SUNDAY READING.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1611, 14 January 1903, Page 18

SUNDAY READING.

THE BIBLE-HOW PRESERVED.

(By F. G. Kenyon, F.R.S., in “Harper’s Magazine ” for November.)

It is now nearly 1850 years since the Jewish tentmaker whom we know as the apostle Paul dictated to one of his companions, who transcribed it on a short roll of papyrus, his letter to the Galatian churches, adding thereto at the end, as was his wont a few lines with his own hand in l&rge characters. It is some 2350 years since Ezra, if the tradition be veracious^ gathered together the greater number of the boohs which comprise the Jewish canon of Scripture. It is 2600 years since the prophecies of Amos and Isaiah were written down, whether by the prophets themselves or by their disciples; while for parts, at least, of the historical books of the Old Testament, a yet higher antiquity may be claimed. How. then, has the text of these books been handed down to us; and what guarantee have we that the latest form in which scholars present it to us is indeed a, true representation of the words which prophets and apostles wrote so long ago ?

Let tus take the Old Testament first. Its history is in some respects simpler, in others more difficult, than that of the New Testament. For about 1800 years we can trace it back, though only half that period is covered by actually extant copies. The Hebrew Old Testament was first committed to print in the year 1488, eleven years after a portion of it, the Book of Psalms, had issued from the press. Behind these ...printed texts lies a great quantity oi manuscripts—hundreds, or even thousands, in number; the English bishop Kennicott published collations of manuscripts in 1776-1780, while the Italian scholar De Rossi, shortly afterwards,. added 825 more to the list, without by any means exhausting the number of extant copies. But an examination of all this great mass of authorities brings to light two striking facts; first, that all of them contain substantially the same tpxt, varied only hy obvious mistakes and slight divergences in detail ; and secondly, that none of them is earlier than the ninth century. The earliest extant MS. of the Hebrew uid Testament is a copy of the Pentateuch, now in the British Museum, and assigned to the ninth century, and the earliest MS. bearing a precise date is a copy of the Prophets, at St. Petersburg, dated A.D. 916. while the majority of the MSS. belong to much later periods. At the same time, so uniform is the text preserved in all the MSS. that the earliest and latest of them differ in no essential respect. THE EXPLANATION

alike of the uniformity of text and of the comparative lateness of the extant* MSS. lies in a single cause, namely, the extreme care with which the Jews have cherished their Scriptures for the last *IBOO years. From about the third century most minute rules have existed for the guidance of the scribes wno copied <tthem, and to secure t’he most scrupulous accuracy of reproduction. Imperfect or mutilated copies were at once withdrawn from the service of the synagogue. Consequently the tendency lias been for the earlier manuscripts to be set aside, and so eventually ro perish, their place being taken by new copies which were in better preservation. Thus on the one hand the Jewish »eal that the Testaments in. use in the synagogues should be perfect has led to the disappearance of the older MSS., while on the other hand tlieir care for accuracy of transcription has-ensured that the later copies are not, as is usually the case with manuscripts, substantially inferior to the earlier. For about a thousand years, then, from the nineteenth century back to the ninth, we have the evidence of printed editions and manuscripts; and for some eight hundred years more we.have sufficient evidence from the writings of Jeivish rabbis, and the like, to satisly us that the text of the Old Testament known to them was the same as that which we still have. The schools of Jewish commentators, known as the Masso-retes (from the ‘‘Mass or ah,” or commentary, which they attached 10 the sacred text), and their predecessors the Talmudists, or compilers of the traditions entitled the “Talmud,” all evidently had before them the same type of text, which we can thus trace back to about the year 100 after Christ. At this period the Jewish rabbis, rallying from the blows struck by the destruction of Jerusalem and the rise of the Christians, met in conference at Jamnia to discuss the precise limits of the canon of inspired Scriptures; and at the same time the text which we now call “Massoretic,” and which is tne only type of Hebrew text now extant, seems to have been determined on. But what of the thousand years or more which still separate the supposed origin of THIS MASSORETIC TEXTfrom the actual dates of composition of the earlier parts of the sacred books ? For this period we have no direct evidence from Hebrew manuscripts, and

