numerous class. It was long supposed that Codex B was singularly free from slips of this kind, and inferences were freely drawn from its presumed accuracy which will no longer be pressed. It is cer- tainly less faulty than its compeer, but the labours of Tischendorf and Vercellone have brousfht to light much of this sort, that was hitherto unsuspected. It is especially prone to the kind of error we recently termed an itacism, that of confoundino: similar vowel sounds to the ruin of the sense, especially in the instance of the Greek pronouns, personal or possessive, of the first and second persons plural, in which case its evidence is worth almost nothing. We will take just one example by way of specimen, the rather as certain critics of great eminence have perceived a certain subtil excellence in a variation which to us appears utterly void of meaning : it is our Lord's question in
42 Oy THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
*
Luke xvi. 12, "If ye have not been faitliful in that which is another's, Avho will give unto you that which is your own ?" Codex B, supported by one other uncial manuscript and by scarcely any other authority, chang- ing a single letter in the Greek, as in the English, would have us read ''who will give unto you that which is our own?" Here, of course, the itacism is patent to every one who is not ready to admit the principle that when the Vatican has spoken, the world has only to believe in silence ; or who has not come to regard the very defects of that document as beauties, just like the lover in Horace did those of his mistress. No less improbable is an addition found a few chapters later, which is countenanced by Codex B and the self-same uncial (Cod. L of the eighth or ninth centur}^) and by hardly any other evidence. In Luke xxi. 24, where our Lord declares that ''Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of tlie Gentiles be fulfilled," these authorities add "and they shall be," without any tolerable significance, so far as we can perceive, the words "and they shall be," with which the next verse begins, being here repeated out of their proper order. Nay, even such a glaring blunder as the corruption of the Greek letter K into N in Matth. xxvii. 28 has not been without its apologists ; yet there, in the room of " And they stripped him," Codex B and a very few witnesses of real importance would have us substitute "And they clothed him," thus rendering the verse completely unintelligible. One or two other instances of the same nature shall be added, and that from no wish to disparage the Codex Vaticanus or to depose it from its rightful place at the head of all our
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 43
textual authorities, but to shew that, like its less distinguished compeers, it is liable to err and has committed errors of the most palpable character. At the end of the eleventh chapter of the Acts, Barnabas and Saul are represented as going up from Antioch to Juda?a, carrying with them to the Church there the contributions of the S^yrian disciples for its relief Then follows, evidently in the order of time, that interesting narrative respecting the deliverance of Peter from prison by the angel, the death of the persecutor Herod, and the growth and prosperity of the infant Church. The concluding verse of the twelfth chapter, in perfect consistency with the whole narrative, accordingly runs on thus: "And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem, when iiiey had fulfilled their ministry," or service. Instead of "from Jerusalem" the impossible variation "to Jerusalem" appears in Codex B and its familiar associate L, and not in them only in this case, but also in the Codex Sinaiticus, and indeed in so many other considerable authorities that we ought not to refuse to accept their testimony, if any testimony could suffice to convince us of the truth of a moral impossibility. The same three manuscripts Codd. ^«^, B, L, with two other uncials of great value (D and A, which we shall describe here- after) and two cursive copies of some importance, by the simple change of two letters, thus transforming the feminine pronoun into the masculine, in Mark vi. 22, botli set at defiance contemporary history and violate every dictate of reason and natural feeling. You remember the shockinc: details of the murder of John the Baptist. Herodias, as we learn from Josephus, who
44 ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
knew the facts well fttid was living at-Ui-c time, was married to her uncle Herod Philip and had by him a dausfhter named Salome, " after whose birth Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of her country, and divorcing herself from her husband, went through the form of a marriage with another Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, her husband's brother on the father's side" {Jewish Antiquities, Book XVIII. Chap. v. § 4). In her wicked resolution to avenge herself on the Baptist, who was ever rebuking the tetrarch for their common sin, she even allowed her daughter to dance before Herod and his nobles on his birth-day : " the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod," as our common Bibles have it. The Vatican manuscript, however, upheld by the six others Ave have enumerated, would read "his daughter Herodias came in," &c., thus at once displaying ignorance of the poor girl's lamentable history, changing her name from Salome into Herodias, and imputing to the tetrarch feelings wdiich not even a Herod would have been base enough to cherish in the case of his own child, for no European can conceive the infamy implied when a royal maiden took part in the abominable dances which defile an Eastern festival. Here we have the teachings of history set at nought by these weighty critical authori- ties. In the very next chapter (Mark vii. 31) geography would fare just as ill if the selfsame five uncial copies, two cursives and even a version or two, sufficed to persuade us that the Lord, on leaving the borders of Tyre, where he had just healed the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, "came through Sidon to the sea of Galilee," a progress which may fiiirly be compared
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 45
to that of a traveller ^vlio leaving London should pass through Oxford to Dover. The ordinary text, as you need not be told, is perfectly consistent in representing the Saviour's course : " and again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee."
In emergencies of this kind, when evidence, which in itself would be irresistible, draws us one way and common sense another, the old-fashioned admirer of classical English may call to mind that paper in the Spectator (No. 470), wherein the delicate humour of Addison amuses itself by a parody on the performances of textual scholars of his day, the giant Bentley, it may be presumed, being chiefly in his view. The pretty verses on which he tries his hand are unfortu- nately a little out of keeping with the passages of Scripture we have been discussing ; but his mirth is harmless, his illustration very happy, and scarcely an exaggeration of the spirit of such criticism as we have just been concerned with. We will read first the text, then Addison's commentary.
My love was fickle once and changing,
Nor e'er -would settle in my heart ; From beauty still to beauty ranging,
In every face I found a dart.
'Twas first a charming shape enslav'd me,
An eye then gave the fatal stroke: Till by her wit Coriuna sav'd me.
And all my former fetters broke.
But now a long and lasting anguish
For Belvidera I endure; Hourly I sigh, and hourly langnisb.
Nor hope to find the wonted cure.
46 OX TUB PniyCIFAL GREEK
For here the false unconstant lover,
After a thousand beauties shown, Does new surprising charms discover,
And finds variety in one.
Most of the ancient manuscripts have in the last line "and finds variety in two." Indeed so many of them concur in this last reading, that I am very much in doubt whether it ought not to take place. There are but two reasons which incline me to the reading as I have pubUshed it: first, because the rhyme; and secondly, because the sense is preserved by it. It might likewise proceed from the osci- tancy of transcribers, who, to despatch their work the sooner, used to write all numbers in cipher, and seeing the figure I follov/ed by a little dash of the pen, as is customary in old manuscripts, they per- haps mistook the dash for a second figure, and by casting up both together, composed out of them the figure II. But this I shall leave to the learned, without determining any thing in a matter of so great uncertainty.
The solitary variations of the Codex Yaticanus from the ordinary Greek text are now and then so happy, that were it possible in common prudence to accept read- ings thus slenderly supported, we should be almost inclined to accept them for true. So much cannot be said for those vouched for by Codex Sinaiticus alone, though some of these too are very suggestive. Let us take for instance 1 Peter v. 13, which our Authorized Bibles render, "The Church that is at Babylon, elected to- gether with you, saluteth you," the word "Church" being printed in what is called italic type (not indeed in the original edition of IGll, but in those published twenty or thirty years later), to intimate that it is not found in the Greek. Thus the passage might very well be translated **She that is in Babylon," &c., whether "she" refer to the Church, or (as some moderns have thought more likely) to Peter's wife, who
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE XEW TESTAMENT. 47
certainly seems to have attended him on his missionary journeys (1 Cor. ix. 5). In this dilemma Codex Sinai- ticiis, by receiving the word "Church" into the. text, supplies us with what is at least a very early exposition of it, which deserves the more regard inasmuch as our best ancient versions, the Latin Vulgate and the elder Syriac, as well as an inferior one, the Armenian, inter- polate the selfsame word. Some of the variations hitherto known to exist in this copy and in no other deserve small consideration, and are probably mere lapses of a careless pen. Such are "Ctesarea" for "Samaria" in Acts viii. 5 ; " Evangelists " for " Hellenists," that is *' Grecian Jews," Acts xi. 20; "not" inserted in Acts xiv. 9 before "heard"; "harvests" instead of "distri- butions" (the marginal rendering) in Heb. ii. 4, this last being a change of but one letter in the Greek. In Luke i. 26 Nazareth is called "a city of Judaea," with only one cursive copy favouring the mistake. Occasionally a terse expression of the true text is diluted into a weak paraphrase, a,s in John ii. 3, where in the place of the ordinary reading "And when they wanted wine," or "And when wine failed," Codex ^, certainly with some support from Old Latin and some inferior versions, would have us substitute "And they had no wine, because the wine of the marriage feast was finished." Now and then too we come on what must be regarded as the worst fault a copy of Holy Scripture can have, an attempt at wilful correction to evade a real or seeming difficulty. Such is the omission of the perplexing "son of Barachiah" after "blood of Zachariah," in Matt, xxiii. 35, the person referred to being to all appearance the son of Jehoiada, whose fate
48 OX THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
and dying words are recorded in 2 Chron. xxiv. 20 — 22. In this instance, since the appendage " son of Bara- cliiah " is absent from the parallel passage Luke xi. 51, we miglit have looked for much support of Codex K's ready solution ; but in fact Ave find scarcely any, and a later hand, of about the seventh or eighth century {facsimile 2, Plate 1), annexes the missing words in the great uncial itself. And here it may be observed once for all, that every known manuscript of high antiquity is thus altered by later scribes, usually fur the pur^oose of amending manifest faults, or of con- forming the reading to the one in vogue at a more recent date. In Codex B we trace two or three such revisers ; in Codex 5^ at least ten, some of whom spread their Avork systematically over every page, others made only occasional corrections, or were limited to separate portions of the manuscript; some again being nearly if not quite contemporaneous with the original document, but far the greater part belonging either to the sixth or seventh century, a few being as recent as the twelfth. It is obvious to remark that these several classes of emendations, widely differing from each other in style, shape of letters, and colour of the ink, could have had no place in a modern manuscript such as Simonides describes if fraud was not intended, and must have been very hard to carry out, if gratui- tously introduced by a clever impostor.
We will enumerate only one more instance of deli- berate and wilful correction which may be imputed to Codex Sinaiticus, and is too remarkable to be over- looked. In Mark xiv. 80, 68, 72 we have before us a set of passages which bear clear marks of designed and
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 49
critical revision, thoroughly carried out in Codex ^^, partially so in Codex B and some of its allies, the object being so far to assimilate the narrative of Peter's three denials with that of the other Evangelists, as to suppress the fact, vouched for by S. Mark only, that the cock crew twice. This end was effected by boldly expunging "twice" in verse 30, "and the cock crew" in verse G8, "the second time" and "twice" in vers^ 72. In these four separate changes one Old Latin copy designated c alone goes the whole way with Codex J< : Cod. B is with it once only, Cod. C (of which we shall have to speak ere long) twice, our old acquaint- ance Cod. L also twice: it meets with some slight countenance from other quarters, but is beyond ques- tion to be set aside as a false witness, and so far as a vicious harmoniser of the Gospel histories. No charge so damaging can be substantiated against the Codex Vaticanus, and however jealous we may be of admitting any variation into the text on its solitary evidence, we shall meet with not a few cases where- in, seconded by the Sinai .copy and by that copy almost alone, the intrinsic goodness of the reading it exhibits will hardly lead us to hesitate to receive it as true.
Codex Alexandkinus, or Codex A of the critics, prefers the next claim on our interest, as the earliest that was thoroughly applied to the recension of the text, and the third in point of merit and antiquity. It is now deposited in the Manuscript Boom of the British Museum, where the open volume of the New Testament may be seen every public day secured in a glass case which stands in the middle of that room, s. L. 4
50
ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
All that is known of its history may soon be told. It came into the Museum on the formation of the
Library in 1753, having previously formed a part of the sovereign's private collection. Sir Thomas Roe, our Ambassador in Turkey, received it in 1C28 as a truly royal gift to Charles I. from Cyril Lucar, then Patriarch of Constantinople, the rash and hapless re- former of the Eastern Church. Cyril had brought the book from Alexandria, where he had before been Patriarch, and had himself inserted and subscribed in it a note importing that he had learnt from tra- dition that it was written by the hand of Thecla,
2IANUSGRIPTS OF THE KEW TESTAMENT. 51
a noble lady of Egypt, thirteen hundred years before, a little later than the Council of Nice, A.D. 32.5. This information he seems to have obtained from an Arabic inscription on the reverse of the first leaf of the manu- script, also ascribing it to Thecla the martyr, while a recent Latin note on a fly-leaf declares that it was given to the Patriarchal Chamber (at Alexandria, as is stated in a much older and obscure scrawl in Moorish Arabic) in the year of the Martyrs 814, which is A.D. 109 S. Thus it appears certain, in spite of some doubts that have been expressed, that Codex A came to us from Alexandria, which was probably its native ^ place. Its connection with Thecla is less easy to be accounted for. A holy lady of that name was an early martyr -for our faith, far too early indeed to be the writer of the book, and a namesake of hers, a friend of the great Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century, whom the probable date of the writing might suit, is not known to have been a martyr. Hence one is inclined to acquiesce in the acute conjecture of Dr Tregelles, that whereas the New Testament portion of Codex A begins at Matt. xxv. 6, which in the Greek Church forms a part of the proper lesson for the festival of that wise virgin S. Thecla, her name once stood in its usual place on that first page high in the upper margin, which has since been ruthlessly cut down, and thus led the writer of the Arabic inscription, from which Cyril derived his ''tradition," to assume that she was the actual scribe.
