02 Chapter II The Transmission of the Bible

Chapter II The Transmission of the Bible letters Paul wrote have all vanished. We have none of the autographs, the originals, of the books of the Bible. The exact transcript as it came from the author’s pen has disappeared. It is generally believed now that these originals vanished fairly soon after they were written. The New Testament books probably had a shorter life than those of the Jewish Scriptures, for they were most probably written on perishable papyrus, while the books of the Old Covenant may have been written on skins a much more durable material. In the loss of the original manuscripts, the Bible is on a par with most of the literary works of antiquity; for very few of them have survived except in copies. To determine the exact content of the books of the Bible, therefore, we study copies most of them copies of copies of copies.

It is only since the invention of the printing press, about the middle of the fifteenth century, that It has been easy to determine the original content of a book. The printing press first made it possible to have thousands of copies of a book all exactly alike. Before its invention no two copies of a book were ever exactly alike. Man has never attained the accuracy of the machine, and his laborious production of books in the ante-printing-press age was slow and inevitably erroneous.

If a book was first written before the fifteenth century, therefore, its original content can be determined only from a study of handwritten copies, or manuscripts. The contents of the so-called “classical literature” the writings of ancient Greece and Rome were determined in this fashion; and the contents of the Bible are determined in the same way. This study of ancient documents in an attempt to overcome the errors of copyists and editors and establish the exact wording of the original is a basic discipline in the study of any ancient literature. It is called “textual criticism” and is often classed with the more in- offensive areas of biblical study as “lower criticism.” It is lower criticism in the sense that the foundation of a skyscraper is lower than the rest of the building which rests upon it. Its technical name, “textual criticism,” is often misleading to the devout student who thinks of texts only as points of departure for the Sunday morning sermon. “Text” is used here in the sense of content. Textual criticism is interested in reconstructing the long history of the transmission of that content from its origins to our day so that the original content, or text, may be accurately restored.

It has already been suggested that the study of textual criticism faces the student of any ancient literature. Students who specialize in English literature learn its techniques to establish an accurate text of Chaucer’s poems; students of Cicero, Caesar, Homer, and Vergil are forced to use either the methods or the results of textual criticism. Its devotees are the pioneers who blaze the trail for learning to travel back through the centuries to the actual words written centuries ago by gifted and inspired men. Np matter what book may be the object of this study, the methods and techniques employed are the same. There may be particular tools of language or paleography needed in one case and not in another; but, in general, the methods are the same. Textual criticism of the Bible is not a thing apart. In a university seminar which attempts to establish the original wording of Chaucer’s poems, F. J. A. Hort’s exposition of the methods employed in textual criticism of the New Testament is required reading. THE MATERIALS OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM This study covers an area which is easily and naturally divided under the headings f Materials” and “Methods.” The materials are ultimately manuscripts physical, objective materials. The solidity of manuscripts and the routine nature of the elementary work in textual criticism have misled many beginners into the belief that all its methods are objective and that it is an exact science. Yet, like most other areas in the humanities, it is at some points subjective. The manuscripts are objective enough, but the methods by which they are studied and their evidence interpreted cannot be 100percentobjective. a] MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE The manuscripts studied in the textual criticism of the Bible are of three sorts: (i) manuscripts in the language of the original, (2) manuscripts of translations, and (3) manuscripts of quotations. The study of these materials is more difficult when a thousand years intervene between the date of writing the original and the date of our copies; it is less difficult when the gap is narrower. In the Greek classics the gap stretches approximately a thousand years wide; in the Latin, it is much narrower, although about three centuries separate the most favored of the Latins Vergil from the extant manuscripts of his works. In the case of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, the interval is sometimes as much as seventeen hundred years; in the New Testament, it is sometimes as little as one hundred and fifty years. But the student should not rashly conclude that the New Testament text is inevitably ten times as accurate as the text of the Old Testament. The study of the text in the last fifty years has shown that the earliest period was the most fruitful in the creation of variant readings. The last thousand years can be retraced easier than the hundred that immediately followed the writing of a book. It is unlikely that any manuscript discoveries will ever carry us all the way back to the original; the most arduous part of the task of textual criticism must, therefore, be achieved with the help of translations and quotations and the use of theory theory as sound as the careful study of all the materials can evolve. b] TRANSLATIONS

Among the materials employed in this study, the manuscripts of translations of the Bible play an important part. This is especially the case in the Old Testament area where early translations compensate somewhat for the lack of early Hebrew manuscripts. The Pentateuch was translated into Greek in Alexandria soon after 250 B.C. The Palestinian Old Testament was translated into Syriac about A.D. aoo. The Old Testament was translated into Latin before the great scholar Jerome in the latter half of the fourth century began the making of the Latin Vulgate.

Such early witnesses might confidently be regarded as satisfactory substitutes for the missing Hebrew manuscripts of these periods. But we do not possess the original manuscripts of the Greek Old Testament, or of the Syriac Old Testament, or of the Old Latin Old Testament. We have no more than fragments of the Old Latin; the oldest manuscript of any large part of the Greek Pentateuch is about five centuries later than the making of the translation; no Syriac manuscript of the Old Testament comes closer than two and a half centuries to the date given above for the making of that version. In other words, the work of establishing the original content of these versions must be carried out before the use of these versions in establishing the original content of the Hebrew Old Testament is possible.

