CNT-09 THE PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.

THE PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.

During the early persecutions of Pagan Rome, many copies of the New Testament were doubtless destroyed in obedience to the imperial decree; as in the dark ages many copies were lost through neglect, or burned through the malice of persecutors. But though these books were bitterly hated, they were also ardently loved, and hence most carefully guarded and preserved, even at the peril of life. And there have been times when the might­iest monarchs rejoiced to do honor to these sacred records, and took great interest in their preservation and circulation. About the year AD 272, or, as some say, AD 274, was bora Flavius Valerius Aurelius Con­stantine, who was the first Christian emperor of Rome. Coming to the throne AD 312 and reigning until his death, AD 337, he was the first Roman emperor who gave open countenance, toleration, and support to the Christian religion, the influence of which at that time had come to pervade the Empire.

There lies before me a “Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine,” in four books, from AD 306 to AD 337, by Eusebius Pamphili, Bishop of Caesarea. This biog­raphy of a Roman emperor—written shortly after his death, by an eminent Christian historian and preacher, who was a personal friend of Constantine, and who only survived him about three years—incidentally gives us important information concerning the esteem in which the sacred writings were then held, and the means taken to provide and preserve authentic copies of the same. In his account, Eusebius writes as follows concerning Constantine’s care for the scriptures.

“Ever careful for the welfare of the churches of God, the Emperor addressed me personally in a letter on the means of providing copies of the inspired oracles . . . His letter, which related to the providing of copies of the Scriptures for reading in the churches, was to the following purport:

“’VICTOR CONSTANTINE,
MAXIMUS AUGUSTUS,
TO EUSEBIUS:

‘“It happens, through the favoring of God our Savior, that great numbers have united themselves to the most holy church in the city which is called by my name. It seems, therefore, highly requisite, since that city is rapidly advancing in prosperity in all other respects, that the number of churches should be also increased. Do you this, therefore: receive with all readiness my determination on this behalf. I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred scriptures, the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the church, to be written on prepared parchment, in a legible manner, and in a commodious and portable form, by transcribers thor­oughly practiced in their art. The procurator of the diocese has also received instructions by letter from our Clemency to be careful to furnish all things necessary for the preparation of such copies; and it will be for you to take special care that they be completed with as little delay as possible. You have authority, also, in virtue of this letter, to use two of the public carriages for their conveyance, by which arrangement the copies, when fairly written, will most easily be forwarded for my personal inspection; and one of the deacons of your church may be entrusted with this service, who, on his arrival here, shall experience my liberality. God preserve you, beloved brother.’

“Such were the Emperor’s commands, which were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborate volumes of a threefold and fourfold form. This fact is attested by another letter, which the emperor wrote in acknowledgment.”—Eusebius, Life of Constantine, Book 4, Chapters 34-37. From this account we see that during the life of Con­stantine fifty magnificent copies of the sacred books were prepared by the command and at the expense of the Roman Emperor, for the benefit of the churches of God; the public carriages of the empire being used to convey them to the Emperor for his personal inspection. These books, prepared under the direction of the learned Eusebius, and at the expense of the Emperor, would, of course, be carefully copied from the most authentic manuscripts, and, being distributed among the different churches throughout Constantinople, the capital of his empire, would naturally be preserved with care, and re­garded as standards from which other copies would be made. And it is quite probable that some of these very copies, made by the order of Constantine, are among the ancient “uncial” manuscripts which have come down to us. Prof. Tischendorf thought it not improbable that the Sinaitic manuscript was one of the copies ordered for Con­stantine in 331, and that it was presented to the convent of Mount Sinai by its founder, the Emperor Justinian. The time of Constantine was not as distant from the time of our Saviour as the reign of the Emperor William of Germany from the time of Martin Luther. Imagine the Emperor William deluded into accepting, publishing, and circulating among all the churches of his realm, a magnificent edition of some false, fabulous, and spurious writings, giving an account of the Reformation under Luther and Melancthon, when no such things had occurred, and the accounts were utterly unreliable. Imag­ine Queen Victoria issuing her royal mandate for the production of fifty magnificent copies of a series of books like “Gulliver’s Travels,” or “Jack the Giant-Killer,” professing to relate events which occurred in the time of her predecessor, Henry VIII., but which all the public monuments and documents demonstrated to be utterly fabulous and deceptive. Imagine the President of the United States ordering the publication and distribution in all the churches of the country, for use in public worship, of a magnificent edition of a lot of utterly fabulous books, containing false accounts of the discovery of America, the settlement of Florida, the founding of Jamestown, the landing of the Pilgrims, and the origin and establishment of the United States Government; while the original jour­nals and documents of explorers and governors, together with the public records of the nation, were all at hand, ready to give the lie to everything contained in his books.