This celebrated manuscript, by far the best de- posited in England, is now bound in four volumes, whereof three contain the Septuagint Greek version of
4—2
52 OX THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
the Old Testament, with the complete loss of only ten leaves ; the fourth volume the New Testament with several lamentable defects. It begins, as we have just stated, with Matt. xxv. G ; two leaves are lost from John vi, 50 to viii. 52 ; three more from 2 Cor. iv. 13 to xii. 6. After the book of the Revelation, and in the same hand with the latter part of the New Testament, we meet with a treasure indeed in the only extant copy of that most precious work of the earliest of the Apostolic Fathers, the Epistle of S. Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, followed by a fragment of a second Epistle of less undoubted authenticity. The book is in quarto, and now consists of 773 leaves (whereof 639 comprise the Old Testament), each page being divided (as may be observed in the wood- cut, p. 50) into two columns of fifty lines each, having about twenty letters or more in each line. The vellum has fallen into holes in many places, and since the ink pools off for very age whensoever a leaf is touched a little roughly, no one is allowed to handle the manuscript except for good reasons. The characters are uncial in form, of elegant shape, but a little less simple than those in Codd. X and B. The punctuation is more frequent, yet still consists of a single stop, usually on a level with the top of the preceding letter, while a vacant space, proportionate to the break in the sense, follows the end of a paragraph. Codex Alexandrinus is the earliest in which we find capital letters, strictly so called. They abound at the beginning of books and sections, some being larger than others, but they are written in common ink by the original scribe, not painted as in later copies. At the end of each book we notice pretty arabesque orna-
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 53
ments in ink by the first hand : that in our wood-cat occurs at the conclusion of Deuteronomy.
Vermilion is freely used in the initial lines of the several books, and has stood the test of time better than the black ink, which has long since turned into a yellowish-brown. Another note of somewhat lower date than the two preceding codices is to be found in the presence of numerals indicating the larger Greek chapters throughout the Gospels, in addition to the so-called Ammonian sections and the Euse- bian canons which occur in Codex Sinaiticus. It should be kept in mind that the larger oriental chapters bear no resemblance to those in our modern Bibles, which were first adopted in the west of Europe about the middle of the thirteenth century. The Greeks divide the text very unequally : S. Matthew into 68 portions, S. Mark into 48, S. Luke into 83, S. John into 18. A list of titles describino^ their
54 ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
contents stands before each of the last three Gospels (those of S. Matthew being wanting), and fragments of the titles repeated may be traced at" the head of the several pages in their proper places, w^heresoever the binder has withheld his cruel shears. In the Acts and Epistles we find no such chapter divisions, nor indeed did these, whose authorship is ascribed to Euthalius Bishop of Sulci, come into vogue before the middle of the fifth century. Since, besides the Eusebian canons. Codex Alexandrinus contains the Epistle of the great S. Athanasius on the Psalms to Marcellinus, it cannot well be considered earlier than A.D. 373, the year when that great champion of the Faith was lost to the Church. The presence of the Epistle of Clement, which was once read in Churches like the works of Barnabas and Hernias contained in Cod. X, recalls us to a period when the canon of Scripture was in some particulars not quite settled, that is, about the time of the Councils of Laodicea (364) and of Carthage (397). Codex A was certainly written a generation after Codd. 5^ and B, but it may still belong to the fourth century ; it cannot be later than the beginning of the fifth.
When Codex A arrived in England, it came into the custody of a very good scholar, Patrick Young, librarian to Charles I. He at once saw its value, and collated the New Testament after the loose fashion of the times. Alexander Huish, Prebendary of Wells (one loves to revive the memory of men who have faithfully laboured before us and are now at rest), examined it afresh for the use of Walton's Polyglott. Bentley's collation, made in 1716, is yet in manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge. J. E. Grabe had sent
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE N'EW TESTAMENT. 55
forth an edition of the Old Testament portion some years before ; but exact representations of this m.anu- script in a semi-facsimile uncial type were completed for the New Testament by Charles Godfrey Woide, a German, and assistant librarian in the British Museum, by public subscription in 1786; for the Old Testament, but at the national expense, by H. H. Baber, who held a similar office to Woide, between the years 1816 and 1828. Both publications are sufficiently accurate for practical purposes, though Woide's bears the higher reputation of the two. The Epistles of Clement were edited from this manuscript first by Patrick Young in 1633, and recently by Bishop Jacobson, Tischendorf, and Canon Lightfoot. Codex Alexandrinus has been judged to be carelessly written, but that is the case to some degree with nearly all the old copies, with the Sinaitic, as we have seen, most of all. Besides other corrections by later hands there are not a few instances in which the original scribe altered what he had first written, and these changes are to the full as weighty as the primitive readings which they amend. Of the character of its text we shall only say at present that it ap- proximates much more closely to that found in later copies, especially in the Gospels, than any other ap-*^ preaching it in respect of antiquity. Hence it is per- petually at variance with Codd. X and B in their characteristic and more conspicuous various readings, and being thus shewn to have had an origin perfectly independent of these cognate copies, its agreement with either or both of them supplies great strength of probability to any reading thus favoured. Its testi- mony, when it stands nearly or quite alone among
5Q OX THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
ancient authorities, may be safely disregarded, save in a few cases wherein it is sustained by the pressure of internal evidence.
There are two or three more manuscripts of the first rank yet to be considered, the description whereof will be more conveniently postponed until the next Lecture. We will now endeavour to convey to one unacquainted with Greek some general notion of each of the documents we have already passed under review, by giving line for line an over-literal translation of the facsimiles of the original on the opposite page ; selecting for this purpose important passages of the New Testament to which we shall have to look back hereafter, on account of the various readings which are contained in them. We begin with Mark xvi. G (part) — 8 from the Codex Vaticanus {facsimile, No. 1) :
THEPLACEWHERETHEYLAID HIMBUTGOYOURWAY TELLTOTHEDISCIPLE^ OFHIMANDTOPETER THATHEGOETHBEFOREYOUTO THEGALILEETHEREHI MSHALLYESEEASHESA IDTOYOUANDOUT^'O INGTHEYFLEDFROMTHE SEPULCHREHE LDFOR THEMTREMORANDAMAZ EMENTANDTONONENO THINGSPAKETHEYWEREAF RAIDFOR : AFTER MARK.
PI. I. 57
nd.
ce
-I UU V »^ XC-TOrT-rtslKTo
3enm c Korrovc- I nrn tNi e K K XM c I jwM
P I eTTOI M OXTTOJ^I X TX>VtA.IOY
ose
ON
me
ro ith
"IT" her
•or ni;
'A lole
JMAf '^'^'^
ith
ves
o-ro'noc&'noYeeHK*- ^y -r o^^ iLx A. A-Y" n jJ. re -re ei n ^-re-T~6»c M AeHT*!' f,y-rd Y '<,^ ' T«X> n e'-rjf a> 6-ri nf>o>>'r6« YMiceic
TON OS'" 6C ee K A,oa>9«i n 6 r^rf M I N K i. I e i.GAQ*r c A. 1 6 «±>*t: ro N jC n oToy
MNHM6 lO^elxCNT^p A. Y XA C ThO »>jI O C K AJ f K
s. cT:^ciciCA.dv>^eNloy T A.€NeinoNe<pofcoYN
TC£)YAA'nMONON AAAeNTCDTAATI KA/TCpAJ MKTJKN I OnNACCTINTO HjKTTYrOTNOTIT- hNAeCTIHHAAH
oejAOTioiTpei'^f
CI NoiMAprrpoT:
7 eCTOnNAKAf Toy ACDfKAlTOAJMA
KAfo/TPejcejcT"
(12)
110 THceyceRei^c MycTHpioMoce
(*)
"I ^TPoc exe-re e xv-roi c Kx iTrxMTm"
xr I o M e © e -roenTi c i ccrrrovc- T-rOi M A.l^Jel rvi-rmNjeKKXnciAM
nX)VI<V'^ »"ri"^^PieTTOI HOXTOA.! X
TTOYXi A^x-rOC'roviA.ioY
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 57
The subscription "After Mark" is by a later Land, as the shape of the letter M compared with those in the text abundantly proves. We have no stops at all in the body of the passage, but : and the follow- ing > >- seem to be original, although the arabesque (which, as well as the subscription, is touched with vermilion) was subsequently added. Like all other good copies. Cod. B omits "quickly" in ver. 8. Al- though Codex Vaticanus ends S. Mark's Gospel with ver. 8, at the 31st line of the second column of a page (its columns, when full, containing 42 lines), it leaves the third column entirely blank, this being the only instance of a vacant column throughout the whole manuscript.
To illustrate Codex Sinaiticus we employ another passage of the deepest interest {facsimile, No. 8), 1 John V. C (part) — 9 (part) :
THEWATERONLY
BUTBYTHEWATER
ANDTHEBLOODAND
THESPlTSTHE
WITNESSINGFORTff
SPTISTHETRU
THFORTHETHRE^^R
ETHEWITNESS
INGTHESPTANDTHEWA
TERANDTHEBLOOD
ANDTHETHREEINTOTH^
ONEAREIFTHEWIT
NESSOFGDREC
58 ON THE PRINCIPAL GREEK
There is no vestige in Codex Sinaiticus, nor indeed in any other manuscript worth naming, of the famous interpolation of what are called the Three Heavenly Witnesses in vers. 7, 8, which yet deforms our Authorised translation, and will call for our special attention here- after: but we here observe an instance of correction by a later hand of about the seventh century, amending one of the original scribe's countless blunders, caused by his eye having wandered two lines down the papy- rus he was copying (p. 39), which led him to write "God" for "men." Here again we perceive no marks of punctuation, but ought to notice a peculiarity, com- mon to all Biblical manuscripts though seen least in the earliest, of abridging the names of the Divine Persons after a fashion we should think a little irreverent. We shall meet with other examples in Codex Alexandrinus, from which we select the single verse Acts xx. 28 {facsimile, No. 4).
Takeheedtoyoueselyesandtoallt"^ flockinwhichyouthesptt"" holymadeoverseers- tofeedthecongregation oftheldwhichhepurchasedthrough thebloodhisown"
"The Lord" in the room of "God" we shall here- after see cause to reject as a false variation from the Received text. Here, however, in the compass of a few lines, we meet with as many as three stops, two of them over against the middle of the letters, and apparently of less power than the final one which is
MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 59
set higher up. As a further mark of lower date we should notice the initial capital, about double the size of the rest, and standing out in the margin by itself.
The lines in our translation could not, of course, be made as nearly of the same length as in the Greek, where the letters are often written smaller at the end of a line, and in less ancient documents than these are compressed in shape. Speaking generally, the cha- racters in Codex B are somewhat less in size than those of Codex A, considerably smaller than those in Cod. ^s, though they all vary a little in this respect in different parts. Finally, the Sinaitic manuscript is written with four columns on a page (p. 17), each rather more than two inches broad, with from 12 to 14 letters in each. Although the Vatican manuscript has but three columns on a page (p. 27), yet the volume being somewhat smaller, the breadth of each column is about the same as those of its rival, though the letters vary from 16 to 18. The columns of Codex Alexan- drinus are but two on a page, and, having an average breadth of 3J inches, allow room for twenty letters and upwards in each. The attempt to keep up a resem- blance to the style of the old writing on papyrus (p. 16) was by this time given over^: in fact the poetical books of the Old Testament are necessarily arranged in pages of two columns even in Codices B and K.
1 Tiie Utrecht Latin Psalter, wliicli contains the Athanasian Creed, •and has been assigned by some to the sixth, by others to the ninth or tenth century, is also written in three columns, but bears marks of having been transcribed from an archetype which had but two eoUnnns on a page. It would seem probable indeed that the three- column an-angement is less a presumption of great antiquity in Latin manuscripts than in Greek.
LECTUEE III.
THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE GREEK
TESTAMENT: — Continued.
The next great manuscript of the Holy Bible wliich calls for our attention is the Codex of Ephraem, or Codex C of our critical notation, now No. 9 in the Greek department of the National Library at Paris, having been brought into France from Florence, to- gether with several other copies of less value, by Queen Catharine de' Medici, of evil memory. It was imported from the East by Andrew John Lascar, a learned Greek patronised by Lorenzo de' Medici, and for a while belonged to Cardinal Nicolas Eidolphi of the same illustrious house. This document is a palimpsest, such as has been described to you before (pp. 17, 18), and the primitive writing (which dates from the fifth century) being first washed out as far as might be, the vellum received in about the twelfth century some Greek works of the celebrated Syrian Father S. Ephraem, from which it derives its distinctive name. The portions of the Old Testament in the Septuagint version which yet survive cover only G4 leaves. Far more precious are 145 leaves of fragments of every part of the New Testament, although more than one-
PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS : CONTINUED, 61
third of the volume has utterly perished, comprising some 37 chapters of the Gospels, 10 of the Acts, 42 of the Epistles (2 John and 2 Thessalonians are entirely lost), and 8 of the Apocalypse. Even of what remains much the greater part is barely legible under the modern writing. I had this document chiefly in view, though the remark would apply to at least one other, when I complained of attempts to revive the nearly ob- literated characters by means of chemical washes (p. 18). Fleck tried the experiment on it in 1834, and has defaced it with dark stains of various colours, from green or blue to brown or black. The older writing was first noticed by Peter Allix two centuries ago ; various readings extracted from it were communicated by Boivin to Kuster, who published them in 1710 in his edition of Mill's Greek Testament. As their high value was readily perceived by our great Bentley, he employed Wetstein, then young in spirit and in eye-sight, to collate the New Testament fully in 1710. To Wetstein's manuscript report now pre- served with Bentley's other books in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, is affixed in the Master's hand-writing the grumbling note, "this collation cost me £50." It might very well have done so and yet have been worth the money, since it often takes two hours or more to read a single page. Complete editions of the New Testament from this manuscript in 1843, of the Old in 1845, were among the earliest and best of Tischendorf 's labours, and leave biblical scholars not much more to desire in regard to it.
