GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 28 September 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

AN EPOCH MARKING WORK CARDINAL XIMINES TRANSLATION. FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT. (By Canon Wilford.—Special to News:) We are so familiar with the Greek of the New’ Testament to-day that it is hard to imagine a time when the vast majority of Christians only knew “the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” through a Latin translation. One of the outstanding events of the opening years of the sixteenth century was the publication of a printed editic n of the Greek New Testament. The honour of conceiving the idea really belongs to Cardinal Ximines, who set to work in 1502 to, prepare it printed Bible to contain Hebrew, Latin and Greek texts in parallel columns. The New Testament was ready by 1514, and the work on the Old Testament was finished in 1517. But the death of the Cardinal and other difficulties delayed matters, and this most important publication, called the “Complutensian Bible,” after the old name of the place where, it was printed, did not see the light of day until 1522. But meanwhile the secret —if secret it was —had.got abroad, and there were those who thought it good to try and rob the Cardinal of the glory of giving the first printed Greek Bible to the world. Great pressure was therefore put on the Dutchman Erasmus, himself a ’learned Greek scholar, to try to be first' in the field. Nothing loth, Erasmus threw himself into the task, and worked so Quickly that his Greek testament appeared in 1516. He had won the race, but his rapidity had vitiated much of his work. Little care had been taken with the text. Only six manuscripts had been consulted, and as none of then! was complete, Erasmus at times found himself with no Greek original at all. Not to-be defeated in the race, to save time he .supplied his own Greek by retranslating from the Latin. BEARING ON ENGLISH BIBLE. This has had an unimportant bearing on our English Bible. The authorised ' yersion of 1611 was largely based on Erasmus’ text, and there are verses in the Revelation of St. John which are translations of Erasmus’ retranslation Greek, One of the other difficulties Erasmus had to face was the carelessness of proof readers. He was badly let down by one of them, who failed to revise many of the sheets. The fact that Erasmus’ work was first in the field gained for it the place that Ximines’ Bible ought to have won. In spite of the fact that the Complutensian Bible was both more scholarly and accurate, it was Erasmus’ test which was more generally used in subsequent editions. So when in 1550 Robert Estienne, a Paris scholar, consummated his work on the Greek text by putting out what we know as the edition of

Stephanus, it was found that he had largely adopted Erasmus’ text, and had only used the Complutensian when he foiind himself in difficulties. When we talk to-day of the Received Text of the Greek Testament, it is to this edition of Robert Estienne that we are referring. But tjie Received Text was farther away from the original Greek than the mediaeval scholars imagined. The en<?rossin<» topic of conversation among the “Dons” of the day was that the Vulgate Latin had been displaced. After many days the Greek Testament had come back into its own. None of them had any idea that what' was really being published was the Greek Text as it had been revised in Syria in the fourth century. What in reality took the place of the Vulgate Latin was the Vulgate Greek. No account had been taken of older MSS. The Received Text was unchallenged for many years. OXFORD EDITIONS. In 1675 tlie Oxford Press published an edition of the Greek Testament in which were noted at the foot of every page a record of different readings which Bishop Fell had discovered in his work among the manuscripts. In 170/, Mill, of Queen's College, Oxford, edited Stephanus’ text and recorded various readings from nearly a hundred MSS. But the first real attack made on the RT. was that of Griesback (1774-1800), who, after making a careful classification of all the MSS., put out a text of his own. He was followed by Lachmann (1842-1850), by Tregelles (18571872) and by Teschendorf (1869-1872), all making valuable contributions to the subject; and the la'st named publishing eight editions of the • Greek Testament. The work of all these scholars led up to the epoch-making findings of two great English divines (Westcott and Hort) and the publication of their great edition of the Greek Testament in 1881. One of their younger contemporaries (Dr. Gregory) deserves to be mentioned, not only because of the valuable work which he did on the New Testament, but also because of his subsequent history. Born in America, of French descent, he had long been resident in Germany before the Great War. His courage equalled his scholarship, and he died fighting gallantly as a septuagenarian on the side of his adopted country. Much work still remained to be done with the passing of all these great names of the nineteenth century, but one thing they had clearly shown—the work of Erasmus must be done over agaip. The Received Text had been dethroned. Westcott and Hort followed up the work which Griesbach had begun. They brought all their scholarship to hear upon the value of the various ancient texts. We shall understand their work better if we let the witnesses they called pass before us, and at the same time glance at the direction that more modern investigation is taking. (a) First of all there are the old Unical MSS., so called because they were written in capitals. Of these there are extant about 120, but only two of them give us the whole text. The two earliest are fourth century M.S.S., while some are as late as the ninth. (b) Next come about 2500 cursive

MSS. written in small running hand, and dating from’ the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Few of these give much help. Nearly all of them are of the Syrian family, and therefore only witness to the type of text used by' Erasmus. But that it does not do to neglect them may be demonstrated by the existence of an eleventh century MS. at Milan, and a twelfth century MS. at Oxford, both of which show evidence of being drawn from another and earlier source. (c) Not so valuable, but still of some service; are getting on for 1300 Jectionaries. These are MSS. containing parts of the New Testament arranged for public reading in the churched. (d) Another not inconsiderable source of information is to be found in. the versions. Although Greek was nearly a universal language at the beginning of the Christian era, the spread of Christianity to the confines of the Empire soon brought about the necessity ot translating the Scriptures into the vernacular of the people. We have veisjons—translations of the Greek into other languages —which were made from MSS. older than any of our present Greek MSS. It is possible for scholars who have given their lives to this branch of learning to tell with a large degree of accuracy the Greek words the translators had" in front of them. . The versions are of peculiar value in helping the textual critic to come to a decision concerning the right reading of a disputed passage. Amongst the most important versions are the Syriac (especially the old Syriac), the Egyptian, of which there are five versions, and the Latin, the old Latin dating back to the early part of the secontl century. The Vulgate Latin is a revision made by St. Jerome at the end of the fourth century. Other less important versions are the Armenian, the Ethiopian, the Arabic, and the Gothic. (e) Much work has of late been done upon the early fathers, many of whose works are extant. So versed in the Scriptures were they that it is impossible to go far in their writings without finding many quotations from the New Testament. Patient work discloses the type of text they used. Oxford University has done much for us in this direction. Only lately a group of scholars there devoted several successive years to a study of St. Cyprian’s works, with the one object of seeing how this Latin writer could help in the solution of New Testament problems. For many years the same university has been working on “the New Testament of St. Irenaeus.” Irenaeus wrote about 175; Cyprian about 250. There are other important writers of the same period.. This work is by no means simple/ There are very real difficulties attached to patriotic study. We are not always sure that we have the Father’s own quotation. Copyists were liable to alter the wording of quotations with which they were familiar. Moreover, we can never be sure that the writer is not quoting from memory. But there are two outstanding factors which make this research, however precarious it may be, entrancingly valuable: (1) The Father had in front of him a manuscript considerably older than any we possess; (2) as we know the part of the world in which the writer lived, we are able to trace the starting place of certain corruptions in the text. (To be concluded next Saturday.)