If such absurdities as these cannot be imagined, neither can it be imagined that Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, a man of no mean scholarship, ability, and eloquence, could be misled in this way into the publication of an edi­tion of the Holy Scriptures, unless those books were known to be genuine, known to be true, and susceptible of the strongest proof from the writings of historians, the unin­terrupted traditions of the people, and the public records of the Roman empire.

It will be borne in mind that after a reign of twenty-five years, Constantine died in 337; about three hundred years from the death of Christ, and less than two hun­dred and fifty years from the death of the apostle John. He was emperor of that Rome under one of whose pro­vincial governors, Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ was cruci­fied. Under Nero, one of his predecessors, Paul had been beheaded. In the Coliseum, which is still standing, hun­dreds and thousands of Christians had been thrown to the wild beasts for avowing their faith in Christ. At some eight or ten different times the sword of persecu­tion had been unsheathed by imperial decree against the defenseless Christians, who had been slaughtered by mobs, and butchered and burned by Roman emperors, whose successor Constantine was. The soft tufa, or volcanic rock, beneath the city of Rome and its environs for miles around, had been exca­vated by these hated, hunted, and persecuted Christians; and there are now in existence hundreds of miles of gal­leries, chambers, and corridors chiseled through this soft rock, where the persecuted Christians of those days fled for refuge, concealing themselves from persecution, bury­ing their own dead, and depositing the gathered frag­ments of their martyred brethren in tombs and recesses which remain to this day. De Rossi says there are about sixty of these Catacombs, and estimates the length of all the passages to be five hundred and eighty-seven geo­graphical miles. Father Marchi says they extend eight or nine hundred miles underground. They are from fifty to seventy-five feet below the surface. For about two hundred and fifty years from the time that the gospel was first preached, and Christians were first persecuted in Rome, down to the time of Constan­tine’s Decree of Toleration, AD 313, these Catacombs were the burial place of generation after generation of the Christian population of Rome. De Rossi judges that the number of bodies laid away in the Catacombs was not less than three million eight hundred and thirty-one thou­sand; while Father Marches estimate is six or seven mill­ions. Gibbon estimates the population of Rome under Theodosius at twelve hundred thousand. Zumpt places it at two millions. But the imperial city in her brightest days never boasted half as many inhabitants as there are Christians in those dark Catacombs, waiting the sounding of the resurrection trumpet. This noble army of martyrs, who had fought the fight of faith, and sealed their testi­mony with their blood—whose doctrine had revolution­ized the Roman empire, and whose bones were hidden in the Catacombs—were not unknown to Constantine, the heir of the throne of the Caesars. The inscriptions on their tombs told of their lives, their deaths, their faith, their hope, and their trust, and were as legible as the in­scriptions on the monuments of the English kings in West­minster Abbey, or on the grave-stones of the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers near Plymouth Rock. To the present day, the leading facts and doctrines of the Bible may be found inscribed upon the walls of those gloomy, subterranean sepulchers, which bear, not only the names and memorials of saints and martyrs who died in the faith and sleep in the peace of Christ, with the dates of their deaths, the memorials of their secular occupations, the palms and crowns expressive of their hopes; but also numerous pictorial representations imaging forth the great facts of divine revelation, and the common faith of the universal church.