From the four-column arrangement of Codex Sinai- ticus, the three columns of Codex Vaticanus, and the
02 TUE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
two of Codex Alexandrinus, we come to the single column in a page of the Codex Ephraem, which, with but few exceptions, was the fashion adopted in Greek Biblical manuscripts in later times, save that Leciion- aries or Church lesson-books were mostly written in two columns down to the period that printing was invented. In shape Codex C is about the same size as Cod. A, but the vellum, though sufficiently good, is hardly so fine as that of its predecessors. The characters too are a little larger than those of B or A, and somewhat more elaborate, the latter circumstance always being a token of someAvhat lower date. Our facsimile (No. 5) is chosen from another famous passage to which we must return by and by, being portions of 1 Timothy iii. 15, 16. The writing in dark ink and double columns in the cursive or running hand belongs to Ephraem's treatise, and affects us nothing.
undofthetruth: Andconfessedlygreatistheofgodlinessmy stery- wasmanifestedinfleshjustifiedinsp
We have left a vacant space in the third line where the primitive reading is quite uncertain: the word of two letters may either have been WHO (OC) or GD i. e. GOD (@C), the difference in sense being evidently a considerable one. Here again we observe the capital letter in the margin, as in Cod. A, and two middle stops in the last line : the double stop before the para- graph break in the first line may be of later date, as the Greek breathings and accents certainly are. The stranffe marks under SC in the Greek compose a
Pl.TI,
^OKICAHClAW
6c:y
© s|^
J
J f
\^„ . J, ' _-
jce9eKe no/MetvieiN
e c c /,es I xcn nrHn eic icam cian
6 OCX) I M I ^oyicy
(10)
yZxsriL^^ir6i\-^^^^f^ojifr^\)\ui .\in^TroLf-TiTir^K4T>iyilJ-«r^XouuTrpocr^rv^li6|P|ftjoo-Tt
c:«w^«.j^»<^^'^9-r«^<y>i'- C'Wf^.r'^^'^*'*^*;'-**"'- -^
»r«.A^'
GREEK TESTAMENT : CONTINUED. 63
musical n-^te, inserted by some one who understood the word to be GD. Codex C should be regarded as slightly junior to Codex A, and may be referred to the first half of the fifth century. An ancient reviser, who went through the manuscript about a hundred years after it was written, has preserved readings which ar^ sometimes hardly inferior to those of the first hand, but two or three later correctors deserve little con- sideration for their labours. Here asjain, as in Cod. A, there are no traces of chapter divisions in the Acts, Epistles, or Apocalypse ; but titles (p. 53), or tables of the contents of the larger Greek chapters are j^refixed to the several Gospels, the Ammonian sections being set in the margin without the Eusebian canons, which latter, being usually written in vermilion paint, may have been washed out by the rough process to which this palimpsest has been subjected. The critical value of Cod. C, where its evidence is to be had, is very highly prized. It stands in respect of text about midway between A and B, and is evidently quite independent of both, to an extent which could not be asserted of Cod. ^^ in reference to B ; so that the support, whether of A or C, or better still, of the two united, lends an authority to the readings of B, which it is not easy to gainsay or set aside,
/ Codex Bez^ or Cod. D, that copy of the Gospels ^r^^ Acts in Greek and Latin arranged in parallel column^, which was presented in 1581 by the French Protestant leader Theodore Beza to the University of Cambridge, is the last of the great uncial copies we shall consider in detail. The open volume stands under a glass case in the New Library, and is probably worth all the
64 THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
other manuscripts there deposited put together: for Cambridge, though rich in grateful sons, is less for- tunate than Oxford in one respect, that she found no Bodley or Laud or Selden to make collections for her, at a ,period when the wreck of English monastic libraries could be picked up almost for the asking. Codex Bezae has been twice edited ; in 1793 by Thomas Kipling, afterwards Dean of Peterborough, in two folio volumes and in type imitating the style of the primi- tive writing, in 1864 by myself in a less costly, but not, I hope, a less useful form. The manuscript is now splendidly bound and forms a quarto of 406 original and nine later vellum leaves : about 128 leaves have been lost, containing portions of the Gospels of S. Matthew and S. John, and no inconsiderable part of the Acts of the Apostles, some of the missing passages being supplied on the more recent leaves in a hand more modern by at least 300 years.
A Latin fragment of the third epistle of S. John, from ver. 11 to the end, stands on the first page of a leaf on the reverse of which the Acts commence, so that the Catholic Epistles or some of them must have preceded that book when the Codex was yet perfect. The order also in which the Gospels stand is uncommon, though not unexampled in the West, those of the two apostles S. Matthew and S. John taking precedence of the writings of the Apostolic men S. Luke and S. Mark. Three of the best codices of the Old Latin versions exhibit the same arrangement, to us a very strange one, — Matthew, John, Luke, Mark.
In Codex Bezoe, as our facsimile (No. 6) will shew,
ToVToNQYMP'-^«>f^o^expocAe£ei>V"rtoJHV- j<e oYTocAcT I AereiAYTCDOJHc eAHAYTor>» ©eA<J3 Mer-ie I^4 oy Tcoc ecDcepAOMAiTinpocce cyMoiAKoAoyeei
PI. III.
hxjM cej i^Qoxi 1 d e m jjeTjj.tJj' d i c it Ad^Thcn dmehi cAXJTecnquid- diciTiUnHs ^»euor»>jolo5iccnAKjejL6 <JS3^Gc lucnxjefNi I o cjui dAdTeTucne^yes uejte
OYKA.CXHM OMei pYXMTeiTXeAYTHC
oynApoXYNerAi
OYAori'zeTAlTOKAKON
o^ X A I r e re n IT H X Ai K I A e> RXAipeiAeTHAAHoVA
(7)
MOMXmblTl OSX65T MONqXJAGRVTquxesuxsUMT MO KI 7 KIUl T\n u T?.
KJ o Ki CO y 1 TXT mxl u m
KiO KJCXudeTsupe ri ki iqu i TXTem
cowou deTXTjTecnxjeRi-rvTi
GREEK TESTAMEXT: COXTIXUED. 65
the Greek text stands on the left page of each open leaf, the Latin translation on the right, opposite to it, and corresponding with it line for line ; the whole being distributed into paetrical lines of not very un- equal length, which in the venerable archetype from which it was derived doubtless suited the sense closer than it does at present. There are thirty-three such lines on every page, that in our specimen 'being taken from John xxi. 21, 22.
HIMTHEREFORESEEINGPETERSAITHTOJS- LDANDTHISMANWHATSAITHTOHIMIS IFIWISHHIMTOREMAINTHUS TILLICOMEWHATTOTHEE FOLLOWTHOUME
The insertion of THUS in the third line enables us to trace a little of the history of this remarkable manuscript before it fell into Beza's hands. William a Prato, Bishop of Clermont in the Auvergne, is known to have produced to the Council of Trent in 1546* "a very ancient Greek codex," which confirmed the reading of the Latin Yulgate " Thus I wish" instead of " If I wish." Since Cod. D is the only known Greek which even seems to do so (as it reads both "if" and "thus" with some other Latin authorities), the inference is a natural one that a Prato had brought it to Trent from his own country. In or about the same year 154G, Henry Stephens collated what cannot but be the self-same copy " in Italy," for the use of his father Robert Stephens' celebrated Greek Testament of 1550. All else we know about the book is told by Beza in his letter to the University of Cambridge which ac- companied his noble gift, and in an autograph note of S.L. 5
G6 THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
his still to be seen in it, whose statements are 3^et more explicit. Hence we learn that he obtained this precious treasure from the monastery of S. Irenseus in Lyons, at the first breaking out of the French religious wars in 15G2 ; and since we learn from the annals of those miserable times that Lyons was sacked and the monastery desecrated by the Huguenots that very year, we need not'go far to conjecture how it came into the possession of Beza, who was serving as chaplain general of the Reformed army during that very campaign. He adds indeed that it had long lain there buried in the dust, which might be true enough in the main, for Beza is little likely to have heard of the loan made to the Bishop of the neighbouring Clermont sixteen years before. Nothing is more likely than that this most venerable document, a relic of the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century, was a native of the country in which it was found. The Latin version bespeaks its western origin ; its style and diction are exactly suitable to a province like Gaul, where the classical language was fast breaking up into the vernacular dialect from which the modern French derives its origin, to whose usage indeed a few of its words and phrases approximate in a manner which can- not well be accidental. For it will be observed that the Latin version of Cod. D has less affinity to the Vulgate than any other yet known. It seems to have been made either from the existing Greek text of the manuscript, or from a yet earlier form very closely alUed with it.
But for the character of its parallel Latin trans- lation, the Codex Beza; might have been dated a little
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. C>7
earlier than we have ventured to place it. Its uncials are firm, simple, and elegant ; the punctuation consists mainly of a single point over against the middle of the letters ; the capitals are not much larger than the other letters, though they sometimes occur in the middle of a line, a practice we have not had to notice before. The text has none of the usual divisions into chapters or sections, but is distributed into paragraphs peculiar to this copy, indicated by the initial letters running slightly into the margin. In some parts this manu- script is quite fresh, the red ink especially being as bright as if it were new : in others it is barely legible. It has suffered many emendations by numerous hands, some of which have dealt with it very violently. The Ammonian sections v/ere placed in the margin by a scribe of about the ninth century.
The chief interest attached to Codex Bezae arises from the very peculiar character of its Greek text, which departs much further from that of the common editions than does that of any other manuscript. No known copy contains so many bold and extensive in- terpolations, either absolutely unsupported, or counte- nanced only by some Old Latin manuscript or Syriac version. In the Acts of the Apostles we seem in many places to be reading a kind of running commentary on the narrative as given by other authorities, rather than S. Luke's history itself, and some of its additions are very interesting, from whatever source they were de- rived, though we must not venture to regard them as authentic. Such, for example, is the touching circum- stance preserved by Cod. D and the margin of a late Syriac version, and by these alone, that Simon Magus,
5—2
G8 THE PRIXCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
after liis earnest request for S. Peter's intercession that his sin might be forgiven him (Acts viii. 24), ceased not to shed many a bitter tear. But the most remarkable passage in this manuscript, in regard to which it stands quite alone, is that which follows Luke vi. 4, on the leaf which is usually kept open at Cambridge for the inspection of visitors. It runs thus :
"On the same day he beheld a certain man work- ing on the sabbath, and said unto him, Man, blessed art thou if thou know^est what thou doest; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed and a transgressor of the law."
I was present when this passage was shewn at Cambridge to a learned Greek Archimandrite, Philippos Schulati of Kustandje. He had never heard either of it or of the manuscript before, but after a moment's thought his comment was ready : " This cannot be : the Lord cursed no man."
Codex Claromontanus, or Cod. D of S. Paul's /Epistles, now No. 107 in the National Library at Paris, bears a strange resemblance to Cod. D of the Gospels and Acts in regard to its country, its history, its date, genius, and general appearance. This copy also was brought to light by Beza, who first mentions it in 1582, the year after he had sent its fellow to Cam- bridge. He had obtained it, he says not how, at the other Clermont near Beauvais, and from him it passed into the hands of those distinguished scholars, Claude Dupuy, Councillor of Paris, and his sons Jacques and Pierre. Jacques, who was the king's librarian, sold it in 165G to Louis XIV, to form part of the great collec- tion which it still adorns. In 1707 John Aymont, an
GREEK TESTAMENT : CONTINUED, G9
apostate priest, stole 35 of its 533 leaves, of the thinnest and finest vellum known to exist. One leaf, which he disposed of in Holland, ^vas restored in 1720 by its pos- sessor Stosch ; the rest were sold to the bibliomanist Harley, Earl of Oxford, Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer, but were sent back to Paris in 1729 by his son, who had learnt their shameful story. This noble volume, like the other Cod. D, is in two languages, the Greek and Latin being on different pages in parallel lines, the Greek on the left side of the open leaf. It contains all S. Paul's Epistles except a few missing leaves, that to the Hebrews standing last as in our modern Bibles, rather than as in Codd. ^5ABC (p. 27). Each page is covered with about 21 lines of uncial writing, the words being continuous both in Greek and Latin, the letters square, regular and beautiful, perhaps a little simpler than those in Codex Beza3. Our facsimile (No. 7) contains 1 Cor. xiii. 5, 6 :
ISNOTUNSEEMLY
SEEKETHNOTHEROWX
ISNOTIRRITATED
THINKETHNOTEVIL
REJOICETHNOTINWRONG
BUTREJOTCETHINTRUTH
Here again, but more correctly and clearly than in Codex Beza3, we have an example of what is technically called stichometri/, that is, the division of prose sentences into lines of about equal length corresponding as nearly as possible to the sense. This elegant but artificial arrangement, though not unknown in the third and fourth centuries, ^vas first formally applied to S. Paul's
70 THE PRINCIPAL MANUSClllPTS OF THE
writings by Euthalius the deacon, A. D. 458. The pre- cious fra<:jment Cod. H of S. Paul, once belonmn^: to Coislin, Bishop of Metz, and now also in the National Library at Paris, is similarly divided to Cod. D, and the two must be referred to the same period, the early part of the sixth century, a date which will suit well enough the Latin version in the parallel column, as it did that of Codex Bezse (p. QtQi). There are few stops in this copy, the breathings and accents are by a hand two or three centuries later. The letters at the begin- ning of words and sections are plain, and not much larger than the rest. The Greek text is far purer than that of Cod. Bezse, and inferior in value only to that of its four great predecessors, Codd. XABC : the Latin version is more independent of the parallel Greek, and of higher critical worth. This manuscript also was excellently edited in 1852 by the indefatigable Tischen- dorf, Avho found his task all the more difficult by reason of the changes the text had successively undergone at the hands of no less than nine different correctors, ancient and modern.
