Original Contributions
W. H. J., Bible Treasury, 2nd Edition, Volume 1, August 1856.
(1st. Edition July, [01 1856 031])
(1) [01 1856 046]
We propose to devote a portion of our pages, to the consideration of such subjects as may help our readers in the study of the sacred volume. Very often it is found that there are expressions in the Scriptures hard to be understood, simply because we may be in ignorance of some customs and peculiarities alluded to. And the books in which these difficulties are explained, are too long and too expensive for the great mass of readers of the Bible. Or, it may be, that a man's other vocations leave him but little time to learn the languages in which the scriptures were written. And, while we may be satisfied that no part of God's will is really hard for those who are only seeking the burden of the message which declares the will; yet we have no right wilfully to neglect any part of that message. We may save well-meaning Christians from those sad displays of zealous ignorance, which occasionally bring scandal upon Christianity itself, if we give them an intelligible account of many things connected with the Bible — such as the different languages in which the Bible has been written; the distinction between the canonical and the apocryphal books; the most famous translations that have been made; the manners and customs, the history and the geography referred to; and the way in which our English Bible has reached us.
These and similar topics we shall treat in a succession of papers. We begin with "The Languages of the Bible."
It may be necessary to premise that learned men divide the whole number of languages that are, or ever have been, spoken, into several chief families. Of these by far the most important are — First, the Indo-Germanic family, including Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, and German, with nearly all European tongues. And secondly, the Shemitic, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic or Syriac.
Of this latter family, the Arabic has been the most cultivated; and, being the language in which the Koran is written, is known to Muslims all over the world.
The Hebrew, called the sacred tongue, because in it nearly all the Old Testament is written, seems to have been spoken in a comparatively small district; perhaps only in Palestine, Phoenicia, and the immediate neighbourhood. It is called Hebrew, because it was the language of the people of that name; and they appear to have been so designated, from Heber; who being the last patriarch, before the dispersion from Babel, must have possessed an authority (as speaking to an undivided people) which no succeeding patriarch could have had.
The term Hebrew language does not, however, occur in the Old Testament. There it is called the language of the Jews, as at 2 Kings 18:26, or the lip of Canaan, as at Isaiah 19:18.
Most probably this was the language of Canaan, before Abraham came into it. For we observe that his relatives on the other side of the Euphrates spoke another tongue (Gen. 31:47), and in the narrative of the intercourse between the Hebrews and the people of the land, there is no allusion to any difference of speech. Then again, the names of places in Canaan, from the very earliest times, have all a meaning in Hebrew but not in any other language; and in the few existing records of the dialect of the idolatrous part of the land, as in the Phoenician, on coins discovered at Tyre, and Malta; and in the daughter of the Phoenician, namely the Punic or Carthaginian, preserved in a Latin comedy of Plautus (Poenulus v. 1, 2), we find a form of speech identical with the Hebrew. And lastly, indigenous to a country place like Palestine, the same word is used to denote both Sea and West.
In this language, the whole of the Old Testament is written, with the exception of parts of the Books of Ezra and Daniel. And it is remarked how little change the language underwent during the thousand years over which the composition of the book extended. This is due to the natural inflexibility of the language itself; the isolation of the people from the rest of the world; the influence of the Pentateuch in fixing it; and the general belief in its sacredness. For these reasons, the language of Moses is substantially the same as that of Malachi, in spite of some antique phrases in the former, and the gradually increasing admixture of Syrian with all the writers that succeeded Isaiah
The Hebrew died out, as a spoken language, at, or soon after the Babylonish captivity, and was replaced by the Syrian or Aramaic, which was the language of their conquerors, the Assyrians and Babylonians. This was the language in which Eliakim begged Rab-shakeh to speak to the people in Jerusalem, because they did not understand it, as the chiefs themselves did. It seems clear therefore that the language of Syria began to penetrate Israel after this time; and, when the Jews remained for two generations in Babylon, they must have lost, nearly, if not entirely, all recollection of their former speech. For Ezra seems to have interpreted the words of the Law to them, on their return. (Neh. 8:8) While yet from the fact of Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi, continuing to write in Hebrew, we may conclude it had not quite disappeared; as we know it had a little later at the time of Alexander's conquests.