Even if we possessed the original content of the various versions of the Bible which for the most part we do not the difficulty of using them in textual criticism could hardly be overestimated. Their use requires some mastery of language as well as of languages. The student must be keenly aware of what is involved in the making of a translation. He must retranslate the translation into the original language in the manner of the original translators before the evidence of the version is available.

C) QUOTATIONS

Valuable assistance in the location of varying forms of the text is given by the quotations from the Bible found in rabbinical writings, in the writings of the Church Fathers, in commentaries, etc. The valuable feature of this type of evidence is that it can usually be dated with some accuracy and located geographically with some definiteness.

Yet these values cannot be obtained without effort.

We, unfortunately, do not possess the original manuscript of the writings of the rabbis and the Fathers. Critical editions (i.e, attempts to reconstruct the original content) of the Christian Fathers are steadily and systematically being prepared; valuable work is in process on rabbinical literature. But it is not yet possible to use the writings of all the early believers who quoted the Bible, with complete confidence as to the accuracy of the printed text on which you rely.

Even when you have a critical text, your task has only begun.* Quotations from the Scriptures were often harmonized to contemporary standards by scribes when the rest of the text was left in its primitive form. Moreover, the value of the specific quotation for textual criticism depends to some extent upon the author’s general practice in quotation. If he usually quotes in paraphrastic fashion, then the quotations from the Scripture must be studied with this in mind. If he edits as he quotes, unusual items in his quotations can be ascribed to the Scriptures only when they are supported elsewhere. The nearer the quotations are in time to the original, the greater is their value. But, as we have already noticed, it is exactly in the earliest period that the biblical text is quoted with the greatest freedom. The first great scholar of the Christian church was Clement of Alexandria, who taught in a Christian school in that city toward the end of the second century A.D. He quotes Matthew 21:9 {Instructor \. 5) as follows “Plucking branches of olives or palms, the children went forth to meet the Lord, and cried, saying, ’Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ “ This is unusual in that it introduces “the children” as the ones who went out to meet Jesus. None of our biblical manuscripts (all later than Clement) mentions the children in this scene at all, although their presence inside the temple is commented on in a later section (Matthew 15:1). Should we change the manuscripts on the basis of Clement’s quotation?

These “children” are found everywhere in later Christianity. We meet them in an apocryphal gospel of the fourth century. In the earliest picture of the Triumphal Entry (fifth to sixth century), they are prominent characters; and they are frequently encountered in picture, song, and story of medieval and modern Christendom. Did Clement introduce them to this role in the triumphal scene, or did he find them in the text of the early manuscript of Matthew he read? Several details indicate that Clement is responsible for the presence of the children here. In the first place, he is engaged in an argument in which it is important for him to find the Scriptures referring to Christians as “children.” In the second place, he does not make a practice of exact quotation. In the third place, in the immediate context he quotes Matthew 25:33 as saying, “Let my lambs stand on my right!” although all other sources read “sheep.” Yet the whole point of the passage for Clement is the use of “lambs.” The change of “sheep” to “lambs” in this second passage supports the judgment that Clement changed “the crowds” to “the children” in the Triumphal Entry story. He accomplished this by transferring the children from the temple to the road outside Jerusalem. Therefore, his quotation is not of much value in any attempt to reconstruct the original form of Matthew 21:9.

UNINTENTIONAL CHANGES In the lives of manuscripts, as of people, the first hundred years are the hardest. We have already seen that the various books which make up our Bible today were not accepted as Bible the moment they were written. The safeguards which sanctity throws around the content of a Bible were not applied to our books until they were at least a hundred years old. To some extent in the case of the Old Testament, to a large extent in the New Testament, the cult itself lacked the organization, the trained individuals, and the interest necessary to preserve the exact wording of the documents. The New Testament is one of triplets: It was born at the same time as dogma and hierarchy. It would be more accurate to say that the doctrine of the importance of the letter of Scripture evolved with the Scripture and with the ecclesiastical organization capable of applying it to the careful preservation of the sacred text. In Old Testament as in New Testament the earliest period of copying was one in which many careless errors of a scribal nature crept into the text. This is partly due to the fact that in this period the writings were not yet canonized. But in part it was due to the lack of educated and trained scribes in the service of the cult. The Hebrews were not a literary people; the early Christians came from the lower classes. The general message of a book was much more important than exactness in matters of detail. The proof of this generalization can be ’seen in the wealth of variation in Old Testament text down to A.D. 200 as contrasted with its stereotyped nature since that date. It can be seen also in the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The Beatty manuscript of Paul’s letters (the oldest manuscript of Paul, written ca. A.D. 200), which has been published in the last few years, abounds in. careless errors. Some of these are omissions; e.g, in Romans 12:8, the words “he that shows mercy, with cheerfulness” are omitted because of the similarity between the end of this phrase and the preceding phrases. The scribe’s eye passed from one ending to the other, and a line was omitted by error. Another example of this very common error can be drawn from the fourth century Greek Bible in the Vatican library. In John 17:15, most manuscripts read:

... I do not ask that you should take them from the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. But the scribe of the Vatican codex skipped from “that” to “that” and wrote:

... I do not ask that you should keep them from the evil. In similar fashion, in both Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, letters, syllables, phrases, clauses, and sentences were omitted. Letters and words were misread. Sometimes a slip of the pen created a new reading. Very common are the errors of hearing the confusion of. two words pronounced alike. These “ear spellings” occurred not only when the manuscript was written from dictation but also when a single scribe was copying directly from the page of the exemplar. Again, if a scribe detected the omission of a word or phrase after the next word or two was written, he often inserted the omitted element at once, thus creating a variation in word order. From all of these causes, unintentional variations entered the textual tradition in large numbers. The synagogue far surpassed the church in the efficiency of the controls it devised and employed to preserve the content of the sacred books unchanged. From early in the Christian era down to the invention of printing, the Hebrew text varied but slightly from manuscript to manuscript. It must be understood that this is a relative judgment. Some idea of the amount of variation can be gained from the following figures. In I Chronicles, chapter n, one manuscript has twenty-two variations from the printed text, another has seventeen, a third has eighteen, and a fourth, twenty-eight; the majority of these are scribal errors. The manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and the Latin Vulgate present many more variations in a comparable space and have a much higher proportion of significant variations.

It is possible to explain the success of the synagogue and the failure of the church by referring to the meticulous checking of the total number of words in the Hebrew books and to other similar precautions. But these are secondary phenomena. Why was the Christian church, both Greek and Latin, less interested in the accurate preservation of every letter of Scripture than the synagogue was? The answer must lie in the highly centralized authority of the Bible in Judaism; Torah monopolized religious authority. It had no such rivals in Judaism as the Christian Bible found in hierarchy and creed. Judaism had no Roman pope, no ecumenical patriarch, no Nicene Creed, no such councils as those of Carthage and Chalcedon. The very force that modernized the Jewish Bible rabbinical interpretation went back (at least formally) to Torah for its base of operations. Interpreters found the various minute elements of the text of great significance and, therefore, the more deserving of accurate transmission. In the Christian church, on the contrary, the clergy and the increasing body of Christian dogma shared the position of authority with the Bible; with the result that the exact wording of Scripture was never as important or as carefully preserved here as it was in Judaism. The scribal errors mentioned above as characteristic of the earliest period were committed (in slightly less frequency) throughout the Middle Ages in the Greek and Latin manuscripts. In the Greek tradition, the last three centuries before the printing press were almost as bad as- the first three, and the Latin Vulgate reached the press in an unfortunately corrupt form. Especially in these areas, the student of textual criticism is faced with the task of setting up a method or methods to overcome scribal mistakes., STANDARD EDITIONS The carefree attitude toward Scripture which existed in the earliest period of Christian history and in the religion of Israel in the pre-Christian period was followed by attempts to control and purify the text. This often led to the publishing of standard texts, revised texts, etc, in the manuscript period. These standard editions were prepared from the highest motives; their makers sought to remove corruptions from the text and to prevent further deterioration by establishing a standard that could be carefully preserved. The development of ecclesiastical organization, the increased efficiency of the controls used by the cult, the growth of culture especially book culture as the result of the impact of Hellenistic civilization on Christianity all these supported the creation of purified and standard texts. The number of such texts is large. In Syriac the early fifth century saw the Peshitta Version completed. The fourth century saw the making of the Latin Vulgate. As early as the second century, the Massoretic Hebrew text had been standardized. By the time of Chrysostom, the Greek text of the New Testament had been edited in at least two standard editions: one in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in Syrian Antioch. In so far as these ecclesiastical texts checked the rate of corruption, they made a positive contribution to the history of the text. Nor can it be doubted that corruption proceeded more slowly under their repressive influence than it had in the uncontrolled period that preceded. Yet, in two ways, the making of these “revisions” makes the task of the student of the text more difficult today. In the first place, every revision tends to displace the unrevised earlier text. Second editions replace first editions; hence the scarcity of first editions. Very often the makers or champions of the revised edition actively attacked the earlier forms of the text, destroying earlier manuscripts wherever they could find them. Thus the champions of the standard Syriac text of the Gospels destroyed manuscripts of the earlier Syriac Gospel harmony with such enthusiasm that not a single manuscript survived in the Syriac language. The champions of the Massoretic Hebrew text are at least partly responsible for the disappearance of all pre-Massoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. The difficulty caused by the lack of early manuscripts springs in part from the making of these standard versions of antiquity. The appearance of these standard versions complicates the history of the text. In only one case, that of the Hebrew text, did the standard text dominate the ensuing tradition universally and continuously. In the Greek, Syriac, Egyptian, and Latin Bibles, the success of the revision was only partial. Not all older manuscripts were destroyed; some were corrected. And correction was never 100percentcomplete. The result is the creation of mixed texts the curse of the manuscript student. One manuscript was corrected in some variants; another in a different set of readings. As additional manuscripts of different types were corrected to standards of varying degrees of mixture, the confusion became worse confounded. This mixture of revised with prerevised texts makes it very difficult to establish the text of the revision. The possession of the text of the revision is, however, an almost indispensable tool for the task of getting back of the revision to the primitive text.