In connection with the Codex Claromontanus we are bound to name another Greek and Latin copy. Codex Sangermanensis or Cod. E of S. Paul, if only to point out its utter uselessness. In the worst days ©f the first French Revolution the Abbey of S. Ger- main dcs Prez by Paris, which had been turned into a saltpetre manufactory, was burnt down, and many of its books were lost in the act of removal. Out of their number Cod. E and two leaves of Cod. H of S. Paul, which M'e just now referred to, have turned up, together with others, in the Imperial Library at St Petersburg,
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 71
that common receptacle of literary property "wliicli has gone astray. AYe may wish the Russians joy of a purchase which is of no value to any one. Cod. E is a large volume, written in coarse uncial letters of about the tenth century, with breathings and accents by the first hand, the two lansfua^^es standinsf on the same page, but the Greek still on the left hand. In respect to the Greek column, it is demonstrably nothing but a servile transcript from Cod. D made by a very ignorant scribe after Cod. D had suffered its more violent correc- tions, which are incorporated with the text of Cod. E in- as blunderiug a fashion as can be conceived. The Latin too is derived from that of Cod. D, but is a little more mixed with the new or Vulgate Latin, and may be of some service in criticism, whereas the Greek cannot possibly be of any.
Another manuscript in which the prose text of the Acts of the Apostles is broken up into stichometry was given to the Bodleian Library by its gTeat Chancellor and benefactor, Archbishop Laud. It is designated Cod. E of the Acts, which book alone it contains, though with a serious gap of the 73 verses between ch. xxvi. 29 and ch. xxviii. 26. This copy also is in Greek and Latin, or more properly in Latin and Greek, for here the two languages are found in parallel columns on the same page (not on different pages as in the two Codd. D), the Latin in the post of honour on the left, in which particular it is almost unique amon^ Biblical manuscripts. It was, therefore, manifestly written in the West of Europe. An edict of Flavins Pancratius, Duke of Sardinia, which with the Apostles' Creed in Latin is annexed to it, shews that it must have been
72 THE FRIXCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF TEE
in that island not earlier than the sixth century. The very peculiar readings which he cites from it suffi- ciently prove that it was in the possession of our Vener- able Bede, who died A.D. 735, and the conjecture is a probable one that it is one of the Greek books brought from Kome to England A.D. C68 by our great Arch- bishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, the fellow- countryman of S. Paul. The style of this manuscript shews that its date is somewhat lower than those we have yet considered (except of course the S. Germain's transcript of Codex Claromontanus), perhaps early in the seventh century or late in the sixth. The charac- ters are large and somewhat rude, the vellum thick and coarse, the 22G extant leaves have from 23 to 26 lines each, every line containing one or two words only, so that the stichometrical arrangement is rather one of name than of fact. Capital letters, running into the margin, occur after a break in the sense, but there are no formal paragraphs or indications of chapter divisions. Our facsimile (No. 8) comprises a portion of Acts XX. 28, with the same various reading as w^e noted above (p. 58) in Cod. A.
TOFEED
THECHURCH
OFTHELE
The Laudian manuscript (E) has been twice edited, by Thomas Hearne the antiquarian in 1715, by Tischen- dorf in 1870. Its text exhibits numberless rare and bold variations from that of ordinary copies, and in places is near akin to that of Cod. Bezse (D), but has a yet stronger affinity than the latter to the Greek
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 73
margin of the later Syriac version. One cursive manu- script of the eleventh century in the Ambrosian Library at Milan (137 of Scholz's notation) resembles it so closely in the latter part of the Acts, that it may almost serve as a substitute for D or E, where either of them is mutilated. Cod. E is our earliest and chief Greek authority for the interesting verse Acts viii. 87, " And Phihp said, If thou believest from all thine heart, thou niayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." This verse is familiar to the Eno-lish reader from having^ been brouoht into the Received Greek text by its first editor Eras- mus, who frankly confesses that he found it not in his Greek copies, save in the margin of a single one. Hence its authenticity cannot be maintained, although Irenseus, who wrote in Gaul in the second century, recognised it without hesitation, as did Cyprian in the third century, Jerome and Augustine in the fourth. Many forms of the Latin version also contain the verse, which at any rate vouches for the undoubted practice of the early Church, of requiring a profession of faith, whether in person or by proxy, as ordinarily an essential preliminaiy to Baptism.
Two other considerable Greek-Latin manuscripts, which contain S. Paul's Epistles, merit a brief and passing notice, although they are neither of them prior to the latter part of the ninth century ; namely, the Codex Augiensis (F), once Richard Bentley's, and bequeathed by his nephew to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Codex Boernerianus (G) in the Royal Library at Dres- den. The former member of this pair I liad the pleasure of editing in 1859, the latter was published by the
74 THE PEIXCIPAL MAXUSCRIPTS OF THE
great critic Matthaei as far back as 1791. Cod. Angi- ensis derives its name from tlie monastery of Augia Dives, Reiclienau, the rich meadow, on a fertile island in the lower part of tbe Lake of Constance, to which it long appertained, and where it may even have been written about a thousand years ago. The origin of Cod. Boernerianus (so named from a former owner, and Professor at Leipsic, C. F. Boerner) is yet better ascer- tained, inasmuch as wdiat is demonstrably the earlier portion of it, comprising the four Gospels, was disco- vered at the great monastery of S. Gall, and published in 183G by Rettig, being known as the very curious and weighty Cod. A {delta, p. 43) of the Gospels. On a leaf now at Dresden were found a stanza or two of Irish verse, doubtless written by one of the students of that nation who crowded to S. Gall in the middle ages, which, as translated by Dr Reeves, the eminent Celtic scholar, may suggest that his countrymen had hardly yet be- come the blind slaves of the Papal court that unhappy circumstances have made them since.
To go to Eome, to go to Eome,
Much trouble, little good,
The King thou seekest there
To find, thou must bring with thee.
The connection between the Greek text as exhibited by Cod. F and that of Cod. G is of the most intimate character. That of Augia has all the defects of the sister copy and two peculiar to itself, since its first seven leaves are completely lost ; both break off at Philemon ver. 20, thus omitting the Epistle to the Hebrews, although Cod. F affixes the Vulgate Latin version of that letter, while Cod. G has at the end of
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 75
Philemon the title "Here be^inneth the EjDistle to the Laodiceans," which, had it been preserved, would have been very interesting. Since the Epistle to the Colossians had already been given in its proper place, it could not have been that letter under another name.
But the Greek text in both copies is chiefly to be noticed. On comparing Matthaei's edition of G with the original of F, I could count only 1982 places wherein they differ, whereof only 200 were true various readings, the rest being mere blunders of the respective scribes, slips of the pen, or interchanges of vowels by reason of itacisms (pp. 39, 41). This affinity between the two has but one parallel, and that a less complete one, in this branch of literature, for Cod. E of S. Paul is only an unskilful transcript of Cod. D after it had suffered ex- tensive corrections (p. 71). The truth is, that they were both taken from the same archetype by scribes who were miserably ignorant of Greek, and in that archetype the words must have been written continuously as in Codd. NABC, the two Codd. D, and E of the Acts. But a habit had long been growing which in the ninth century be- came confirmed, of setting a space between the words, and to this habit the scribes of both copies wished to conform, and even put a single point or stop at the end of each word {see p. 20), as if to shew that the practice was not yet familiar. Now the thing to be noticed is this; while in their almost complete darkness as to the meaning of the Greek they both made most ludicrous errors in the process of separating the words, the blun- ders of the one are by no means identical Avith those of the other, though just as gross and absurd. Hence it
7G THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
follows tliat both F and G were transcribed separately from the same older codex, and, except in the places where they differ from 'each other, must be regarded not as two witnesses but one. The text thus pre- served is both ancient and valuable, marked by many peculiarities of its own, and not to be rejected, if re- jected at all, without much thought and some hesi- tation.
In respect to their Latin versions the two are quite independent. Cod. F has a pure form of the Latin Vulgate, as current at the period, in parallel columns on the same page with the Greek, but so arranged that the two Latin should alw^ays stand in the outward columns of each open leaf, the two Greek inside, and next to each other. In Cod. G the Latin is of an older type, set over the Greek and much conformed to it. Cod. G also preserves, by mexins of capital letters in the middle of the lines, the stichometrical arrange- ment of the archetyi^e from which it was taken.
It would be too much to tire your patience by de- scribing other uncial manuscripts of lower date and less eminent merit. For their age, history, and character- istics I must be content to refer you to works which have been specially devoted to the subject, among which the second edition of my *' Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament," whatever be its other merits, is at least the most recent. Suffice it to say that the palimpsest fragments (p. 17) Codd. P and Q at Wolf- enbiittel, Cod. R (Nitriensis, see p. 90) of S. Luke in the British Museum, Cod. Z of S. Matthew at Trinity College, Dublin, must be assigned to the sixth century, or the opening of the seventh, and, so far as they carry
GREEK TESTAMENT: COSTINUED. 77
us, are only less weighty than Codd. KABCD. But the coryphjBus of these lesser authorities, though not earlier than the eighth century, is Codex L, or No. 62 in the National Library at Paris, of which we have had occasion to speak in connection with Codex B (pp. 42, 43, 49). In number the uncials amount to fifty-six in the Gospels, far the greater part of which are fragments, and many of them inconsiderable fragments ; in the Acts and Catholic Epistles to six ; in the Pauline Epistles to fifteen, chiefly fragments ; in the Apocalypse to only five ; to eighty-two in all. "We do not here include Church lesson-books or Lectionaries, of which about sixty-eight survive in uncial characters ; inasmuch as this style of writing, which became obsolete in other books towards the end of the ninth century, was in volumes used for reading^ in Churches, for motives of obvious convenience, kept up about two hundred years longer.
I have just said that much of our elder and uncial writing is merely fragmentary. This arises in part from the nature of the case. A few leaves, or per- haps a single leaf, of precious Biblical vellum, had been barbarously mangled to make up the binding of some comparatively modern book. Thus a portion of the beautiful Codex Ruber or Cod. M of S. Paul has been made up into fly-leaves for a volume of small value in comparison, among the Harleian manuscrijots in the British Museum : Griesbach identified it at a glance as belonging to a fragment at Hamburg, by the exquisite semicursive writing and the bright red ink. Again, that interesting leaf of S. Mark's Gospel (W*^) which is now arranged on glass at Trinity College, Cambridge, consists
78 TILE FRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
of 27 several shreds, picked out of the binding of a vokime of Gregory Nazianzen in 1862 by the University Librarian, Mr Bradshaw. Too often, however, the scat- tering of various parts of the same manuscript is the Avork of mere fraud or greed. Of Avhat was once a very fine copy of the Gospels written late in the sixth cen- tury on thin purple-dyed vellum in letters of silver and gold, four leaves are among the Cotton manuscripts in the British Museum, six are in the Vatican, two in the Imperial Library at Vienna. Thirty-three more leaves of the self-same codex (known as N of the Gospels) have lately been discovered at the monastery of S. John at Patmos, whence the other twelve were no doubt stolen, then divided for the purpose of getting a higher price for them from three several purchasers than from one. One would be sorry indeed to utter a word of disparagement about a person who has done so much for Biblical learning as Tischendorf, yet it is hard to acquit him of blame for having dispersed needlessly the several portions of certain documents he has brought to liofht. The case of Codex Sinaiticus seems to have admitted of no alternative. He was glad to get posses- sion of its separate parts when and how he could. Yet the effect abides, that the 43 leaves wliich go by the name of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus (p. 32) are now at Leipsic, the remainder of the manuscript at St Petersburg, But it is hard to account in this way for his procedure in another matter. In 1855 he sold to the University of Oxford for the Bodleian, at a good price, two uncial codices of some importance, probably written in the ninth century, and each containing about half of the Gospels. Tliey are known as Codd. T {(/amma) and A
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 79
(lambda), and were stated by him to have been found in some eastern monastery — he is in the habit of describ- ing in this general Avay the original locality of treasures which he met with on his various journeys. Four years later, on his return from the expedition during which he lighted on Codex Sinai ticus, he took to St Petersburg the remaining half of each of these documents, which are thus separated from their other portions by the breadth of Europe, and that without giving Oxford a chance of acquiring the whole, so far at least as w^e are aware. Without doubt the course wdiich Tischendorf adopted was the more advantageous to liimself, but to the Biblical student it is vexatiously inconvenient.