The language that took its place was much more widely spread: it is called Syrian in the English translation of the Bible, as at 2 Kings 18:26, Dan. 2:4. But it is usual now to call it Aramaic, since Aram is the real biblical word for Syria, and seems to have designated the country North and East of the Euphrates, from which Abraham had originally emigrated, and where afterwards arose that fierce and conquering race which founded Nineveh and Babylon. It used to be called Chaldee, but erroneously; as the only place, where the tongue of the Chaldeans is mentioned, is at Dan. 1:4; and there it manifestly means a language peculiar to a priestly caste at Babylon, not to the whole people.
At the time of our Lord, this was the native language of Palestine; and occurs in our Testaments, in the words Ephphatha, Talitha Cumi, Eli Eli lama Sabacthani, etc. This was also the language of the inscription on the cross, and of St. Paul's speech as recorded at Acts 22. Although in both these instances the Hebrew is mentioned, there is no doubt that it is the modern, not the ancient, language that is meant.
In it are also written those parts of the Old Testament, which are not in Hebrew: viz. Daniel 2:4, to Daniel 7:28; and Ezra 4:8, to Ezra 6:18; and Ezra 7:12-26. Also the ancient Chaldee paraphrases on the Bible, and the Talmud. And to the present day it is the sacred language of the Nestorians and Syrian Christians; even of those on the Malabar coast of India.
The only other language that remains to be noticed, is the Greek, in which, the whole of the New Testament is written: a peculiar dialect of which prevailed in Western Asia and Egypt, in consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great. Its chief locality was Alexandria, where the first Ptolemies had transplanted most of the arts and sciences which used to flourish before in Athens. This dialect is therefore called Alexandrian Greek, and is distinguished from the language of the classics, by having engrafted on it, many Hebrew and other Oriental modes of expression; no doubt partly in consequence of the great numbers of Jews, who, from an early period, dwelt in Alexandria.
Even in Palestine, although Hebrew retained its place as the sacred language, and Syrian or Aramaic was spoken in the country parts, there is every probability that Greek was the ordinary speech of intercourse; and that it stood in the same relation to the native Aramaic, that English does to Welsh in Wales at the present day.
In this Alexandrian Greek is written the whole of the New Testament; the ancient Septuagint translation of the Old; and the works of Josephus and Philo. As it was the common language of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, it became necessarily the common language of all early Christians, who for some years were confined to that part of the world. And even when Christianity had reached Rome and the West, there is evidence that Greek (and not Latin, as might have been supposed) was, for a long time, the ecclesiastical tongue.
It is a matter of discussion whether our Lord and his Apostles spoke Greek or Aramaic; and it does not seem possible to pronounce a decided verdict on the question. It is likely enough that all the people of Palestine, except the most retired or the most ignorant, understood and used, both forms of speech. Hence the threefold inscription on the cross. In Aramaic and Greek for the people: just as public documents in Wales might be in Welsh and English:— and in Latin, because that was the official language of Pontius Pilate, and the government servants.
From the fact of some few Aramaic words of our Lord being preserved, we might conclude that he did not always speak in that tongue; and it must have been observed that when St. Paul addresses the people from the castle stairs in Hebrew (i.e. in Aramaic), they were pleased by this mark of respect to their native tongue; and had expected that he would rather speak Greek, which they understood equally well. On the other hand the question of the chief captain, "Canst thou speak Greek?" would seem to have originated the second question, "Art thou not that Egyptian?" as Greek was certainly the language of Egypt at that time; and therefore the chief captain supposed he was not an inhabitant of Palestine.
At any rate, there was certainly a distinction between Greek-speaking Jews, and others. For we notice in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 6 etc.) that some are called Hebrews and some Grecians. There is a difference of opinion as to whether the distinction consisted in the speech they used; or in the version of the Bible that they read. For while the Jews of Palestine, and eastward of that country, constantly used the original Hebrew Scriptures, only rendered into Aramaic at the very moment they were read; the Jews of Alexandria, and generally in the countries west of the Holy Land, seem not to have known the Hebrew, even in the synagogues, and to have used only the Greek Septuagint translation.