must 'have recourse to early transit tions of the Hebrew hook into other languages. This is a class of evidence which is practically unknown, in the case of classical literature (since we possess no very early translations ot the Greek and Latin, classics), but which is of very great importance in regard to the Bible. In the days of the Old Testament there were two translations, or “versions.” as they are now commonly termed, which we know to have been made before the formation of the Massoretio text, and which therefore threw some light on the state of the Hebrew text before that event. One of these is the Samaritan version, the other, the Greek version, known as the Septuagint. The Samaritan version is the Bible which the mixed population planted in Samaria by the Assyrians, after the conquest and deportation of the Ten Tribes, adopted from their Jewish neighbours; but since at that time the Prophets and the miscellaneous books of the Old Testament had not yet been fully recognised as part of the sacred canon, this Samaritan Bible consists only of the Pentateuch. The Samaritan version, therefore, probably represents the Hebrew Pentateuch as it was about the fifth century before Christ; and the habitual enmity existing between J ews and Samaritans make it improbable that the Samaritan text would be affected by any changes subsequently introduced among the Jews. The variations which Occur in the Samaritan version are fairly numerous, but most of them are unimportant ; the more notable among them are generally supported by the Septuagint. and of these it must be said that there is a considerable probability that they are right. Unfortunately, the Samaritan version is only available for the Pentateuch; and it is in the other books that the greatest textual difficulties arise. Here our only help is the Greek Septuagint version, so named from tlie “seventy” translators by whom it is traditionally said to have been made in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt (B.C. 284-247.). There is at least no doubt that it was" made about this time, and in Egypt, for the benefit of the large colony of Greek-speaking Jews in that country; and after the introduction of Christianity it became the. Old Testa- 1 ment of Greek-speaking Christians generally. We possess early and good manuscripts of it, dating from the fourth, or even (in the case of a few recently discovered scraps of papyrus) ■from the third century of our era; but its value, as evidence of the pre-Mas-soretio Hebrew text, is seriously discounted by two considerations. In the first place, oiur manuscripts differ very considerably among themselves, many of them having been affected by editors who tried to bring the Greek more into accordance with the Hebrew as they knew it; so that it is not at all easy to ascertain what the original text of the Septuagint was. Secondly, when we have ascertained, as in many places we can, that it differs very decidedly from the received Hebrew text, we still have to make up our minds as to whether the divergence is due to the Greek translator having made a mistake, or translated very freely, or to> 'his having had a different Hebrew text before him. The best scholars are cautious about admitting alternative readings on the evidence of the Septuagint, thinking that we must first ascertain more clearly the history of the Septuagint text itself.

For the present, therefore., we may say that the Old Testament has come down to us almost wholly through the Massoretio edition of THE HEBREW TEXT, and to this both the English and the American revisers have in the main adhered.

When we come to look at the New Testament we find a very different set of circumstances, leading naturally to very different results. The Jewish Scriptures, from a time to which we cannot reach hack, were recognised as sacred books, carefully copied ' by trained scribes, and never subject to systematic destruction by external enemies. When, however, the early Christian missionaries wrote the hooks which now form our New Testament, they did not write them as sacred books on the same level as the Pentateuch or the Psalms, nor were they at first so regarded by those to whom they were sent. St. Paul wrote letters to the various communities in which he was interested, just as hundreds of his contemporaries wrote letters to their friends. We have now, thanks to the discoveries made of recent years in Egypt, numbers of such letters, written in the first and subsequent centuries of our era, and written, as liis must hav4 ? been written, on papyrus; so that avo know just how his letters to the Romans or Philippians must have looked. We can even produce parallels to those subscriptions in “large letters” in his OAvn hand, which he mentions at the end of his epistle to the Galatians. These communications Avould, no doubt, be read in the congregation to Avhich they were addressed, and copies of them Avould often he sent to neighbouring churches; but it would only he gradually that they came to he looked upon as sacred or inspired literature. Similarly the Gospels and Acts were but