Little can here be said about manuscripts written in the cursive or running hand, which style from the tenth century downwards (p. 20) was almost exclusively employed in copying manuscripts of the New Testa- ment. They are very numerous — sixteen hundred at least having been entered in formal Catalogues, whereof hardly a hundred have been collated or even examined as they ought — but they will not enter largely into discussion when we come to apply our materials to the solution of critical difficulties. A very brief account of a few of them is all we shall find time for. As the uncials are designated by letters of the alphabet, so are the cursives for the most part by the Arabic numerals. Cod. 1 contains the Gospels, Acts, and all the Epistles, written in an elegant and minute hand, and on account of certain beautiful miniatures which have now been abstracted from it was assigned to the tenth century: the handwriting might lead us to think that it is a little more recent. Our facsimile (No. 0, Plate 1) represents
80 THE PIUXCIPAL MAXUSCBIPTS OF THE
the title and first words of S. Luke's Gospel, and tlie graceful illuminations are set off by bright colours and gilding. It is deposited in the Public Library of Basle, in which city it was used, only too slightly, by Erasmus, when he was preparing the first published edition of the Greek New Testament, 1516.
The Apocalypse, or Book of the Revelation, is not often contained in the same volume as the Gospels ; so that Cod. 1 of the Apocalypse is quite a different manu- script, of less value and antiquity, and being the only one to which Erasmus had access when forming his Greek text, its manifold errors and its defect in the six concluding verses rendered his text of this book the least satisfactory portion of his great work. This Cod. 1 then belonged to John Beuchlin (or Capnio, as he was called, after the fanciful humour of his times), the famous scholar whose death in 1522 was bewailed by his loving friend Erasmus in one of the most exquisite of his Colloquies. It was subsequently lost, but was happily re-discovered by Professor Delitzsch in 1861, in the library of the Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein, to the great gain of sacred literature.
Cod. 33 of the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, although much less beautiful than the Basle Cod. 1, is in respect of its contents far more valuable. For its store of excellent various readings, and its textual resemblance to the most venerable uncials, it has been justly styled " Queen of the cursives." It once belonged to the great French minister Colbert, and is now in the National Library at Paris, No. 14. It is written in a fine round hand of the eleventli century, ^\\i\\ 52 long lines on each page {nee facsimile No. 10, Luke i. 8 — 11), but has
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 81
been shamefully misused in former times. By reason of the damp, the ink has in many places left its proper page blank, so that, to the dismay of Tregelles, who persistently collated it anew in 1850, the writing can only be read as set off on the opposite page.
The next copy we shall speak of, Cod. 69 of the Gospels, is one of the comparatively few cursives — some twenty-five in all — which embrace the whole New Testament, although with numerous defects. It is a folio volume, peculiar for having been written, apparently with a reed, on inferior vellum and coarse paper, arranged in the proportion of two parchment to three paper leaves, recurring at regular intervals : the handwriting is a wretched scrawl, always tiresome and sometimes difficult to decipher. Our facsimile (No. 11) contains 1 Tim. iii. 15 — 16, selected for the sake of a reading to which we have previously made reference, and shall have occasion to speak more about hereafter. Its wide variations from the Received text have drawn much attention to this document, which was presented to the Town Council of Leicester in 1640 by a neigh- bouring clergyman, Thomas Hayne. Its present owners allowed both Tregelles and myself to take it home with us for the laborious task of complete collation, but it is ordinarily kept with reverent care in the Town Library by those who take an honest pride in their treasure. A few years since some friends of mine were in- specting it with strangers' curiosity, while the old lady appointed to exhibit it expatiated loudly on its merits. It was, of course, in her oration, one of the wonders of the world, a precious relic coming down to us from the fourth century of the Christian era. Then sud- S. L. 6
82 THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF TUE
denly changing countenance, and sharpening the tones of her voice, she proceeded, to the lively amusement of her audience, " And yet that famous Doctor Scrivener pretends that it is no older than the fourteenth cen- tury : — much he knows about it !" If you will glance again at our facsimile, and compare it with others that I have laid before you, it may probably occur to you that the date I venture to assign to it is not far wrong ; but it might have comforted the zealous guardian of the Leicester manuscript, had she been told that mere age is but one element in assigning to a document its proper value. This very copy has recently been demon- strated by the late Professor Ferrar, of Trinity College, Dublin, and his colleague there, Mr. T. K. Abbott, to have so close a connection -with three others of the twelfth century, one being now at Paris, another at Vienna, the third at Milan ^, that the four must have been transcribed, either directly or perhaps at second hand, from some archetype of very remote antiquity, which in Mr Abbott's judgment may have equalled Codex Bezse in age, while it exceeded it in the purity of its text. One point of resemblance between the four is a very startling one. These manuscripts, and these alone, coincide in removing the history of the Avoman taken in adultery, which we shall have to discuss hereafter, from the beginning of the eighth chapter of S. John's Gospel to the end of the twenty-first chapter of S. Luke.
Two other very important copies of the Gospels are Cod. 157 in the Vatican, which is next in weight
1 The other three copies are, Cod, 13 of the Gospels, Paris No. 50; Cod. 124, Vienna, Lambecc. 31 ; Cod. 3-lG, Milan, Ambros. S. 23 sup.
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 83
among the cursives to Cod. 33, and from its miniatures in colours and gold is seen to belong to the early part of the twelfth century; and a Church lesson-book, dated A.D. 1319, abounding with readings found elsewhere only in Cod. B and the best uncials, which has been named by others Scrivener's y, because I was fortunate enough to light upon it nearly thirty years ago among the Burney manuscripts in the British Museum. In the same great library is deposited another cursive, as remarkable as any in existence, Cod. 61 of the Acts of the Apostles only, but with 297 verses missing. This also is dated (A.D. 1044), and seems once to have con- tained the Catholic Epistles, since a table of the chap- ters in S. James yet remains. Tischendorf discovered it in Egypt in 1853, and sold it to the Trustees of the British Museum. In consideration of its singular cri- tical value in a book whose readings are at times much disturbed, independent collations have been made of it by Tischendorf, Tregelles, and myself.
The last cursive we shall mention at present is one of about the twelfth century. Cod. 95 of the Apocalypse, manuscripts of which book are much scarcer than those of any other portion of the New Testament. The late Lord de la Zouche, then Mr Curzon, found it in 1837 on the library floor at the monastery of Caracalla, on Mount Athos, and begged it of the Abbot, who sug- gested that the vellum leaves would be of use to cover pickle-jars. This " special treasure," as Tregelles justly calls it, contains also, between the portions of its pre- cious text, an epitome of Arethas' commentary on the Apocalypse, and breaks off at ch. xx. 11. This copy, and one less valuable from the same place (Cod. 96},
6—2
84 THE PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE
Mr Curzon allowed me to collate in 1855 at his seat, Parham Park in Sussex.
Manuscripts of every kind and date will often be found to contain very interesting matter respecting their scribes and the times when they were written. Many of them are adorned with pictures in miniature or of full size, as also with arabesque and other illu- minations, in paint of blue or purple, green or ver- milion or gold, both beautiful in themselves, and illustrative of the history of art. But these things ap- pertain rather to the antiquarian than to the Biblical critic, and must not detain us now. A pretty little notice of the Scriytorium, or writing-room in monas- teries (see p. 4), of its tenants and its furniture, may be seen in so unlikely a place as the Appendix to the "Golden Legend" of the American poet Longfellow, who fairly quotes the authorities whence his informa- tion is taken. In two writers of manuscripts, who have repeatedly crossed my path, I cannot help feeling a special interest: one is Theodore of Hagios Petros in the Morea, which little town even yet furnishes pupils to the German Universities, in whose firm bold hand no less than six manuscripts still survive, bearing date between a.d. 1278 and 1301; the other is AngelusVer- gecius, a professional scribe of the sixteenth century, on whose elegant style was modelled the Greek type cast for the Royal Printing Office at Paris, and to whose excellence in his art is due the oddly-soundiug proverb, " he writes like an angel." The colophon oi concluding note to an extensive work is sometimes very touching in its quaint simplicity, whether it be a burst of thankfulness that the toil is ended; or a
GREEK TESTAMENT: CONTINUED. 85
request for the reader's prayers in behalf of the sinful penman ; or a description of his personal peculiarities, such as "the one-eyed Cyprian;" or some obvious moral reflection, which hardly reads like a common- place, now that it is verified before our eyes. Take, for example, the following distich, extracted from a manuscript in the collection of the Baroness Burdett- Coutts (II. 10) :
"q fxh Xftp "h ypd\f/a<Ta o-qireTai rdcpi^^ ■ij 5e ^t/3Xo5 i<TTaTac.../x^xp'' rep/xaTuv.
The hand that wrote doth moulder in the tomb, The Book abideth till the day of doom.
LECTUEE IV.
ox THE ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT.
1. I TRIED to explain in the course of my first Lecture (pj). 9 — 11) the important service rendelred to sacred criticism by the primitive versions of Holy Scrip- ture and by the express citations from it j)reserved in early ecclesiastical writers ; inasmuch as these help to bridge over the space of nearly three centuries which separates the lost autographs of the Apostles and Evan- gelists from the most venerable of those manuscripts which my second and third Lectures were designed to render familiar to you. In plain truth, the versions and the Fathers of the second and third century stand in the place of copies of the New Testament which were then in common use, but have long since utterly disap- peared beyond all hope of discovery : and, speaking generally, they fill up the vacant room, if not at all times so completely as we might wish, yet in a way abundantly sufficient for all practical purposes. A sin- gle example shall illustrate my meaning, and it shall be taken in preference from one of the few passages (they are only twenty-five through the New Testament)
CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 87
wherein the translators of our Authorized Bible notice in their margin a difiference of reading. In Acts xiii. 18 our ordinary text runs "And about the time of forty years suffered he their manners in the wilderness," where the margin, instead of " suffered he their man- ners," intimates as a possible alternative "bore tliem as a nurse beareth or feedeth her child," supplying for once to the Eno-lish reader both the Greek words irpoiro^opriaev and iTpo4)o<j)6pr)(Tev, which differ only in a single letter, pi or j^hi. When we come to examine our best manuscripts we find them not unequally di- vided. For pi of our English text are Codd. XB, the very ancient second hand of C (p. 63), the Greek of D against its own parallel Latin version, the great cur- sive 61 (p. 83), three lesser uncials and most cursives. For phi of our margin stand Codd. AC (by the first hand), E or Bede's copy, the Latin of D (p. 66), that admirable cursive numbered as 33 in the Gospels (p. 80) and several others of a superior class. In this state of perplexity, since either reading would give us a fair sense, we naturally desire to know which of them was extant in ages prior to the fourth century, the date of our earliest codices i«5 and B. Now several translations which yet survive were made at an early period, and this is just such a case as versions would have peculiar weight in deciding, because in no other language save Greek would two words so widely apart in meaning be so close to each other in form. We notice therefore that the elder Syriac of the second century, the two Egyptian of the third, conspire in representing phi, the form upheld in our margin, and these facts would go far to decide the question, which happens to be one
88 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
rather curious than very important, but that we observe both readings in the works of the celebrated Greek critic and theologian Origen, who died in the middle of the third century. Both readings, therefore, were well known and supported long before Codd. XB existed, and the parallel in Deut. i. 31, to which our translators make a seasonable reference, and which in the Hebrew admits of no ambiguity, will probably incline us to prefer phi of the Authorized margin to -pi of the text.
2. I have dwelt the longer on the foregoing pas- sage, that you may see distinctly how prominent a part the primitive versions and Fathers must always bear in the Textual criticism of the New Testament. My hearers, therefore, will not suppose that I am exhaust- ing their attention to no purpose, if I now seek to trace these fruitful sources of information with some pains and care, before entering upon the practical ap- plication of the principles we shall have established to an examination of certain leading passages of the New Testament itself, which examination will form the sub- ject-matter of our fifth and sixth, or concluding Lec- tures. In regard to versions one tiling ought to be well borne in mind, that we here employ them in the service of the criticism of Holy Scripture, not as guides to its right interpretation. We endeavour to discover the general character and precise readings of the lost manuscripts of the original which the translators had before them, and are concerned with nothing more. Hence a very wretched version like the iEthiopic or one form of the later Syriac may afford us considerable aid, whereas an excellent one, such as ofir English Authorized Bible, inasmuch as it is derived from d
FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 89
modern and well-known text, will prove for our present end of no use at all. The chief ancient versions we shall describe are those in the Syriac, Egyptian, and Latin tongues.