One of the most scholarly, dramatic, and disastrous of these ancient revisions was Origen’s (|A.D. 254) revision of that Greek translation of the Old Testament which is called the Septuagint. His edition is called the Hexapla and was carried out on the grand scale. Part of his purpose was to show the relation between the Hebrew text and that of the various Greek translations. He, therefore, published his work in six columns of parallel material. At the left was the Hebrew text; next, a transliteration of the Hebrew in Greek letters; then, four Greek translations, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion. This magnificent production had an unfortunate influence on the text of the Septuagint. To begin with, the Hebrew column established the order of the contents; the Septuagint material was transposed to parallel the Hebrew. Moreover, Origen added to the Septuagint any material which it lacked that the Hebrew of his day contained. He usually marked this additional material by prefixing an asterisk; and, in some cases where the Greek manuscripts differed, he chose the reading that was closest to the Hebrew, without indicating the existence of the variants. Since these manuscripts had undoubtedly suffered some corruption from the influence of the Hebrew before Origen’s day, the result was that he frequently preferred the worse reading. The ultimate catastrophe was that the bulk of his work prevented its mass production; hence the Septuagint column was copied out alone, in many cases without much effort to reproduce the asterisks and other diacritical marks. Thus the great difficulty in the study of the Septuagint text is to get back of Origen’s Hexapla, His work, like a seven-barred gate, stands across the path that criticism must follow. The exultation with which the recent discovery of a pre-Hexaplaric manuscript was received is a by-product of the pernicious results of Origen’s attempt to improve the text.

INTENTIONAL CHANGES In the making of the standard versions, we have already seen the deliberate introduction of changes in the biblical text. While it is to be remembered that these changes were always made with the best intentions as “corrections” or “restorations” it must not be forgotten that the resultant text was often inferior to the unrevised text. Many an individual scribe, also, deliberately changed the text so as to correct its “errors.”

Some of these changes were stylistic and grammatical. The New Testament, for example, was written in the conversational Greek of the common people. Under the pressure imposed by the growth of culture in the church (a culture that insisted on Attic Greek as the one pure dialect), scribes changed the forms of the common speech into agreement with Attic usage. Sentence structure was sometimes changed by the scribes’ feeling for style. Mark 4:24 reads, “Take heed what you hear: with what measure you measure, it shall be measured to you “ In several manuscripts this is improved to, “Take heed what you hear, for with what measure you measure...”

Some of these changes were intended to make the parallel accounts of the same incident agree in details. There are four accounts of Jesus’ baptism. In the Johannine account the distinctive item is the assertion that the Spirit abode upon Jesus after the baptism (John 1:31, John 1:33). In many manuscripts the words “and abode upon him” are added to the accounts of the baptism in the first three gospels. In some instances the scribes carefully corrected quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament so that the New Testament would agree with the Old Testament. The older sources of Mark 1:2 refer to “Isaiah the prophet” and precede to quote from Malachi the prophet and then from Isaiah. Later manuscripts change “Isaiah the prophet” to “the prophets,” thus making the reference to the Old Testament more accurate.

Occasionally, the Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament were edited to make them conform more explicitly to Christian faith. The ninety-fifth Psalm (ninety-six in the Septuagint) was identified as a messianic Psalm, probably because of the reference to the Lord (God) coming in judgment. The tenth verse of this Psalm reads, “Say among the nations, the Lord reigns.” Some enthusiastic Christian scribes have made this a reference to the crucifixion by adding the words “from the tree” (i.e, the cross) after the verb “reigns.” Not only was book harmonized with book, but the Scriptures were harmonized also with liturgical practice. In the Greek church, on the fourth evening of Lent, Matthew 7:7 was read after Mark 11:26. The same combination of passages was read quite frequently on saints’ days, especially on December 9. As a result of this, some manuscripts of the Gospels follow Mark 11:26 with Matthew 7:7. The same natural influence of liturgy upon the text can be seen in the addition of the doxology to the Lord’s Prayer.