As Greek was the tongue of their Syrian oppressors in the time of the Maccabees, the Rabbis looked upon it with aversion, as being especially a profane tongue, fit only for entirely worldly business, but never to be intruded into the synagogue. This feeling was aggravated by the fact that the Jews of Alexandria — where chiefly Greek-speaking Jews abounded, — had not only a translation of the Scriptures, which they advanced almost to the same rank as the original: but even a temple of their own, which in some respects was permitted to rival the holy building in Jerusalem.
But, anyhow, Greek was the current language of the world at the time of the appearance of Christianity:— the language with which a man might travel from end to end of the Roman Empire. And there appears a special providence in the circumstance that the Gospel was sent forth at the very time when there was thus a universal language, in which to convey it. It was necessary to the free circulation of the message, that it should be written in the speech of the Empire, not in some local dialect, And the Grecians or Hellenists, though despised by the Palestine Jews, appear certainly, by means both of their more common tongue, and also of their greater enlightenment, to have been the part of Israel that most generally embraced the Gospel, and carried it into distant lands, away from its original cradle in Judaea and Galilee.
History of the Text of the Bible.
[1st. Edition July 01 1856 48]
Most of the books of the Old Testament were committed to writing before the Babylonish captivity, when we have no contemporary literature: for profane history had not properly begun. The grounds for receiving them are, however, of the very strongest possible kind. For the original delivery of them was from men to whom Jehovah Himself had given their commission. They were delivered by prophets and seers, who spoke the Lord's message, and were regarded as those whose authority might not be questioned. Their books also, we doubt not, wore held in scrupulous veneration, whenever there remained among the people a sense of the true religion.
There were, indeed, seasons, when God and His servants, and therefore their writings also, were despised and forsaken. But even then, there were faithful people who held fast to their Scriptures, and who could always restore the books, when the nation returned to its proper allegiance. The longest revolt from Jehovah was that which occurred in the reigns of Manasseh and Amon, when the nation seemed to have quite given up His service. Yet when Josiah commenced a great reform, and search was made for copies of the sacred books; there was found in the recesses of the temple, an authentic copy of the law, whose injunctions the king immediately proceeded to obey.
At the return from Babylon, a new era commences. Ezra, assisted by competent scribes, undertook the task of placing the sacred writings upon so sure a footing, that there should be no room for any loss hereafter. Situated as he was, there were ample means at hand, for securing correct copies of the several books, and of forming them into a canon, or authorised volume. The prophets who lived at that time — Zechariah and Haggai — and who received their messages direct from Jehovah, were quite sufficient to establish the authority he required.
We have moreover, to remember that there is no absolute necessity for our investigating the condition of the text of the Old Testament, before the time of our Lord and His apostles. After all, we have only to arrive at a knowledge of what the text was in the days of the first promulgation of Christianity. For we have their, and especially His, infallible mark of approbation fixed on the Scriptures as then existing; and it is clear that no possible evidence could be stronger.
Now we arrive at a knowledge of that text, through several separate and independent channels. In addition to the original Scriptures themselves, in the Hebrew; we have many very ancient translations, some made before the time of Christ; and these reach us quite independently of the original text; so that in any point where they all concur, we have, it is plain, a proof of the most convincing nature, that we have the text, as it existed, before the separation of these several witnesses. And where they differ, as they do in unimportant respects, we have all the more reason for being persuaded of their value. We are quite sure that there has been no collusion or deceit. Joined to this evidence, we have also that which is furnished by these books being quoted in ancient writers. They supply us with an additional testimony to the words which they have used. Thus we know that the Old Testament is very frequently quoted in the New. We receive the New Testament through altogether a different source from that whereby the Old comes to us; and we therefore feel sure that if the christian books report Moses or Isaiah to have said such and such words; and we find the books of Moses and Isaiah, which have been in possession of the Jews, (the avowed enemies of christianity), saying the same words, we have no hesitation in perceiving that we could have no better proof of the fact that those words were actually used.
We leave for the present these sources of evidence, and confine ourselves to a consideration of the Hebrew text itself, which has come down to us, almost entirely from the Jews.