3. The Aramaean or Syriac, employed to this da}?- in the public service of several Eastern Churches, is a branch of the great Semitic family of languages, and as early as Jacob's age was distinct from the Hebrew: Laban the Syrian called the stony heap of witness " Jegar-sahadutha," but Jacob called it ''Galeed" (Gen. xxxi. 47). As we now find it in books, it was spoken in the north of Syria and in Upper Mesopotamia, about Edessa, the native country of the patriarch Abraham. It is, compared with the Hebrew, which ceased to be vernacular six centuries before Christ, at the time of the Captivity to Babylon, a copious, flexible, and elegant lacguage. It is so near akin to the Chaldee as spoken in Babylon, and brought back by the Jews into Pales- tine, that the latter was popularly known by its name (2 Kings xviii. 26; Isai. xxxvi. 11; Dan. ii. 4). Hence the Syriac of literature, though long since passed away from common use, very nearly represents the dialect spoken by our Lord during his earthly ministry, and by those who then lived in the Holy Land ; and was on that account regarded with the deeper interest by Albert Widmanstadt, Chancellor to the Emperor Ferdinand I., and by its other first students in modern times. The oldest Syriac version, distinguished from those that followed it by the name of the "Peshito" or " Simple," comprised both the Old and New Testa- ments, except the second Epistle of S. Peter, the second ^ S and third of S. John and the Apocalypse, and seems
90 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTUER 2IATERIALS
to have been executed (at least in some portions) as early as the end of the first or the beginning of the second century, from manuscripts which have of course long ago perished : it is cited under the familiar ap- pellation of ''the Syrian" by Melito about A.D. 170. Christianity, as we know, spread early from Antioch, the Greek capital (Acts xi. 19 — 27; xiii. 1, &c.), into the native interior of Syria, where the Apostle Thadda3us is alleged to have preached the Gospel to Abgarus, toparch of Edessa. The Peshito would be readily conceded to be by far the chief of all versions of Scripture, but for certain appearances of revision under- gone by its text in ancient times, which slightly impair its critical value ; although we have copies of it which bear date in the sixth century, and, even as it stands, in weight and authority it is exceeded by none, while for perspicuity of style, for ease and freedom combined with precision and correctness — but these qualities make little for our immediate purpose — it is quite without a rival. The first printed edition of the New Testament, out of many that succeeded, was put forth at Vienna in 1555 by Widmanstadt, at the expense of his Imperial master ; the Old Testament Avas first published in 1()4.'5 by the Maronite Gabriel Sionita, in the magni- ficent Paris Polyglott.
4. A strong light was thrown upon the history of the Syriac versions by the happy discovery made by the late Canon Cureton, then an officer in the Manu- script Department of the British Museum, while en- gaged upon the task of examining and arranging the Syriac and other manuscripts {see p. 76) brought to England by the late Archdeacon Tattam about 1847
FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 91
from the convent of S. Mary the Mother of God in the Kitrian Desert, seventy miles N.W. of Cairo. It con- sists of the single known copy of a version of the Gospels, neither itself the Peshito nor yet independent of it, which after ten years' delay was published by Cureton in 1858, with a translation and copious notes. The original manuscript has been reasonably assigned to the fifth centurv. It is a fraojment, containing^ on fine vellum leaves, written with two columns on a page, large portions of the other Gospels, but only one precious passage of S. Mark (ch. xvi. 17 — 20), so arranged that S. John immediately follows it and pre- cedes S. Luke. Beyond question the Curetonian Syriac is a document of high importance in criticism, often lending powerful support to the very best of our other authorities ; although, considered as a translation, where it quits the footsteps of the Peshito, it is often loose, careless, paraphrastic, or wholly erroneous. Its text bears so strong a resemblance in many places to that of Codex Bez3e and the older forms pf the Latin version, which we shall soon have to speak about, that they must doubtless be referred to some common origin, as far back as the second century, and thus afford us a plain proof that readings may be very ancient without being in the least degree good or even probable. Take for instance the following palpable interpolation, mani- festly grounded on Luke xiv. 8 — 10, which the Cure- tonian Syriac (as it is usually called), in company with Codex Bezae, some Old Latin Manuscripts and writers, and one other witness, annexes to Matt. xx. 28. The rendering (which is somewhat rugged) is Cureton's, not mine.
92 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTUEli JIATEEIALS
But you, seek ye that from little tilings ye may become gi-eat, and not from great things may become little. "Whenever ye are invited to the house of a supper, be not sitting down in the honoured place, lest should come he that is more honoured than thou, and to thee the Lord of the supper should say, Come near below, and thou be ashamed in the eyes of the guests. But if thou sit doyn in the little place, and he that is less than thee should come, and to thee the Lord of the supper shall say, Come near, and come up and sit down, thou also shalt have more glory in the eyes of the guests.
5. The Peshito and Caret onian Syriac versions, in whatever relation they may stand to each other (for this point must be regarded as still unsettled), carry us back to a text of the second centur}^, not by any means necessarily the purest, yet claiming special attention on the score of its mere antiquity. About four other translations of Scripture into Syriac, but of a later date, are extant, either complete or in a fragmentary shape, two of which have considerable worth as instruments of criticism. The Philoxenian or Harclean Syriac is the principal, and includes the whole New Testament. At the end of the manuscript from which the printed text is derived (and we find independent testimony to the fact in another quarter), a colophon or subscription by the first hand declares that the translation was made A. D. 508 (by one Polycarp, a Rural or Suffragan Bishop, as we learn elsewhere) for Xenaias or Philoxe- nus, Bishop of Mabug or Hierapolis, of the Monophysite communion, the chief of those semi-heretical sects into which the Syrian Church has been divided from the fifth century to this day. The subscription goes on to state that this version was collated by the writer, Thomas of Harkel, A.D. 616 (who subsequently became himself Monophysite Bishop of Mabug), by the help of
FOR TUB CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 93
two approved Greek manuscripts (perhaps of three, for the reading varies), belonging to the convent of Antonia, in Alexandria. We have here, therefore, a version of the sixth century, diligently corrected a hundred years later by venerable Greek copies found in Egypt, whose variations are set in the margin. It is this margin which renders the Philoxenian version as valuable as it is to textual critics, for the body of the work consists of a servile accommodation of the noble and free Peshito, the vernacular Bible of all Syria, to the very letter of the Greek. A note in the Philoxenian margin is the solitary witness we have not yet spoken of as vouching for the paragraph affixed to Matt. XX. 28 (p. 91) ; it much resembles Cod. L in its more characteristic variations, and in the Acts is the almost constant associate of Codd. DE. 137 {see p. 73), whether each singly or all together. Certain j)assages in the Philoxenian text are distinguished by asterisks and obeli, which may be due to Thomas of Harkel, although their i3recise purpose is a little uncertain, unless it be to indicate suspicion of the possible spuriousness of the passages to which they are attached. Two manu- scripts of the Philoxenian translation were sent to England from Diarbekr in 1730, and made known by a tract published by Dr. Gloucester Ridley in 1761. He bequeathed them to New College, Oxford, whose library they now adorn, and several other copies of the Gospels only have been since discovered elsewhere. The version was published at Oxford by Professor Joseph White in 1788—1803.
6. The only other Syriac version we shall notice was found in a single Vatican manuscript, dated A. D. 1030,
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by the gi'eat Danish scholar Adler, and was published in full by the Count F. Miniscalchi Erezzo in 1861 — 4. It is distinguished as the Jerusalem Syriac, because the dialect in which it is written seems to be rather that of Southern than of Northern Syria. It appears to be made immediately from the Greek, not grounded on the Peshito, like the Philoxenian. Although the copy we possess is so recent, it must have been derived from a pure source, and is the more valuable from its obvious independence of our other critical materials: it often sides with Codd. BD against the mass of authorities. Being only a Church lesson-book of the Gospels, it often fails us where w^e should most desire its help, but is very interesting as enabling us to compare the Lec- tionary of the Syrian Church with that of the Greek. The general features are common to both, with many characteristic variations, as well in the passages chosen for public reading, as in the lesser Festivals and Saints' days appointed to be kept holy.
7. Next to Syria in geographical position stands Egypt, once a Christian land, though now given up, by the mysterious ordinance of an allwise Providence, to the false creed of the impostor Mohammed. The handful of native Egyptians who still abide in the faith of Christ comprises a poor, down-trodden, scat- tered and divided remnant, discriminated from its conquerors the Arabs by the appellation of Copts, a temi whose origin is uncertain : every one knows that the Old Testament name of the people was Mitzri. By the Coptic versions of the Bible, therefore, we mean those made for the use of the primitive Christians of Egypt, possibly as early as the second century, when
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the Gospel had ah'eady spread from Alexandria far into the interior ; certainly before the middle of the third, when the Christian population had grown very nume- rous, whereas even their chief rulers, eminent abbots and bishops celebrated as mighty in the Scriptures, knew no language except their own.
By comparing our existing translations of the Bible with all we know of the ancient language of Egypt, it is evident that their diction does not differ materially from the demotic, or vulgar speech of the nation a few cen- turies before the Christian era ; and that the demotic again is but a modernized form of the elder or sacred tongue, from which it varied — to employ the illustration of Canon Lightfoot, who has devoted much labour to the investigation of the whole subject — much as the Italian does from the Latin. The three in fact, the sacred, the demotic, and the Coj)tic, represent three successive stages of a language fundamentally the same, only that the demotic in some degree, and the Coptic to a far greater extent, have been enriched or corrupted, as the case may be, by a large admixture of Greek words, derived from the Greek colonies, of which Alexandria was by far the most considerable. The Coptic, again, must be subdivided into two principal dialects, one being in use in Lower Egypt two or three centuries after Christ, and hence called the Memphitic from the old northern capital of Memphis; the other in Upper Egjrpt, called the Thebaic, from the hundred-gated Thebes, the metropolis of the south. These two dialects are sometimes designated respectively as the Bahiric and the Sahidic, from Arabic names of the north and south provinces, but it is an en'or to apply the general
96 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
term Coptic to either of them exclusively, as it some- times is applied to the Memphitic or Bahiric alone. The Memphitic and Thebaic dialects, in each of which a perfectly independent version of the New Testament is extant, are well-defined and separate from each other. The small fragments of a translation of both Testaments in a third dialect, the Bashmuric, which seems to have been vernacular either in the Oasis of Ammon in the west, or among certain rude tribes in the Delta of the Nile, are of the less importance, inasmuch as they belong only to a secondary version grounded upon the Thebaic.
8. The other two versions, however, the Mem- phitic and the Thebaic, have now established their claim to be regarded among the very first of the aids to sacred criticism, subsidiary to manuscripts of the original : I say subsidiary, inasmuch as it is a principle universally acknowledged, that no reading, vouched for by versions alone, can be safely regarded as genuine. It may easily have arisen from the licence assumed by translators, or may have been the result of subsequent and ill-advised corrections. The Egyptian versions are for the end of the second and the beginning of the third century guides as faithful and trustworthy as the Syriac versions for a period earlier by eighty or a hundred years. The Memphitic bears some marks of being the prior in date, but it is under the heavy disad- vantage of being known to us only through codices comparatively recent ; many of them are dated after the Coptic notation of the era of the Martyrs who fell in Diocletian's persecution, A. D. 284. Out of upwards of fifty which Canon Lightfoot has catalogued and for the
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most part examined, only a few fragments in the Britisli Museum {Additional MS. 14,740 A) can be earlier than the tenth century, and far the greater number are a good deal later. Manuscripts of the Thebaic, on the other hand, which was alwa3^s rough and unpolished, and has long since become obsolete as a language, are usually of venerable antiquity, though so few and fragmentary that a complete version of the New Testa- ment cannot be made up from all of them put together. They were chiefly found in the museum of Cardinal Borgia, at Velletri, the contents of which are now re- moved to the College of the Propaganda at Rome, and were made known piecemeal by scholars whose obscure diligence well deserves our grateful praise, namely, by R, Tuki, Roman Bishop of Arsinoe, in 1778, by Mingarelli in 1785, by the Augustinian eremite Giorgi in 1789, and in a posthumous work by Woide, who edited for us the New Testament portion of Codex A (p. 55). The Memphitic version stands in pressing need of a critical reviser, who will find abundant materials ready for him. The first edition, published in 171G by David Wilkins, a Prussian by birth, by adoption an Oxonian, faulty as it is, has not been superseded by the recent one of Schwartze (1846) and Boetticher (1852), much less by inferior reprints for native use. The support frequently accorded by the Memphitic to Codd. XB jointly, by the Thebaic to Codd. B D, or to one of the two, in their characteristic readings, cannot fail to be of weight, as well in maintaining the evidence of these great manuscripts when supported by the Egyptian versions, as in throwing suspicion upon it where Coptic testimony goes the contrary way.
s. L. 7
98 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
9. The Latin versions of Holy Scripture demand and will reward our special attention. Although we know that a branch of the Christian Church existed at Rome "many years" before S. Paul's first visit to the city (Rom. xv. 23), and already flourished there in the first century, it probably was not for the use of converts in the capital that the earliest Latin trans- lation was made. To them S. Paul wrote his noble Epistle in Greek ; the earliest Bishops of that Church were mostly Greek : even Clement their first or one of their first Bishops, and Caius the presbyter at a later period, whose names intimate a pure Roman origin, yet chose to write in Greek, a language more or less familiar even to the lowest classes in that great centre of the civilized world. In the provinces, especiall}^ at a distance from the chief seats of commerce, Latin was the only language generally spoken, and in such places the necessity must have first arisen of rendering at least the New Testament into a tongue to be " under- standed of the people." The name of Cardinal Wise- man must, I fear, be handed down in English history as that of an ecclesiastic, whose rashness and vanity sorely damaged the cause which his heart was set upon serving: by Biblical students he will be commemor- ated, like a far greater Cardinal whom in some respects he resembled, as being, almost "from his cradle a scholar, and a ripe and good one." The Latin version has naturally a deep interest for members of his com- munion, and indeed, for obvious reasons, it has hardly been treated in this country with the consideration it deseTves. It was Cardinal Wiseman's merit to de- monstrate, some forty years since, what had been faintly
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conjectured by Eichliorn and others, that the Old Latin Bible, so far as we can restore it to its primitive shape by the help of materials yet surviving, had its origin not in Italy at all, but in northern Africa, and in that province of Eoman Africa where TertuUian declaimed late in the second century, where Cyprian Bishop of Carthage became a martyr in the third, Avhere Augus- tine, Bishop of Hippo, compiled his huge tomes of dogmatic theology and devotional lore about the end of the fourth. To this conclusion the Cardinal was led by the style of the Old Latin version itself, which abounds in words and grammatical constructions that had long ago grown obsolete at Kome, but can be illustrated from African writers, such as the heathen Appuleius of the second century, the Christians Arnobius and Lactantius of the fourth. Rude and unclassical as the Old Latin translation no doubt is, the palpable lack of polish is not ill atoned for by a certain terseness and vigour which characterise this whole school of writers, but never degenerate into vulgarity or absolute barbarism.