Among these representations, which are repeated again and again, we find Adam and Eve, with the serpent and the forbidden tree; the expulsion of our first parents from Eden; representations of Noah in the ark, with the return­ing dove bearing the olive branch; pictures of Abraham offering up Isaac, of Joseph sold into Egypt, of Moses putting off the shoes from his feet, receiving the Law, and again standing with the baskets of manna beside him, or smiting the rock from which the waters burst forth; of Job in his affliction; of Jonah cast into the sea, where the fish is waiting to swallow him up, and again sitting be­neath his gourd, which the worm is preparing to devour; of Elijah ascending to heaven in the chariot of fire; of the three Hebrews in the furnace; of Daniel in the lions’ den; and of various other occurrences which indicate an intimate knowledge of scriptural facts and scenes. We also find representations of the wise men from the East adoring the Savior; of Jesus in the temple disputing with the doctors; of Christ baptized of John in the river Jor­dan; of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the seven baskets heaped with fragments standing beside the kneel­ing apostles; of the restored paralytic walking away with his bed on his back; of the Savior talking with the woman of Samaria by the well, opening the eyes of the blind, healing the woman who touched the hem of his garment, blessing the little children, raising Lazarus from the dead, riding into Jerusalem over the scattered gar­ments, and amid the waving palms, and standing to be judged in the presence of Pontius Pilate. We also see representations of the sower scattering his precious seed; the Good Shepherd leading his flock, or bearing the lost sheep upon his shoulders; of the virgins going forth to meet the bridegroom; of Peter denying his Lord; of Pilate washing his hands; and of numerous other facts and doc­trines of the gospel; while on every hand are found the symbols of a Christian faith, the anchor, the cross, the olive branch, the lamb, and the dove.

These sculptured records lie scattered through subter­ranean galleries long enough to reach from one end of Italy to the other; and Constantine and his contempora­ries could not have been ignorant of their existence. The events of Christ’s life occurred within less than three hundred years preceding the commencement of his reign. The histories which recited them, and the public records of the empire, containing the official documents, in which were inscribed, no doubt, the account of the crucifixion of Christ himself, and all the various im­perial edicts under which Christians had been persecu­ted, were within the reach of the emperor, who had himself recently professed to embrace the Christian faith, which, notwithstanding the persecutions of his ancestors and predecessors, had overrun the Roman world, perme­ated all ranks and orders of people, overthrown the idola­tries which had held sway for ages, and had come to be the acknowledged religion of the mightiest empire on the globe.

Constantine had the means of knowing whether his friend Eusebius was stating facts when in his Ecclesias­tical History (Book 2, Chapter 2) he wrote: “The fame of our Lord’s remarkable resurrection being now spread abroad, according to an ancient custom prevalent among the rul­ers of the nations to communicate novel occurrences to the emperor, that nothing might escape him, Pontius Pilate transmits to Tiberius an account of the circumstances concerning the resurrection of our Lord from the dead, the report of which had been spread throughout all Pal­estine. In this account he also intimated that he ascer­tained other miracles respecting heaven, and having now risen from the dead, he was believed to be a God by the great mass of the people. Tiberius referred the matter to the Senate, but it is said they rejected the proposition.” Constantine had the means of knowing whether Tertullian wrote truly when in his Apology to the Rulers of the Roman Empire (§ 21), he spoke of the darkness at the crucifixion and said, “You yourselves have an account of the world-portent still in your archives;” and when after recording Christ’s condemnation, death, burial, resurrec­tion and ascension, he said, “All these things did Pilate do to Christ; and, now in fact a Christian in his own con­victions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius.”