Some intentional changes were purely explanatory in character, intended to clear up obscurities in the text. They were written on the margin of the manuscript or between the lines; from these positions some of them crept into the text itself. They usually are brief additions. A larger number of changes were of a dogmatic nature. Where the scribe found the sacred text saying something unworthy of deity, he knew it was wrong and preceded to correct it as well as he could. The development of paraphrases for the divine name in the Old Testament, the avoidance of anthropomorphisms in the versions of the Old Testament, etc, are all examples of this. The Old Testament scribes had the term Tiqqune sopherim for their deliberate changes made in the interest of dogma or decency. An interesting example is Habakkuk 1:12, where “you do not die,” said to God was changed to “we shall not die.” The original form of the verse was, “Are you not from everlasting, O Yahweh, my God? My Holy One, you do not die.” Another example is the change in Genesis 18:22 from “The Lord was yet standing before Abraham” to “Abraham was yet standing before the Lord.” Similar deliberate changes were made by the scribes who copied the New Testament. Mark 13:22 reads, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Several New Testament manuscripts omit the words “neither the Son” because of the implication of limitation of Jesus’ knowledge. Not only theological doctrines but also social feeling affected the text. This was especially true in the earliest period when the transmission was least controlled. Early Christianity became anti-Semitic before it was one hundred years old, and the word “anti-Semitic” is used here to mean dominated by prejudice and passion in general attitudes toward the Jews. In a manuscript of the Old Syriac version, called the Curetonian manuscript, a striking change is made in Matthew 1:21 because of this anti-Semitic bias. Most manuscripts read, “You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people...” but this manuscript changes “his people” to “the world,” thereby removing one Jewish element from the gospel. I have called attention elsewhere to the thoroughness with which the author of the Fourth Gospel has read Jesus out of Judaism. The early Christian believers were sensitive to -the charge that Jesus was a criminal because he had been executed by Roman authority in the most shameful manner possible. They did everything they could to reduce the reproach of the cross. Luke 23:32 says, “There were also two others, malefactors, led with him to be executed.” Nothing but the final’s on “others” and the commas save the reader of the English version from assuming that this implies that Jesus was a malefactor. The possibility of reading the passage this way in the ancient languages was even stronger. The vast mass of our earliest New Testament manuscript text was written without commas, thus the risk of reading that Jesus was a malefactor was much greater. Some Old Latin manuscripts and the Sinai tic Syriac manuscript omit the word “other” or “others,” thus removing all implication that Jesus was a criminal. The Fourth Gospel achieves the same result by retaining “others” and omitting “malefactors.”

METHODS

How is the student of the text to get back to the original content of the Bible in spite of the intentional and unintentional changes made during the centuries of its transmission? Many methods have been suggested, but none is self-sufficient. Only when the shortcomings of the various techniques are realized, can their virtues be combined with reasonable success.

There are several 100percentobjective methods, and they are all worthless. One is to count the number of manuscripts supporting one reading and the number supporting the rival reading and then to accept the reading supported by the larger number of manuscripts. There is one drawback to the adoption of this method. As with people so with manuscripts those with the worst character often have the most children. One thousand descendants of a very carelessly written manuscript do not outweigh ten descendants of a carefully written manuscript. In the last fifty years this method has been repudiated by the world of scholarship. The statement that “most manuscripts” read “so-and-so” is not decisive.

Equally objective but even less defensible is the choice of the oldest manuscript as representing the original text. It would be possible to publish a Bible whose content was determined solely on the basis of date; that is, the reading with the most ancient attestation would be chosen. This is never seriously considered by scholarship but is occasionally attempted by those who have gulped down one hasty mouthful of manuscript lore. Its repudiation by the authorities in this field rises from their recognition of two facts: (i) the period of wildest variation was the earliest period and (a) no one manuscript (not even the oldest) is entirely correct. The antiquity of a reading is not in itself a decisive criterion of authenticity. A much more popular and significant method is called the genealogical method from its attempt to trace the ancestry of manuscripts. If -manuscripts were all related to one another in the pattern son father-grandfather-great grandfather, etc, it would be a simple matter to establish a family tree for each late manuscript and then group the families into clans and tribes and nations, to identify the “father” of each nation, and finally to find the parent of these fathers in the original manuscript. Theoretically, this is accomplished by the genealogical method as applied to manuscripts. But, actually, the method has not been applied to biblical manuscripts as manuscripts. The reasons for this are manifold. In the Old Testament there are so few manuscripts of any antiquity that the family tree could be held together only by the most extensive use of all the devices of tree surgery. In the New Testament there are so many manuscripts that the tree would have to be taller than the sequoias with a tangle of branches suggesting a cross between the banyan and the crab apple. A beginning has been made by the identification of a few families (with six to twenty members) and their tentative grouping in larger units; but the real work on a genealogical scheme of New Testament manuscripts is still to be done.

More serious obstacles to the employment of the genealogical method exist in the complex nature of relationships between manuscripts. The mixture of texts that results from “correction” has already been mentioned. When part of the readings throughout one manuscript come from one ancestor and part from a very different ancestor, and when this is the case with scores and hundreds of manuscripts, the complexity of a chart that would represent ancestry is bewildering and intimidating. Another type- of mixture springs from the use of two or more manuscripts in sequence in the making of a manuscript. Matthew may have been copied from one source, Mark from another, Luke from a third, and John from a fourth thus one manuscript of the Four Gospels would have four fathers. Nor would four fathers be an extravagant number, especially in the early period and (in the New Testament area) the latest period. The early and famous Washington manuscript of the Gospels not only has different ancestors in different Gospels but also switches parents within the Gospel of Mark. The Four Gospels of Karahissar from the late thirteenth century is descended from eight different “fathers,” and in at least two sections the text was corrected by still other types.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the genealogical method is more often applied to variants than to manuscripts. This use will be discussed below, but it should be noted here that this method has also rendered valuable service in the study of the broad general areas of manuscript study. Here it has served to take certain main groups of manuscripts back to the later edge of the primitive period. This has been done only in a broad, loose, general fashion; and the genealogical method alone will never carry us over the deep chasm of the primitive period.