10. But while it must be admitted, on grounds simply philological, that Africa was the parent of the Old Latin Bible, it is a remarkable fact that nearly all its chief manuscripts have been discovered in a different quarter, within quite a limited region in the north of Italy. Thus the most ancient and best of them, the Codex Vercellensis, called in our critical notation the italic a (a.), was brought to light at Vercelli in 172G by that illustrious labourer in this department of study, Joseph Bianchini (latinized into Blanch inus), when Canon of Verona. This copy of the Gospels, unfortu-
100 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
nately much mutilated, may date from the fourth century, that is, it is not more recent than Cod. A, nearly contemporary with Codd. ^^B. In his own city Bianchini met with Cod. Veronensis [h. of the critics), which is hardly less ancient or valuable than its com- peer. Another more modernized in regard to text (/.), yet still of the sixth century, was found by Bianchini at Brescia. Another very beautiful copy (7^:.), com- prising the latter half of S. Mark followed by portions of S. Matthew, full of precious readings much resembling those of Codd. KB, as early in date as h., has since been discovered among the books — a fine collection indeed — brought from Bobbio to Turin. Only two years back a fresh manuscript, Cod. Sarzannensis (j.), in the Church of Sarezzano near Tortona, was published by Guerrino Amelli, of the Ambrosian Library at Milan. This also belongs to the fifth century, and, like Cod. N. of the Greek (p. 78), codd. a. h. f. and some others, is written on purple vellum, in letters of silver and gold. The locality of all these copies might seem to indicate that they belonged to the Italic recension of the text, a modification which Augustine, though by nation an African, in a passage which has been tampered with by Bentley for no adequate reason, pronounces to be pre- ferable to the other forms of the Latin, as being at once "closer to the words of the original, and more perspicuous in expressing the meaning." The Latin version of Cod. Claromontanus {d. of S. Paul, see p. 70) may be referred to the African recension.
11. Besides the afore-named manuscripts, found almost in a heap in Lombardy and Piedmont, we shall name in passing a few others hardly inferior to them
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in date or intrinsic worth. At Paris is cod. c, edited by Sabatier (1713 — 9), the text being quite remarkable, though the writing is no older than the eleventh century. Two are at Vienna, cod. e. of the fourth or fifth century, whose style is very rugged and antique, and cod. i, of a century later, a fragment in purple and gold. Codd. ff\, ff^., were once in the Abbey of Corbey in Picardy, where Martianay edited the former in 1695. Like some other French manuscripts (p. 70), ff^. has found its way to S. Petersburg, but its fellow is still safe at Paris. Two others, formerly in the Abbey of S. Ger- main des Prez (^\, g'^.), have disappeared altogether, unless they too are at S. Petersburg : their contents are partially known by readings extracted by Martianay, then by Sabatier and Bianchini. Since truth obliged us to speak slightingly of Cardinal Mai when he tried his prentice hand on the famous Cod. B (p. 30), we should be the more forward to acknowledge his services with reference to the Latin version, wherein he possessed the skill and knowledge of a master. To him we owe not only Cod. h. in the Vatican, of which Sabatier had given some specimens, but what is one of the most valuable and interesting of all documents of this class, a Speculum or Book of Quotations, from almost every part of the New Testament (being all the more prized, inasmuch as our main Old Latin authorities contain the Gospels alone), edited in 1843 from a manuscript of the sixth century (cod. m. of our critical notation) in the monastery of S. Croce at Rome, and conspicuous for being the earliest in which the clause about the Three Heavenly Witnesses (1 John v. 7, 8) is con- tained : it is here found in two different places.
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12. The various copies wliicli we have just enume- rated, as well as some others of hardly less importance, exhibit to us a text substantially one, though with countless variations peculiar to each single copy. They must have sprung from a common source, inasmuch as the general form, both in respect to words and con- struction, is the same in all : occasional divergency, liowever extensive, cannot weaken the impression pro- duced by resemblance, if that be too close or too con- stant to be attributed to chance. Yet the very amount of these variations suffices to prove at how early a period they took their rise, and it can hardly be ques- tioned that the readings preserved in codd. a. h. e. and a few others, were already current before the close of the second century, and thus, to our instruction and infinite satisfaction, represent to us the contents of Greek manuscripts centuries older than themselves. The critical value of such documents can scarcely be estimated too highly, yet, by the time the end of the fourth century was reached, the lack of uniformity between the several types of the Old Latin version became a practical inconvenience which was no longer tolerable. "There are almost as many models as there are copies," exclaims S. Jerome to Pope Damasus in A.D, 384 ; and for once the facts of the case left no room for Jerome's characteristic habit of exaggeration. To him, as to the chief Biblical scholar then living, the Pope had entrusted the grave office of revising the older translation by the help of ancient Greek manu- scripts, and of thus producing a translation which might become the standard as well for public as for private reading. Such is the origin of the New Latin, the
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Common, or (as it is usually designated) the Vulgate version of the New Testament, which Jerome com- pleted about A.D. 385, substantially, though by no means precisely, in the form that it is now known, as the "authentic" translation of the Church of Rome. Jerome did not put it forth as a new translation made from the Greek, as he did twenty years later that of the Old Testament taken from the Hebrew ; but he retained, so far as faithfulness to the sacred original permitted, the diction, the idiom, the general tone of the elder Latin, which was endeared to Christians by long and familiar use. Even with all this caution to avoid offence, his work at first encountered vigorous opposition, and came into ordinary use only by slow and painful degrees. As an interpretation his Vulgate far surpasses its prototype ; as an instrument of criticism it is decidedly inferior, where the evidence of the Old Latin may be had : for it does not, like its predeces- sor, bring before us the testimony, good or bad, of documents of the second century, but only that of manuscripts which Jerome deemed correct and ancient at the end of the fourth.
13. The literary history of the Vulgate is a vast study by itself, on which we have fortunately no need to enter now. In its purest form that version appears in the Codex Amiatinus, a noble copy of the whole Bible, stichometrically written (p. 69) by the hand of the Abbot Servandus, A.D. 541. It was brought from the great Cistercian monastery of Monte Amiatino into the Laurentian Library at Florence, and has been edited more than once. Only five years younger is the Codex Fuldensis, in the famous Abbey of Fulda in Hesse
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Cassel, first applied to tlie recension of the text by Lachmann in 1839. Since the Vulgate was the sole Bible of Western Europe for above one thousand years, it is not surprising that more copies of it exist in public libraries than of almost all other books put together ; many of them being of much use for eluci- dating Jerome's text, but the greater part more remark- able for the illuminations and embellishments which have been lavished upon them by skilful or pious hands. The noble volume exhibited open in the Manu- script Room of the British Museum as Charlemagne's Bible, is probably some fifty years later than his reign, although it may possibly contain certain corrections made about A.D. 797 at his request by our learned country- man Alcuin. The first printed book, as we had occa- sion to mention before (p. 3), was the Latin Bible of the Vulgate version ; and after the Council of Trent in 154G had stamped this translation with its sanction, in terms however ambiguous, it became the obvious duty of the Church of Bome to provide an authorized standard for general use. Sixtus V. in 1590, and after him Clement VIII. in 1592, put forth separate edi^ tions, each executed with anxious care, yet the former at least so full of errors both textual and typographical, as to have exposed the Popes and their confident yet purblind criticism to the derision of zealous polemical writers (such as Dr Th. James in his Bellum rajxde, sice Concordia Discors, 1600), who could not let slip what appeared to them a suitable occasion for vexing the enemies they had failed to convince. We profess no sort of sympathy with this gibing spirit, especially when exercised upon topics so sacred ; yet it is only right to
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state that neither Sixtas' nor Clement's Bible, the latter of which is adopted for "authentic" in the Koman communion, can be relied upon in tiie least for critical purposes. Tliey are constructed in a loose and unin- telligent fashion, on manuscripts too recent to be trust- worthy. If Codex Amiatinus was consulted for Pope Sixtus, as has been stated, it had little or no influence in formin^Tf the text. The true readiness must still be sought for in the older copies among which it is para- mount.
14. The Syriac, the Coptic and the Latin : — these are the principal versions," the rest being quite sub- sidiary or of slight consideration. To us of the Teutonic stock the Gothic is the most interesting, although more so on linofuistic than critical oTounds. It was made bv Ulphilas, a Cappadocian, about Sjft 350, while the Goths still inliabited Moesia, now called Bulgaria, and its dialect is marvellously akin to that of modern Germany. Besides some fragments from Bobbio discovered by Mai in 1817, and others in the Wolfenbiittel library in the same volume as the fragments Codd. PQ of the Gospels (p. 76), there is extant the superb but incom- plete Codex Argenteus in the University of Upsal, on purple vellum witli silver and gold letters. It was taken by the Swedes at the siege of Prague in 1648, and has been several times edited. Ten leaves, stolen about 1821, were given up by the penitent thief, more gracious than Aymont (p. 68), on his death-bed, to Uppstrom, who published them in 1857. The remain- ing versions might do us better service, if we knew better how to use them. The Armenian and ^thiopic, composed, in or about the fifth century, in languages
106 ANCIEXT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
known to few, labour under the suspicion of having been conformed in later times to the Latin Vulgate, and, considered as versions, they have been alleged to possess little merit. The Georgian, which is said to date from the sixth century, pertains to the Armenians of the orthodox faith, and w^e know of no one in England who can read it, except Prebendary Malan of Broadwindsor. The Georgian is even stated to have been corrupted from the Slavonic, the version of the sister communion in Kussia, made from the Greek as late as the ninth century. A secondary translation, not made from the Greek at all, can be applied only to the criticism of its own primary. Such are the Frankish and the Anglo- Saxon or Old English, various modifications of which are derived from what were considered the best copies of the Vulgate between the eighth and eleventh cen- turies ; such too are the Persic in Walton's Polyglott and several Arabic versions, which are translated from the Peshito Syriac. Another Persic version, edited by Wheelocke (1653-7), and perhaps some out of the many Arabic versions extant (especially the Gospels in the excellent one published by Erpenius in 1616 and called from Fayiim, a province in Egypt), were rendered from Greek manuscripts too modern to be of much account.
15. The advantage we derive from versions sucli as most of those we have been describing, as making known to us the contents of manuscripts of the original older than any at present existing, is too great not to be held in constant remembrance. In other respects important deductions must be made before we apj)ly their evidence to the criticism of the
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sacred books. It may prove as difficult to arrive at the primitive text of the version as of the Greek itself: the variations subsisting in the copies are sometimes quite as considerable, and suspicions of subsequent correction. from other sources are easily raised and hard to refute. Even so late a version as the Fayyumiyeh of Erpenius has been thought to be revised from the Coptic. Then again, if we take into our reckoning the genius of the language into which the Greek is turned, the skill, the care, the peculiar habits of the translator, and our own defective knowledge of the special dialect of the version, we shall perhaps never feel so secure in the application of this kind of testi- mony as when we come to determine the genuineness of whole sentences or clauses inserted in some Greek copies and omitted in others. " Scripture, by being translated into the tongues of many nations, assures us of the falsehood of additions," as Jerome ^vi'ites to Pope Damasus in his Preface to the Vulgate Gospels. This is even now the surest benefit which versions can render to the critic.
