GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 5 October 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

NEW DISCOVERIES - GETTING BACK TO ORIGINAL TEXT. MOST VALUABLE WORK. OXFORD'S LATEST CONTRIBUTION. (By. Canon Wilford. —Special to News.) When the present writer was at Cambridge,’ so . great was the reputation of the Westcott and Hort text that' there wai a tendency to accept its findings as the last word in textual criticism. We certainly did not notice sufficiently the limitations that these two great scholars themselves assigned to their work. They had laid down certain principles. We followed their principles, failing to notice that at' times in .their text; and. often in their margin, they themselves departed from them. As it turns -out, they were still only forerunners. But yet their work in the main will never be out of date, as witness the fact that the Oxford meeting of 1927 decided that the text of Westcott and Hort should be printed at . the head of their work. Their theory was a right one. It remained for their successors, with the help of subsequent discoveries, to see where their conclusions really led. Westcott and Hort’s message to Greek Testament scholars was this: A reading must not be accepted simply because it can claim the support of a very large number of MSB, . A reading attested by only two MSS., if these are old ones, is very possibly • to be preferred to a reading attested by fifty Ute MSS. It is necessary to group your manuscripts into families. This Westcott and Hort proceeded to do, dividing the MSS. into three main grpups, the -Syrian, the Western, and what they themselves called the Neutral group. They showed quite clearly that the Syrian group, although overwhelmingly predominant' in numbers, represented a revision of the text made in the fourth century. The MSS. belonging to the otlier two well defined groups, although very few in number, gave their witness to older texts, the Western tex:t, and they continued to use the questionbegging name Griesbach had given it, which, although clearly ancient showed, they believed, evidence of careless transmission. In their opinion, the scribes who had copied some of the MSS, had inserted extraneous matter, and for this reason they thought that the Western text ought only to be used with o-rcat care. They pointed out that in this text whole verses, and sometimes longer passages, are found which are entirely absent from other copies. Many of these they assigned to amplification on the part of the scribe. The text to which Westcott and Hort gave the first place was their neutral text. - This, they averred, approached most' nearly to the original. There were more traces of it to be found at Alexandria than elsewhere, although they could produce evidences for its existence in places far remote from that city. But subsequent research has rather modified the position, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Westcott and Hort found the keystone of their theory in what was, after all, an unproved fact, namely, that the original, text of the New Testament had remained pure- longest at Alexandria. As one looks back, one may wonder why the fact that traces of another type of text were to be found emana-* ting from Alexandria did not help to alter their decision. These they fully recognised, but, as an explanation, maintained that they belonged to the same family, and were only changes made in the language on the part of those seeking purity of diction. Still, they were sufficiently aware of their differences to group them together, and to give them distinct name of their o«n (Alexandraian text). But scholars to-day are not prepared to assign the great weight to the Neutral Text that .Westcott and Hort demanded for it. Earthquakes are not the peculiar property of New Zealand. It has not been a severe one, but there has been something of an earthquake in New Testament country. We have already seen that in cer-

tain quarters Westcott and Hort’s position was almost universally, adopted. The influence of their Work has been enormous. Their text largely influenced the revisers of our English Bible, and, although the revisers did not go as far as Westcott and Hort, those who use the Revised English New Testament to-day have in many instances in front of them the findings of those'two great scholars. Many of those who have been nurtured on the Greek New Testament have had Westcott and Hort’s Greek Text as the centre of their studies. To give an example, it is the text the writer has used with his students during the sixteen years he has been in his present position. ■ But fresh and important discoveries since those days, and the work of many scholars upon old material, has made necassary a of Hort’s position. To use a metaphor: The spire of the cathedral tower is still there, but the shake has given the stone masons some work. There are cracks appearing in the fabric of the Neutral Text. It has been shown that there is little evidence for Hort’s text outside Egypt and' Palestinian Caesarea, and in Egypt itself the support is not as strong as Hort supposed. He was wrong in° assigning the Egyptian version winch supports this type of text to the second century. Scholars to-day tell us it was a-product of the fifth. This witness is therefore now out of court. It also seems quite clear that an important Egyptian writer, Clement of Alexandria, used a Western,- and not. a Neutral text. The two main codices upon -which Westcott an<L Hort largely relied are not, as they stated, two witnesses preserving independently a very early text, but two MSS. very closely related to one another and copied from a near ancestor. A curious mistake in both of them exemplifies this. In St. Mark, IV.; 21, both have, “ought not the lamp to be put under the lampstand,” where the Greek preposition for “upon” hag given place to the preposition for “under.” It is difficult from this not to come to the conclusion that the two MSS. are very closely connected, and that both.are copied from a MS. of near date, the scribe of which had made , the mistake. They can therefore be no longer looked upon as independent witnesses. Weighing allthe evidence, scholars .have come to the conclusion that Westcott and Hort’s-Neutral text represents a recension made about 250. They maintain ithat we have. material which will enable us to get nearer the original than this. And this material they find in the Western Text.