memoirs of the Master’s life, written down after the lajise of some years, in order to perpetuate the oral narratives of those who had been eye-witnesses and recipients of His teachings. Many such narratives were compiled, as we know from St. Luke, which have now perished, because they never attained the distinction of being recognised as authoritative by the Church at large. Only in the course of tho second century, did the five narratives which now stand at the head of our New Testament, single themselves out and receive recognition as the authentic and inspired records of the life of Christ on earth and for the dissemination of His Gospel throughout the Roman world. Even so, however, THE CHRISTIAN WRITINGS did not acquire the ordinary privileges and safeguards of secular literature. Throughout the second and third centuries, Christianity, though often tolerated hy Roman emperors and governor's, was never officially recognised, and was always liable to a recurrence of proscription and persecution. At such times the sacred books were special objects of attack. This is no mere matter of conjecture; from the contemporary records of the later persecutions we know that systematic search was made for these books and that those who were so weak or so faithless as to surrender them to tho destroyer were subjected to punishment afterwards by their co-religionists. In this way manv copies of the New Testament writings perished; and it is to be observed that tho official copies the property of the various churches, which would presumably be the most correct in point of text, would bo the most liable to destruction in this way. On the other ihand, the copies which were in private possession would he less likely to attract attention, and might more easilv be concealed. That such private copies existed we cannot doubt. W T e now possess many copies of works of classical literature, written upon papyrus at tins very period, and many of them are obviously rough copies intended for private use, written in irregular, unornamental hands, and often with little care for precise accuracy. In copies such as these we must conceive the Christian Scripture as circulating from hand to hand, with scanty opportunities for correction hy comparison with unofficial copies; and in this way it is easy to see how many of the variations crept in which now puzzle the textual critics.

Until the beginning of tho fourth century, then, the circumstances attending the circulation of the iNexv Testament books were very inimical. to their continual existence. The material on which they were written; papyrus, is so perishable that it is only in the dry soil and climate of Egypt that it has survived at ail- Even in Lower. Egypt, w T here the Greek-speaking population was most numerous, the soil is too damp for its preservation. Our hopes of very early copies a.re therefore restricted to Central and Upper Egypt • and when we have taken into consideration the dangers of persecution and the existence of a large non-Greek population, we cannot be surprised to find that no considerable MS. of the New Testament has survived from this period. Only a few small fragmenls remain, and these are not earlier than the third century. The first quarter of the fourth century, however, brought about a great change. Christianity became ' a THE OFFICIAL RELIGION OF THE EMPIRE, and papyrus was superseded hy vellum as the material on which the best copies of hooks were written. The first event secured freedom of circulation for the and placed the best re sources of the copyists’ art at tneir disposal. The second provided a material strong enough to resist the ravages of time and decay, while the sub stitution of the modern book form for the old roll form made-it possible to bring together all the Christian Scriptures in a single volume. To this period, or very shortly afterwards, may be assigned the two oldest among the extant MSS. of the Greek Bible—the Codex Vatican us and the Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Vaticanus is written in a beautiful small hand with three columns to the page, and has been preserved in the Vatican Library at Rome since the fifteenth century, though it is only within the last year that its contents have been made accessible to scholars. The Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai hy Tisckendorf, and now in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, is written in a rather larger hand, with four columns to the page. Both contained, when complete, the whole of both Testaments, and both are written like all early MSS., on vellum, in uncial characters—that is, in capital letters formed separately. They rank foremost among the witnesses to the text of the New Testament, and their evidence has had great weight with the revisers of the English Bible. Other important uncial MSS. of the Greek Bible are the Codex Alexandrinus, in the British Museum. anrl the palimpsest Codex Ephraemi, at Paris, both of the fifth century and the Codex Bezae. at Cambridge, of the sixth cen-

tury, the last containing the Gospel® and Acts only, with many remarkable variants in the text and with a Latin version parallel to the Greek. From the fourth to the ninth century COPIES OF THE BIBLE, as of other literature, continued to ha written in uncial characters, which tended continually to become larger and heavier. In the ninth century came a reaction, and the current hand of everyday life was modified into a hook hand, which, while possessing much more beauty than tho later uncials, could bo written continuously, and therefore with greater ease and speed. With this invention of the “minuscle” or “cursivo” style, tho multiplication of copies of the Scriptures proceeded apace, until the discovery of printing in the fifteenth century superseded the use of manuscripts altogether. In spite of the ravages of time, more than three thousand copies of the Greek New Testament, whole or in part, still exist, and to these must be added the copies of tho early translations into other languages—Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, Latin, etc-—which give invaluable assistance to the scholar in ascertaining the correct text of the Scriptures.

We owe our knowledge of most of the great works of Greek and Latin literature —EEschylus, Sophocles, Horace, Lucretius, Tacitus, and many more —to manuscripts written from 900 to 1500 years after their authors’ deaths; while of the New Testament wo have two excellent and approximately complete copies at an interval of only 250 year's. Again, of the classical writers we have, as a rule, only a few score of copies (often less), of which one or two usuallv stand out as decisively superior to the rest-, but of the New Testament we have more than 3000 copies (besides the very large number of versions), and many of these have distinct and independent value.