16. Still more precarious, in the majority of cases, is the aid to be looked for from ecclesiastical writers of the early ages. These venerable persons frequently quoted Scripture loosely from memory, and usually no more of its words than suited their imme- diate purpose. What they actually wrote has proved peculiarly liable to change at the hand of careless scribes, who followed mechanically the readings of the New Testament they Avere most familiar with, instead of those set down in the model which they were tran- scribing. Hence it arises that, both in ordinary manu-
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scripts and in printed editions, the same author is perpetually found to cite the self-same text in two or three various forms, whether in different places or on the same page of his work. Yet there are occasions when the testimony of the Fathers is so direct and full that it is absolutely conclusive as to the true reading of the copy of Scripture which lay before their eyes. Witness the representation of Matt. i. 18, as given by S. Irenseus, the light of the Church of Gaul towards the close of the second century, the disciple too of Polycarp who had conversed Avith the Evangelist S. John. The five books of Irenseus against Heresies, though extant chiefly in a bald Latin translation, com- pose, the man and his circumstances considered, one of the most precious reliques of Christian antiquity. The common reading of S. Matthew's words is " Now the birth of Jesus Christ Avas on this wise ;" but the Curetonian Syriac, the Old Latin copies a. h. c.f.ff^., and d. the Latin version of Codex Bezae (the corre- sponding Greek being lost), with the Vulgate or New Latin, its satellites the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon, and Wheelocke's Persic, omit the word '' Jesus." All this would signify little, inasmuch as every extant Greek manuscript has either " Jesus Christ " or " Christ Jesus," if the grave authority of Irenasus were not thrown into the opposite scale. That profound theo- logian, in the course of his demonstration that Jesus and Christ are the same Person (a doctrine which certain heretics had denied), presses the fact that whereas the Evangelist might very well have stated, "Now the birth of Jesus was on tliis wise," the Holy Spirit, foreseeing and guarding against the
FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 109
fraud of depravers, saitli tbroiigli Matthew, "Now the birth of Christ was on this wise." We say nothing for tlie logical validity of this writer's inference, or for the probability of the reading he vouches for, but here at any rate is a suggestive variation from the common text adojDted as if it were beyond question by such a man as Irenseus, within little more than a century after the Gospel of S. Matthew was published. 17. One more example of the value of express citation by an emiuent Father shall suffice, and here it confirms the common text instead of tending to disturb it. In Luke xv. 18, 19 the prodigal, resolving to go back to his Father, frames to himself a speech fitting to the emergency, " Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee ; I am no more worthy to be called thy son : make me as one of thy hired servants." When he carries his determination into happy effect in ver. 21, he addresses to his gracious Father the rest of his prepared speech, but drops the last clause, " make me as one of thy hired servants." S. Augustine, whose intellect was probably the most keen that ever yielded up its best powers to the exact study of the Bible, fails not to point out that delicate touch of true nature, in that the sou, after he had once enjoyed his parent's forgiving kiss, disdains the ignoble condition of servi- tude which once he deemed almost too good to hope for. Yet this very clause is thrust into the text by great codices usually of the highest authority {^ BD. 33 and a few others), Avhose tasteless interpolation is thus rebuked by one who knew the mind of the Spirit as few indeed in any age have been privileged to know.
110 ANCIENT VERSIONS AND OTHER MATERIALS
18. It would serve no good purpose to lay before you a mere list of the ecclesiastical writers who are more or less available as instruments of criticism. Among the Greeks, the fragments of the Apostolic Fathers and their immediate followers are too scanty to supply us with much detailed information, though they afford us priceless evidence that the several books of the New Testament were familiar to the writers. Justin Martyr, who died for the faith about A. D. "ii^ the earliest Christian of whom any considerable re- mains survive the wreck of time, has a habit of rather referring to than quoting the " Memorials composed by the Apostles and their immediate followers," which he elsewhere calls " Gospels ; " so that although his re- ferences are often very close and even verbally exact, an opinion, very unreasonable I must be allowed to call it, has grown up among certain in recent times, that he had before him some other compositions rather than those that now bear that holy name. Irenseus we have spoken of before. The first mention we have of various readings in Scripture occurs in his fifth book against Heresies, where he discusses the question whether the true number 'is QQQ or 616 in Rev. xiii. 18, and ex- pressly imputes the Apocalypse to S. John the Apostle, as Justin Martyr had done before him. Clement of Alexandria brings us into the third century, and his volumes abound with citations from Scripture, more or less precise. But the greatest name among the ancients in this branch of sacred learning is Origen, his pupil, the son of a martyr, himself a sufferer for the name of Christ (d. 254). Seldom have such warmth of fancy and so bold a grasp of mind been
FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. Ill
associated with the life-long patient industry which procured for Origen the honourable appellation of Adamantius. His copious w^orks (some of them now extant only in a poor Latin version) have been ran- sacked, especially by the celebrated German critic Griesbach, for the quotations or allusions to Scripture which cover every page. Often enough the results have proved merely negative. Origen may be alleged • in the same disputed passage, twice or thrice on either side ; or his citation is but a passing one, and no great stress can be laid on the actual words he uses. Fre- quently, however, the case is otherwise. Either the context proves beyond a doubt which reading he adopted, or else he formally discusses the variations which he found in his copies, and expresses a definite judgment upon their relative merits. In instances of this latter description there is no authority to compare with his for fulness of knowledge and discriminating care.
19. Coming down to the fourtli century, we now have Eusebius and Jerome, both of them in regard to criticism disciples of Origen, and inclined to defer rather too much to his arbitrary decisions. The labour of Eusebius in compiling his Canons of Harmony of the Gospels (p. 34), and those of Jerome in regard to the Latin Yulgate (p. 102), we have spoken of before. Since Jerome made habitual use of Greek codices for his work of revision, he is to be regarded as a witness for the original text, not, like his western predecessors, Tertullian or Cyprian or their lesser contemporaries, for their native Old Latin translation only. Of the rest, Chrysostom's expositions frequently render it cer-
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tain wliat readings he follows, and since his Homilies on S. Matthew are at Wolfenbiittel in a codex of the sixth century, we are so far better protected than usual from the subsequent corruption of his text {see p. 107). The same advantage belongs to those works of John Damascene of the eighth century, which are preserved at Paris in a manuscript apparently contemporaneous : • while the Homilies on S. Luke by Cyril of Alexandria, of the fifth century, whose critical worth is greater than his age might lead us to expect, have been lately published from a Syriac version by Dr Payne Smith, the Dean of Canterbury, in such a shape that we may use them with confidence, as virtually unchanged during the lapse of so many centuries. But these instances of good fortune are exceptional and rare.
20. These, therefore, are the main sources of in- formation : manuscripts of the original, versions, and Fathers. Our materials, abundant upon the whole, though in some directions still partial and incomplete, have been slowly accumulated by the diligence of successive generations of scholars, the principal of whom we have already enumerated (p. 14). To apply these materials wisely and soberly to the task of constructing afresh the text of the New Testament calls for critical dis- cernment and acuteness, such as fall to the lot of few. This happy faculty has proved very deficient in the case of some that have toiled patiently and successfully at the work of collation : on the other hand, it has been bestowed in a high degree on men who as colla- tors have accomplished comparatively little, as on Bentley, Bengel, Griesbach, and (if I may venture to refer to an elaborate edition of the New Testament
FOR THE CRITICISM OF THE GREEK TEXT. 113
not yet given to the public) on the joint counsellors, Canon Westcott and Mr Hort. For, in fact, the results of all the external evidence that can be brought together to support any particular various reading are seldom so conclusive on one side or the other, as to enable us to dispense with considerations drawn from internal evi- dence : where by internal evidence we mean that exer- cise of the reason upon the matter submitted to it which will often prompt us, almost by instinct, to reject one alternative and to embrace another. Nor "have we much cause to fear that we shall thus come to substitute our own impressions, — our own subjective impressions, if one must use that rather affected but convenient term — in the room of the conclusions wdiich mere written records would dictate. \Vhether we will or not, we unconsciously adopt that one out of tvv-o oppo- site statements, in themselves not unequally attested to, which we judge the better suited to recognised phe- nomena, and to the common course of thino^s. Were we to try ever so much to do so, we should not find it easy to dispense w^ith the dictates of discretion and good sense : nature would prove too strong for the dogmas of a wayward theory. Some things indeed may be very powerfully maintained, which we w^ould not receive upon any testimony that could be produced (pp. 41 — 6) : but the aj)peal to internal probabilities will be chiefly made where external evidence is evenly, or at any rate not very unevenly, balanced.
21. This just and rational use of internal testi- mony he is the best critic who most judiciously em- ploys. We can say little more than this as a guide to the thoughtful student. What degree of preponderanc3 s. L. 8
114 ANCIENT VEBSIONSAND OTHER MATERIALS
in favour of one out of several forms of reading (all of them affording a tolerable sense) shall entitle it to reception as a matter of right ; to what extent rules of subjective criticism may be allowed to eke out the scantiness of documentary authority, are points that cannot well be defined with strict accuracy. Men's decisions respecting them will always vary according to their temperament and intellectual habits; the judgment of the same person will fluctuate from time to time as to the same evidence brought to bear on the self-same case. All we can hope to do is to set forth two or three general principles, or canons as they are called, which of course are only so far true as they are grounded on reason or taught by experience, the appli- cation of which, in spite, perhaps even in consequence, of their extreme simplicity, has proved a searching test of the tact and sagacity of all that have handled them.
Canon I. The harder reading is preferable to the easier. This is Bengel's prime rule, and looks fair enough in itself. It would seem more likely that a copyist should try to explain an obscure expres- sion, or to relieve a harsh construction, than that he should make that perplexed which before w^as easy. Thus in John vii. 39, where the true reading stands " the Spirit (or " the Holy Spirit ") was not yet," we are not at all surprised to find the word "given" sup- plied by all the versions, including our English Bible in its italic type. The difficulty would be to discover how it could have fiillen out of the text, if it had ever been there, as Cod. B and one cursive of no great value would fain persuade us to believe.
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Caxon II. The shorter reading is more probable than the longer, it being the tendency of most scribes (though certainly not of all) rather to enlarge than to abridge. This rule applies to the case, among others, where two or more accounts of the same event or speech occur, and the fuller narrative is used to amplify the more brief. Thus in some copies of Acts ix. 5, G, are found the words, " It is hard for thee to kick against the goads. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? And the Lord said unto him," yet all this does not belong to the passage at all, but is trans- ferred, with some change, from S. Paul's own narrative of his conversion, Acts xxvi. 14. In the parallel places of the three early or Synoptic Gospels the tendency to such accretions is very strongly marked, and its effect is of course to smooth down seeming discrepancies between them, and to bring into the other two forms or expressions belonging of right only to one. A simple case is that of the Lord's solemn declaration, " I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Thus it really is in Luke v. 82, from which the concluding explanation "unto repentance" has been interjDolated into the two parallel passages Matt. ix. 13 ; Mark ii. 17.
Canon III. In deciding on the probability of a various reading regard should be had to the peculiar style, manner, and habits of thought of the author, which copyists are very prone to overlook and so un- consciously to withdraw from sight. Thus S. Mark, though never obscure, is often singularly concise and abrupt ; S. Luke in his Acts of the Apostles is fond of omittino^ " saith " or " said " after the word iiidicatinsr the speaker, which verb is duly supplied in recent
8—2
116 ANCIENT VERSIONS AXD OTHER MATERIALS
copies in at least six places; the pointed energy of S. James leads him perpetually to neglect connecting particles, and these have been erroneously brought into the common text. Yet even this canon has a double edge, since habit or the love of critical correc- tion will sometimes tempt the scribe to alter the text into his author's usual manner, as well as to depart from it through inadvertence.
Canon IY. Attention must also be paid to the genius and usage of each several authority, and to the independence or otherwise of the testimony borne by each. Thus the evidence of Cod. B is of the less in- fluence in omissions and that of Cod. D or Beza's in considerable additions to the text : even so good a copy as Cod. C, by adding tlie clause "into repentance" in Matt. ix. 13; Mark ii. 17, displays a proneness to the assimilation of unlike passages a little damaging to its character for purity. Again, as it would be manifestly unfair to estimate Codd. DE or FG of S. Paul's Epistles, or the four members of Ferrar's group (p. 82) when in accordance with each other, as more witnesses than one, so, even where the resemblance is less per- petual, as in the case of Codd. ^B, it is impossible to note their close correspondence in places where they stand almost alone, without indulging the suspicion that there is some recondite connection between them of a nature which we do not fully understand, and for which some allowance is required to be made.
Canon Y. would be the most valuable of all, if it were more capable of application to particular in- stances. It has been said that "when the cause of a various reading is known, the variation itself disap-
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pears," and this language hardly exaggerates what may be effected by internal evidence, when it is clear, simple, and unambiguous. Hence springs the rule that " that reading out of several is to be chosen, from which all the rest may have been derived, although it could not be derived from any of them." Thus in James iii. 12, if we suppose that form of the second clause to be the true one, wliich is supported by Codd. KABC and other good authority, ''neither can salt water yield sweet," it is easy to understand how a somewhat rugged construction was gradually made to assume the shape in which it is seen in our Authorized Bible, " so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh."
In our two concluding lectures we shall have fuller opportunity for tracing the influence of these rules in their practical application to the texts we shall then undertake to examine. The first canon especially, that of preferring the harder of two readings, may obviously be over-strained, and must be applied with especial caution. " To force readings into the text merely be- cause they are difficult" — I adopt thankfully the forcible language of the Bishop of Lincoln, Dr Christo- pher Wordsworth, — ^'•'is to adulterate . the divine text with human alloy ; it is to obtrude upon the reader of Scripture the solecisms of faltering copyists, in the place of the word of God."
LECTUEE V.
DISCUSSION OF IMPORTANT PASSAGES IN THE HOLT GOSPELS.
We come at length to apply the principles and facts we have hitherto been concerned with to the examina- tion of select passages in the New Testament, in which the Received reading of the Greek text, and conse- quently of our own English translation of it, has been called in question with more or less reason. As we stated at the outset, the great mass of variations made known to us from the enlarged study of critical authori- ties are quite insignificant, scarcely affecting the sense at all (p. 7), while some are of a wholly different character, so grave and perplexing that we can form no safe judgment about them without calling all available resources to our aid. Yet this last statement must be made with an important reservation, which I have