Constantine knew whether Justin Martyr spoke truly when, in his apology to the Emperor Antoninus Pius (chapter 21), he testified of Christ’s healing the sick, cast­ing out demons, cleansing the lepers, and raising the dead; and added, “And that he did these things you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate." Constantine was familiar with all these matters. The public records of Rome had not yet been destroyed by barbarian conquerors, and were at his command. He was nearly thirty years old in AD 303, when his pred­ecessor Diocletian published his imperial edict command­ing them to tear down the churches of the Christians, and burn their copies of the sacred Scriptures. He had witnessed the last expiring throes of this heathenish dragon, which sought to subvert Christianity by first murdering the men who taught it, and then by destroy­ing the writings on which it was founded. He had access to the official records of the trials of Christians, some of which are now extant, where the Roman commissioner said to the bishop Paul, “Bring forward the Scriptures of the Law;” and where inquisition was made whether any “Scriptures of your Law were burnt according to the sa­cred law.” He knew the willingness with which some Christians handed over certain “useless writings,” which satisfied the demands of the officers; and the zeal with which they gathered and guarded the sacred Scriptures which were read in their assemblies; and now he had pub­licly embraced the faith that had so long been persecuted, and had made Christianity the religion of the empire.

Under these circumstances, it appears that the Roman emperor ordered made, at the public expense, fifty splendid copies of the sacred writings which recorded the life of Christ and the beginnings of Christianity, that they might be distributed among the churches in the imperial capital, where they would be publicly read every Lord’s day. The period of Constantine was one of literature, art, refinement, eloquence, and poetry. Christianity had not been imposed upon an unquestioning and sleepy age. It had been launched upon a generation marked by men­tal activity. It had been assailed and ridiculed for centuries by the wit and wisdom of the Roman world. Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, had assaulted the Chris­tian religion, and done his best to overthrow it. Jews and Gentiles had combined to withstand and uproot the new faith; and still Christianity had held its steady course, and triumphed over its foes. The history of Rome was as well known to Constantine as the history of England is to Queen Victoria. He could not have been imposed upon by a spurious religion or spurious records thereof. It is utterly incredible that he should order the production of fifty magnificent copies of a series of legendary tales and old wives’ fables, for distribution and public weekly reading among the worshipers of Almighty God.

There were, doubtless, plenty of men living at that time, whose grandfathers might have seen men who knew every fact, and had personal acquaintance with every person mentioned in those books. And it is as impossible to suppose that such books could have been published by the emperor and palmed upon the people as genuine, au­thentic, and truthful documents unless there were suffi­cient reasons for their reception, as to suppose that the governor of Massachusetts would publish, for weekly reading in all the churches of New England, a book which related that Christopher Columbus walked across the At­lantic ocean on snow-shoes, and that Martin Luther, after being banished from Ireland for causing the potato rot, Came to America in a steamship and founded the Dutch Republic on Plymouth Rock.

Hence we are carried back, by authentic documents bear­ing the official sanction of a Roman emperor, more than 1550 years, to the times of Constantine and the Council of Nicea, at which period infidels admit that the New Testa­ment, as we now have it, existed. From that point we have only to bridge a chasm of less than 300 years, to clasp hands with the apostles, and witness the events which they described. Can we span this chasm? Most certainly.