Another valuable method is the internal criticism of readings. Down through the generations of careful study. of manuscripts, scholars have set forth longer and shorter lists of “canons” or rules to guide the student in that choice between alternative readings which is the central task of textual criticism. Some of these sound paradoxical, and most of them have little practical value. Two of the most famous are “the more difficult reading is to be preferred” and “the shorter reading is the older.” The first springs from the assumption that a scribe would never intentionally make a reading more difficult. But what of unintentional change? And would readings that seem difficult to us always seem difficult to all the scribes who have worked on the text? If this rule were followed rigorously in all cases, the original text would approach unintelligibility. The second rule ignores the common tendency of scribes to omit either intentionally (in times of revision or in the primitive period) or unintentionally. Suppose the student must choose between two readings one long and one short, and the long one is the more difficult. He must either find additional rules or fall back on his own judgment of the relative value of these rules.

Additional rules can be found in the combination of genealogical method with study of variants. All the variations in one passage are assembled,- the student then chooses that one which best explains all the others. In other words, he constructs a family tree of variants. In Mark 1:12-13 some manuscripts read, “And immediately the Spirit drove him out into the desert. And he was in the desert forty days. ...” Others read, “... into the desert. And he was there forty days “ Still others read, “-... into the desert. And he was there in the desert forty days “ Obviously, the third is the child of the first and the second. The choice between the other two, so far as this rule is concerned, then depends on a judgment as to whether “into the desert. And he was in the desert...” would be changed to “into the desert. And he was there...” or vice versa. To assist in such difficult decisions the further rule is employed that that variant is to be chosen which best fits the context which is most at home in the author’s style, vocabulary, ideas, and purpose. These two rules are the most practical and valuable for internal study of readings. The last method is called “^QnJC^uaj__e^nenda.tion.” When the text as preserved in all the manuscripts does not make sense, it is clear that (i) we are too stupid to understand it, or (2) the author wrote nonsense, or (3) the original reading has been lost. Since we usually think too highly of ourselves and the author to accept (1) or (2), we try to restore the lost reading by conjecture. This is employed more rarely in the New Testament area than in the Old Testament for obvious reasons. The greater number and greater antiquity of New Testament manuscripts makes it less probable that many readings have been lost; this judgment is objectively supported by the large number of unintelligible passages in the Hebrew Old Testament and the small number of such passages in the Greek New Testament.

All students of the biblical text have admitted the legitimacy of conjectural emendation. Even the sacred name of Hort can be quoted in support of its application to the New Testament in moderation. In The New Testament: An American Translation, Professor Goodspeed has translated several conjectural emendations. One of the most striking is in 2 Pet. 3:19, where he accepts the suggestion of Rendel Harris that the name of Enoch has dropped from all manuscripts. The omission would be caused by the similarity of the two lines ENOK(AI) and ENOCH, which are easily confused in Greek uncial characters. The sixteenth edition of Nestle’s Greek text of the New Testament records about two hundred conjectural emendations. These are given in the critical apparatus below the text; in ninety instances they are accompanied by the name of the scholar who first suggested them; in a few cases they are marked by Nestle with the symbol used to designate readings “which, according to widespread opinion, might be original.” An example is Matthew 2:6, “And you Bethlehem, land of Judah,...” which by the addition of one letter in the Greek text reads (more sensibly), “And you Bethlehem of the land of Judah “ A striking conjectural emendation in the Old Testament is that of Professor Arnold in 1 Samuel 14:18. The Hebrew reads, “And Saul said to Ahijah, Bring hither the ark of God, for the ark of God was in that day and the children of Israel.” The Greek version reads, “... hither the Ephod; for he bore the Ephod in that day before Israel.” The conjecture is that the Hebrew was deliberately corrupted to hide the fact that there were many arks in ancient Israel, the Greek version obtaining the same result by translating “ark” as “Ephod.” If “ark” be substituted for “Ephod” in the Greek, the original sense of the passage is recovered.

Another emendation of a famous Old Testament passage is made in Isaiah 9:3, which has been read in three ways. The Massoretic Hebrew text reads (as the King James Version translates), “Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” All the rest of the verse argues against the authenticity of the negative before “increased the joy.” As a recognition of this, the Revisers read it as, “Thou hast multiplied the nation; thou hast increased their joy, etc.” This change is made possible by reading to’ as Id. But this reading has been further improved by attaching this lo’ to the preceding word, which gives the meaning, “Thou hast multiplied rejoicing; thou hast increased joy, etc.” A slight change in word division restores the clear meaning of the original. By conjectural emendation, by genealogical study of manuscripts and variants, by a careful study of each manuscript’s distinctive characteristics, by the help of versions and quotations, and by the most searching scruting of all the variant readings, the text of the Bible is established. No one method is employed to the exclusion of the others; internal and external criticism support one another’s hands. In the objective part of the task the law is accuracy; in the subjective, common sense.