In Westcott and Hort’s days the weak point of the Western text was the almost entire absence of support for it ■ from the Greek uncial MSS.. Codex Bezal, a sixth century MS., which has been in the Cambridge University Library since 1681, was its only representative. This is a bilingual text, with Greek and Latin facing each other oh opposite pages. The Greek is on the left hand, and. .the Latin on the right. Because to some, little extent the Greek had been adapted to the Latin text, scholars did not give to this text the weight it' deserved. But it no longer stands alone. A most important discovery early in the present century led to the purchase in Egypt by an American collector (Mr. C. L. Freer) of a MS. entirely unknown before. This MS. js certainly a fifth century.MS., and, with the exception of our two fourth century MSS., is' as old as any we have. It is a MS. of. the Gospels, and of the Western type. Its existence makes it no longer possible to overlook the claims of many Western readings not previously accepted. It has helped us to see the accuracy of the old Latin version. For instance, in parts of St. Mark it corresponds almost word for word with the important old Latin manuscript listed as e. But modern discoveries and modern scholarship have not stopped here. It has been shown that the term Western, to describe the type of text with which we are now dealing, is almost ridiculously misleading. There is to-day ample evidence that it was more widely spread in. the East than in the West. In 1892, two energetic Cambridge ladies, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, visited, the monastery of St. Catherine, on Mt. Sinai, and there found a MS. of the old Syrian Gospel Text, which subsequent study showed to be of the Western family. The situation was changing. Monasteries of the East in no uncertain way were giving their support to a text which originally had been thought mainly Western. The fact- was being established that a text which Westcott and Hort largely discounted was not only older than the one they favoured, but that its circulation was almost world-wide.

But there might be further earthquakes, so the. foundations of the new building, must be laid very deep.-Greek Testament scholars are willing to work slowly. With all this new material in front of them they might have .felt fully justified in starting to rebuild. It would not have been surprising' if they had put out their critical edition of the New Testament before the "present time, yet, like wise men, they felt it better to be perfectly... sure of .their building material. They would continue their investigation before they .incurred the very large expense that a publication such as they were planning entailed. We have already spoken of a few of the intricacies of their work. It remains to summarise the rest.

There was, and still is, much work to be. done in. tabulating the work of earlier witnesses. It does not do to leave unexplored the vast mass of MSS. belonging to the Syrian group,, for although Westcott and Hort were right in con-sio-ninw it to a comparatively late date, this text undoubtedly has behind it ancient elements. As, if we leave out Alexandria, there is a scarcity of Eastern Greek evidence. during, the second and third centuries, ..it is important to see whether some of the MSS of the. Syrian revision may not indirectly carry us back to those early .days. Again, some very exact work has been done on an old Latin fragmeilt of . the Gospels known as “k” and an endeavour has been made to arrive at the Greek text-which lies behind it. Attempts, too, have been made to define the type of text attested in the other versions. Citations have been collected from the earliest western Fathers, and valuable suggestions proffered, as to the type of text familiar to them. It is perhaps not too much to say that this patriotic study has gone a long way to undermine the view which led Hort to .prefer the neutral text.

Moreover, attention, has been paid to the papyri collections. These papyri are nearly all found in Egypt, where the dryness of the climate has helped to preserve them. The plant was once the universal writing material of the Egyptians. Much has come to be preserved, because as waste paper-it was used as wrappings for the mummies. Explorers tell: us that the rubbish heaps of Fayum and.Oxyrhynchus are full of these papyri, scraps; Many of them are much earlier than the beginning of the r "' ; ;'-s :r 1.-ahince-sheet

dealing with the finance of Egypt in the fourth century, B.C. The papyri furnish us with information on all kinds of subjects, and they have yielded their treasures to the New Testament scholar. The “Sayings of Jesus,” published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897, their “New Savinas” -in 1904, and two. boo.ks by

Dr. Taylor, dealing with the Oxyrhynchus “Sayings of Jesus,” published in 1905, made students realise that fresh help was coming to them from unexpected quarters. The waste paper baskets of ancient Egypt are actually helping us <£o-day in our attempt to get as near as possible -to the original text

of the Greek New Testament. The tremors have subsided, the material for the new building has all been gathered; the builders are even now at work; and Oxford University is on the eve of giving one of the most valuable contributions she has ever given to the world. ; - - . <■..