It would not have been difficult to have preserved the autograph writings of the apostles until the times of Constantine. We have Egyptian manuscripts four thou­sand years old; but these were kept from the air and damp in that rainless climate, hermetically sealed in earthen or wooden vessels; or under mummy coverings, deposited sometimes in tombs cut ninety feet deep in the living rock, and also buried beneath the pure, dry, desert sands. But we have, also, numerous printed and written books from three to five hundred years old; and if the original writings of the apostles were preserved as long as that, we may have, today, manuscripts copied directly from them. But times of persecution are unfavorable to the preser­vation of relics, and solitary autographs are specially ex­posed to danger from corruption and forgery. The church had no central tabernacle or sacred ark like that in which the Law of Moses was preserved; but where two or three were met in Christ’s name, He was in the midst, and there his words still lived and were rehearsed. Hence the early church could not depend for the integrity of their sacred books upon some securely guarded manuscript, penned by apostolic hands, but rather upon numberless trust­worthy copies, which when a book or epistle was once re­ceived and duly authenticated, were so speedily tran­scribed, and so widely scattered, that no human power could extirpate the sacred records, and no ingenuity of malice could materially impair their integrity. But we are not entirely dependent upon the testimony of Christians to establish the facts recorded in the New Testament. Many of the facts in early Christian history are proven by the testimony of enemies as well as friends. The writings of Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, Celsus, and others, bear witness to the truth; and even within the present day new witnesses rise up to add their testimony. Amid the ruins of old Pompeii, buried by an eruption AD 79, the explorer’s spade not only discloses sculptures and records which tell of morals like those of Sodom and Gomorrah, but also taunting caricatures and inscriptions deriding a crucified God! And on the walls of one of Pompeii’s palaces, stands an unfinished sculpture of a cross! Alas for guilty Pompeii! her glory perished in a day; but after eighteen hundred years of silence her mute walls bear witness that so long ago as AD 79, the shameless votaries of lust and pleasure scoffed at a cruci­fied Redeemer as bitterly as they do today. But in addition to these we have a chain of Christian authors reaching from the days of the apostles down to the time of Constantine, who quoted, copied, defended, criticized, and commented upon the sacred Scriptures, in such a way that almost the entire New Testament is em­bodied in the writings of those ancient fathers.

Between the death of John, the last of the apostles, AD 100, and the time of the Council of Nicea, a period of about 225 years, we have the writings of Polycarp (AD 69-156), who was a disciple of the apostle John, and bishop of the church at Smyrna; of Clement, bishop of Rome from about AD 91 or 92 to 100 or 101, whom Origen identifies as Paul’s fellow-laborer (Php 4:3); of Justin Martyr, a converted philosopher (AD 105-165); of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, an eminent Christian writer, born about AD 115, and martyred about AD 190; of Theophilus, bishop of Antioch in Syria from AD 168 to 181 or 188; of Athenagoras, a converted Greek philosopher, said by some to have been the first principal of the great theological school at Alexandria (AD 161-180); of Clement of Alexandria, who presided over the same school and died about AD 220; of Origen (AD 185-254), the pupil and learned successor of Clement in the presidency of the school, and a most eloquent and vol­uminous writer; of Dionysius, a disciple of Origen, who was president of the same school AD 231, patriarch of Alexandria AD 248, and died AD 265; of Hippolytus, bishop of the Port of Rome, AD 235; of Tertullian, a presbyter at Carthage (AD 160-220), a learned and elo­quent convert from heathenism; of Cyprian (AD 200-258), bishop of Carthage, who suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Valerian; of Gregory (AD 210-270), bishop of Neocaesarea; of Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero,” a distinguished writer, and one of the most learned men of his time, who settled at Nicomedia as professor of Latin eloquence, AD 301, at the invitation of the Emperor Diocletian, became a Christian, wrote in defense of the new religion, and died about AD 325. All these, and other writers of learning, eloquence, ability, and intelli­gence, occupying high positions in society and in the church; men of extensive travel and wide and varied in­formation; men who had renounced the heathenism in which they were nurtured and accepted Christianity with all its pains—many of them for the sake of Christ enduring banishment, imprisonment, and death,—left behind them various treatises containing the records and memorials of their faith, and the truth for which they suffered the loss of all things. A large proportion of their writings have perished at the hands of persecutors and in the wreck of ages; but those that still remain, when translated into English, are suffi­cient to fill about twelve thousand octavo pages of the Ante-Nicene Library. A number of these writers, such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian, and Theophilus, wrote ably and acutely against heathenism and in defense of Christianity, some of them addressing and dedicating their writings to the persecuting Roman emperors, and defending their hunted brethren from the outrageous slanders which were made a pretext for banishing and slaughtering them. Writing thus to heathen who did not acknowledge the authority of the sacred Scriptures, of course they would have little opportunity to quote largely from the New Testament writings, though from time to time they refer to the sacred books under various titles, and often quote largely from the words of Christ; but Polycarp, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Hippolytus, and others, wrote mainly for the benefit of Christians, and throughout their works, on almost every page, quotations from the New Testa­ment are profusely scattered. Those authors quoted the same sacred books which we quote, as the rule of their faith and the guide of their conduct, appealing to these books as a standard by which to test both doctrine and practice, and regarding them as unquestionably the au­thentic writings of the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ.