ACHIEVEMENTS By the use of these methods, the corrupt form of the Greek text of the New Testament which ruled from A.D. 1516 to 1880 has been repudiated. In A.D. 1516 Erasmus rushed through the press an edition of the Greek New Testament based on a mere handful of late manuscripts, none earlier than the tenth century. Except for minor modifications, this text remained the standard Greek text of the New Testament through the middle of the nineteenth century.

It is this type of text which was translated to make the King James Version. But throughout this period the manuscript resources were being constantly enriched by discovery and study, and methods were being improved and refined. Tischendorf’s discovery of a fourth-century Greek Bible on Mount Siani dramatized the value of the new resources in effective fashion, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw the production of new editions of the Greek Testament based on hundreds of manuscripts, scores of them earlier than the earliest used by Erasmus. The Massoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament was at the same time being revised into greater accuracy, and the versions of the Old Testament have been used to make significant improvements in the English Bible. Better methods and new materials have each done their part to carry the content of our Bible back closer and closer to its original form. Where the King James Version represented the text of the Bible as it existed from the tenth to the fifteenth century, the revised versions and to a still higher degree some of the modern-speech translations go back to the Bible as it existed in the late third or early fourth century. Finality has not been attained, nor will it be attained in our lifetime. But the great wealth of second- and third-century manuscripts discovered in the last decade and the slow but constant increase in our knowledge of the significance of all the sources will make a still better text possible for our children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSMISSION

GENERAL

KENYON, FREDERIC. The Story of the Bible: A Popular Account of How It Came to Us. New York: E. P. Button, 1937. Books and Their Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

These two volumes contain much interesting manuscript lore, some of general interest, some rather technical, but all written by a master of manuscript study and textual criticism.

PRICE, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible: An Account of Manuscripts, Texts, and Versions of the Bible (gth ed.)- New York: Harper & Bros, 1934. The best elementary treatment of the transmission of the Bible Good bibliographies.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. How We Got Our Bible. New York: James Pott & Co, 1912. A good brief treatment of the process, not very penetrating in analysis.

Reprints dated later are unchanged.

ADVANCED a) MANUALS BUHL, F. Canon and Text of the Old Testament (trans, by J.

MACPHERSON). Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark, 1892. (See chap, i.)

GINSBURG, C. D. An Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible. London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897. A standard manual on the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

RAHLFS, A. Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften desAlten Testaments. Berlin: Weidmann, 1914.

Standard catalogue of Greek manuscripts of the Old Tesament.

WEIR, T. H. A Short History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament (2d ed.). London: Williams & Norgate, 1907. A brief but solid introduction to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible.

COLLOMP, P. La Critique destextes. Paris: Societe d’edition les belles lettres, 1931. On method. Valuable discussion, exposition, and criticism of contemporary scholarly positions on methods of textual criticism not limited to biblical text.

GREGORY, C. R. Textkritik desNeuen Testamentes. 3 vols. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1900-1909. This contains the standard catalogue of New Testament manuscripts, continued until 1933 in Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft by von Dobschiitz.

KENYON, FREDERIC G. Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (id ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1912. Fine introductory survey of materials and theories.

. Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek Bible (Schweich Lectures for 1932). London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Helps to bring the Handbook up to date.

. The Text of the Greek Bible. London: G. Duckworth, Not as heavy as the Handbook, more up to date.

LAGRANGE, M. J. Introduction a V etude du Nouveau Testament, Part II: Critique textuelle; Vol. II: La Critique rationelle.

Paris: J. Gabalda, 1935. A lengthy study, both historical and critical, of the theory, methods, and achievements of textual criticism of the New Testament. The discussion of the Armenian and Georgian versions written by S. Lyonnet is the only adequate and up-to-date treatment in any of the works cited in this bibliography.

LAKE, K. The Text of the New Testament (6th rev. ed. by SILVA NEW). London: Christophers, 1928. Brief, concise introduction by a master of the subject.

VAGANAY, L. An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (trans, by B. V. Miller). London: Sands & Co, 1937. Brief but valuable analysis; good bibliographies including work up to date. The history of the manuscript transmission and the discussion of method are exceptionally good. b) CRITICAL EDITIONS I. NEW TESTAMENT

WESTCOTT, B. F, AND HORT, F. J. A. The New Testament in the Original Greek, Vol. I: The Text; Vol. II: Introduction and Appendix. New York: Harper & Bros, 1882. This text has practically become the standard text of the Greek New Testament in England and, to a lesser degree, in America. The text itself has no critical apparatus, but the second volume gives a classic discussion of methods and principles of textual criticism. The lexicon by Hickie, which is often bound in with the text in Macmillan’s edition, is the worst lexicon of the Greek New Testament in use today. Student’s who buy the text volume should buy the edition without the lexicon.

EBERHARD NESTLE’S Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu critico curavit (i6th ed. by ERWIN NESTLE). Stuttgart, Priviligierte Wiirttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1936. This is the best edition for classroom use. It is less expensive than any of its rivals. It gives variant readings in a critical apparatus which is constantly revised. This edition contains the evidence of the Beatty papyri and Codex Koridethi. Cross-references are given in the margins, Old Testament sources being identified. Verse divisions are plainly indicated. Most of the equipment of the medieval Greek manuscripts is reproduced. The text is derived from those of Weiss, Tischendorf, and Hort; it is quite close to that of Westcott and Hort.

TISCHENDORF, C. Novum Testamentum Graece... editio critica octavo motor. Leipzig: Heinrich’s, 1869-72. A critical text with a good apparatus, now antiquated by the discoveries of the last half-century. The text is in general similar to that of Westcott and Hort.

VON SODEN, H. Die Schriften desNeuen Testaments in ihrer dltesten erreichbaren Textgetsalt, Vol. I. Berlin: Glaue, 190210. Vol. II: Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913. Von Soden’s theory of the history of the text has been severely criticized and generally repudiated by scholarship. As a result, his text has not been accepted for scholarly study. But his work is an invaluable introduction to the study of the medieval manuscripts of the New Testament.

LEGG, S. C. E. Novum Testamentum Graece Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.

Only the Gospel of Mark has appeared as yet. The text printed is that of Westcott and Hort; the critical apparatus claims to bring Tischendorf up to date, but it is disappointingly inaccurate and incomplete. Expensive.

EBERHARD NESTLE’S Novum Testamentum Latine (6th ed.). Stuttgart: Privilegierte Wiirttembergischen Bibelanstalt, 1935- The text printed is the official Roman Catholic text; the apparatus gives all variant readings of the Sixtine edition of A.D. 1 590 and of the edition of Wordsworth and White, etc.

WORDSWORTH, I. AND WHITE, H. I. Novum Testamentum domini nostri Jesu Christi Latine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 191 1. This is now the outstanding critical edition of the Vulgate; so far the books of the New Testament through Ephesians have been published. A manual edition without lengthy introductions and apparatus was published in 191 1 at the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

2. OLD TESTAMENT KITTEL, R. Biblia Hebraica (jd ed.). Stuttgart: Privileg.

Wiirtt. Bibelanstalt, 1929. A sound critical edition of the Hebrew Scriptures, with brief apparatus. This differs from the second edition in that it includes the Massorah parva and gives the text of the Leningrad Codex, whereas all earlier printings have reproduced the text of Jacob ben Chaim of 1525.

RAHLFS, A. Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Privileg. Wiirtt. Bibelanstalt, 1935. This appears in two forms a two-volume student edition and a onevolume deluxe edition. The text is based on the three oldest manuscripts as a primary source, but much additional evidence is given in the apparatus. This edition is cheaper, more legible, and more up to date than that of Swete.

BROOKE, A. E, AND MCLEAN, N. The Old Testament in Greek according to the Text of Codex Vaticanus. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1906. This larger Cambridge edition repeats and improves in details the text made familiar to students for the last generation in the manual edition of H. B. Swete. In this larger work, the text is supplemented by the evidence of a valuable selected apparatus, which includes all the uncials, all early versions, much important patristic evidence, and a small group of minuscules. The last fasciculus to appear contained I Esdras, EzraNehemiah (1935).

RAHLFS, A. Septuaginta. Vol. I, Genesis, Stuttgart: Privileg. Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1926; Vol. X, P salmi cum ’ Odis. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1931; Vol. IX, I Maccabaeorum liber I (ed. W. KAPPLER). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1936.

These volumes published by the Gottingen LXX Society (Genesis, Ruth, Psalms, and I Maccabees have appeared to date) are the result of the most thorough study of the text of the Septuagint. To postpone duplication of the work of the Cambridge editors, the Germans are now working through the second half of the Old Testament.

Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam Vulgatam versionem adcodicum fidem,... A. GASQUET, edita. Rome: Vatican Library, 1926.

Standard edition of Latin Vulgate of the Old Testament. H. Quentin has edited Vol. I Genesis (1926), Vol. II Exodus & Leviticus (1929), Vol. Ill Numbers & Deuteronomy (1936).

3. APOCRYPHA AND RELATED WRITINGS

TISCHENDORF, C. Evangelia apocrypha adhibitis plurimis codicibus graecis et latinis maximum partem nunc primum cohsultis atque ineditorum copia insignibus (2d ed.). Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1876.

LIPSIUS, R. A, AND BONNET, M. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha.

Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891-1903.

BIHLMEYER, K. Die apostolischen Vater^ Neubearbeitung der Funkschen Ausgabe> Vol. I. Tubingen: Mohr, 1924.

Most complete critical apparatus. Vol. II (Hermas) has not yet appeared.

GEBHARDT, O, HARNACK, A, AND ZAHN,T. Patrum apostolicorum opera (6th ed. minor). Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920. A very inexpensive Greek text.

GOODSPEED, E. J. Die altesten Apologeten. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914. A critical edition of the Greek text of the first Christian apologists through Tatian.