These sacred writings were prized, reverenced, copied, circulated, and read, among all the Christians who were scattered throughout the known world. A hundred years after the last of the apostles died, Tertullian, in whose collected writings, still extant, are quoted eighteen hun­dred different passages from the New Testament, besides a multitude from the Old, expressly mentions “the Old Testament,” as well as “the New Testament,” containing “the Gospels” and “the Apostles” In his work, “Against Heretics,” this eminent writer says:

“If you are willing to exercise your curiosity profit­ably in the business of your salvation, visit the apos­tolic churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside in their places; in which their very authentic letters are recited, sounding forth the voice and represent­ing the countenance of every one of them. Is Achaia near you? You have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia you have Philippi and Thessalonica. If you can go to Asia you have Ephesus; but if you are near to Italy you have Rome.” The original manuscripts, carefully preserved, might have lasted hundreds of years. Of course, when perse­cutions arose, and churches were scattered, the autograph writings of the apostles would be likely to be lost or de­stroyed; or they might fade out as the years rolled on. But the books were not lost. At an early date, probably long before these originals had passed from existence, the New Testament was translated into both the Syriac and Latin tongues, and both of these versions still exist, and have been retranslated into English.

Besides, multitudes of copies of the New Testament books were made and circulated, and publicly read to “all the holy brethren” in their weekly assemblies. 1Th 5:27. And thus the people became so familiar with them that the change of a word would have been detected instantly. Prof. Andrews Norton in his “Gen­uineness of the Gospels” (1. 50-53), estimates that before AD 200 there were not less than sixty thousand manu­script copies of the Gospels in existence. To falsify books so widely diffused would have been impossible.

Besides, the martyr Polycarp, who was cast to the lions about AD 155, after having served Christ eighty-six years, must have been, during some thirty years of his long life, acquainted with the apostle John, whose disciple he was. In his letter to the Philippians he quotes more than thirty passages from our New Testament, and he must have re­ceived these books directly from the apostle John, who wrote so large a proportion of them; and his Christian life must have dated back to within some five years of the death of the apostle Paul, who was martyred under Nero, about the year AD 65, Nero having died AD 68. In Polycarp’s time there were churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire, in which these sacred books were reg­ularly read on the first day of the week. And the apos­tolic churches received the Gospels from those who wrote them; and the Epistles were written and signed by men whom they knew. Paul wrote, “The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle, so I write.” 2Th 3:17; Col 4:18; 1Co 16:21. And as these Epistles were sent by trusty mes­sengers to churches where Paul had lived, and preached, and labored, for weeks, and months, and years, they must have been familiar with his handwriting, and could not have been imposed upon with spurious documents—especially as several of his letters were in answer to let­ters which they had addressed to him. The Epistles of Paul must certainly have been written before the death of Paul. The death of Paul occurred about AD 65,—or prior to the death of Nero, at whose command he was slain;—and hence the books of the New Testament which we have are traced back by un­broken chains of reliable evidence, until we reach their au­thors, who were the personal friends and acquaintances of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who testified of the things which they had seen; and at the peril of their lives bore witness, not to theories, dreams, or imaginations, but to facts and events which had come within their observation.

These writers testified things which they knew. The apostle John does not say, “That which we have dreamed, imagined, or guessed at, that thing do we declare unto you;” but “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life.” 1Jn 1:1. This was their testimony. They testified that they saw Christ, in his life and in his death; that they saw him after his resurrection, and felt his hands and feet, saw the nail-prints and spear wounds; and knew and testified of these things.