We spoke, in our last article, of the division of Jews into two great classes:— the Hebrews, who spoke or used Aramaic; and the Grecians who spoke and used Greek. The latter seem to have disappeared soon after the publication of christianity. Those who were not absorbed into the church, gave up all their differences with other Jews, and were in no way distinguished from them. There were two centres about which they chiefly congregated. The one was at Tiberias in Galilee, within the Roman Empire; the other at Babylon, without it. At each of these places, schools of theology and literature flourished for many generations. From Tiberias there issued the Mishna, or second law; being in fact those very traditions, reduced to writing, against which our Lord had inveighed. This Mishna being regarded as itself a book to be reverenced; the doctors of Tiberias by degrees collected many notes and comments upon it, which form what is called the Gemara, i.e., supplement. And the Mishna and this gemara together, make up the first talmud (or doctrine) called the Jerusalem talmud, which was completed about the year A.D., 300.
About this time the school at Tiberias was losing its importance, and in its place rose up that of Babylon, where other and far more voluminous comments, making another gemara, were added to the mishna of Tiberias. And these make up the second or Babylon talmud — always meant, when the talmud only is mentioned — which was finished about the year A.D. 500.
Now in both these talmuds, written in Aramaic, there are a vast number of quotations from the Bible, which learned men have, with great labour, collected and compared with the Bible itself. They find the discrepancies quite unimportant.
When the Arabs conquered those parts of the world where these learned Jews were chiefly settled, and when the earlier Caliphs in the eighth and ninth centuries patronised all kinds of learning;— a great impulse was given to the cultivation of the Hebrew language and literature, and to the critical study of the Bible. A succession of Jewish doctors then flourished in the East, who are styled the Masoretes, because their collection of writings is called the masorah or tradition. They directed their attention almost exclusively to the text of the Bible, selecting the best manuscripts, and rejecting what was corrupt. The scrupulous care they took may be judged from the fact that they have counted the number of words, and the number of letters in the Bible or in any particular parts. They have left on record what is the middle word, or the middle letter of the entire book; how many words begin with a particular letter, and many other minute labours of the same kind, trifling indeed, but still showing most remarkably how careful they were of even words and letters.
When the Turks overpowered Western Asia in the eleventh century, they commenced a systematic persecution against the Jews, broke up their schools, and killed or banished their leaders. The doctors fled chiefly into Spain, where there was still a Caliph at Cordova: and to the adjoining provinces in the South of France. Here Aben-Ezra, Maimonides, Kimchi, and others, preserved the learning of the Eastern Jews. But, when the fierce persecution of Ferdinand and Isabella, in the fifteenth century, drove all the Jews out of Spain, they carried with them, into more favourable countries, the valuable treasures they possessed; and therefore in the next or sixteenth century, when learning revived, and the reformation arose, then the Hebrew MSS. of the Jews were at hand, and were soon put into print, by means of which the Bible was corrected, and brought back, as nearly as possible, to its original condition.
We cannot but admire the providential ordering of events, which overruled the cruel and iniquitous persecutions raised against the learned Jews, first by the Turkish sultans in Asia, and then by the christian sovereigns of Spain, bringing to us the Hebrew MSS. of the Bible, which otherwise we might have sought in vain.
It must be also mentioned that we do not depend solely upon these Asiatic and Spanish Jews for our MSS. There existed from time immemorial in Poland and Germany, another separate community of Jews, whose traditions and schools of learning were quite independent of their brethren; and from them we have MSS. agreeing indeed in all essential respects with the others, but still so far varying as to show they come to us through different channels.
The history of the text of the New Testament is much simpler and shorter than that of the Old. We have the concurrent evidence of churches and congregations, who were scattered over the civilised world, and who preserved the apostolic records with affectionate reverence. We have numberless quotations and references in the christian writings from the second century onwards. We have very ancient translations in Latin and in Syriac, that have a perfectly independent existence. And we have MSS. reaching up almost to the days when the books themselves were originally written. We know also, that from a very early period the church was divided into several rival factions; each of whom acted apart from the others; and in each of whom we possess independent evidence for the text. And here, as in the case of the Jews, it is impossible not to see how wonderfully God brought good out of evil. For, by the time the dark ages came in, during that gloomy period, marked out by the ninth and tenth centuries, when learning and religion seemed almost lost, and Europe appeared to be lapsing back into barbarism; — the Benedictine and Cistercian Abbeys, founded at a previous happier season, had stored up, unnoticed and uncared for, the ancient Greek MSS. of the New Testament, which, when required, were produced by the investigation of the scholars who mainly brought about the Reformation.
When Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1453, and the last remnant of ancient civilisation destroyed, many scholars fled to the West of Europe, and brought with them a knowledge of the Greek language, till then almost unknown, at the very time when the dispersion of the Jews from Spain was making public the Hebrew tongue. And contemporaneously with these events, that wonderful discovery of printing was made; putting machinery into the hands of men for the preparation of proper copies of the Bible, which would have been altogether wanting a few generations previously.
Since that epoch, the libraries of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, have been ransacked, and many valuable MSS. discovered which were then unknown; and the settlement of the text, as it is called, has become the subject of the attention of biblical students. A judgement has to be formed from the variety and abundance of materials that exist, and a text produced that shall be as nearly as possible like what it was when it left the hands of the original writers. And in order to accomplish this, not only have the ancient MSS. themselves to be examined, and their comparative value decided, but due weight has to be given to any differences that may appear in the ancient translations, or in quotations made in ancient authors. It frequently happens that the different sources of information vary in particulars, and then a judgement must be exercised as to which is to be preferred.
We shall, in future papers, show what these various sources of information are. In the mean time, we shall be content with remarking, that the result of these investigations has been of the very happiest nature. When they were first entered on, great alarm was felt that the faith of many would be unsettled by them; and for that reason the Church of Rome forbade any amendment of the text of the Vulgate, acknowledged on all hands to be corrupt. But, however embarrassing the differences may be to the scholar, they are insignificant to the divine or the christian. They are all really quite unimportant — and the happy result is that we have discovered them to be unimportant. Whereas had we refused to look at them, we might have been harassed by a suspicion that we had been imposed upon; and should not have been certain, as we are now, that for all practical purposes, our ordinary Bibles give us what God originally directed the prophet or the apostle to reveal.
God sent His book into the world, like all His other blessings, entrusted to human care, and liable to injury from human carelessness. We may be thankful that He has watched over His own gift, and has protected it from all real damage.
(2) The Canon of Scripture, and the Various Divisions of the Books.
2nd Edition, Volume 1, September 1856.
(1st. Edition, September 1856 [01 1856 064])
[01 1856 062]
It is very remarkable in how many different senses the word Canon is used; though all these senses are traceable to one idea attached to it. Originally it is a Greek word signifying Reed, whence our own word Cane is derived; then by an easy transition, it is applied to anything in shape resembling a Reed or Cane, especially a Ruler for drawing straight lines. There is no doubt that the word Cannon, for great guns, comes from the same source; notwithstanding our spelling it with two n's. Then it is taken to signify a Rule for directing the conduct — thus a clergyman connected with a cathedral is called a Canon; because he is supposed to live according to a certain Rule. And we speak of the Canon of Scripture, meaning thereby those books which are to be taken as the Rule of faith.
Hence by canonical Scripture is to be understood, those writings which are stamped with Divine and infallible authority; and are distinguished from all others which are submitted to our judgement, and upon which we are free to pronounce an opinion. A canonical book is given to us, as containing the Word of God; i.e., the message or command which God sends to us; and is therefore entirely beyond our doubts or our opinions.
From this it follows that every canonical book must be recommended by some one, who carried the Divine authority along with him, — some one to whom Jehovah had actually appeared, and given the commission to execute his office. It is not, of course, needed that the writer should himself have received his mission from Jehovah; but some such an one must have seen and sanctioned the work. The books of the prophets in the Old Testament are all published, as containing the words which Jehovah spoke to the Prophets. And the other books received the sanction of such prophets, before they were accepted as containing the rule of faith, or as being canonical.
In the case of the books of the Old Testament our inquiry is really enclosed within narrower limits than might at first sight appear: for the very greatest authority we could possibly have is that of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was indeed Jehovah incarnate. He frequently refers to the Old Scriptures, as containing the word of life; and as being a certain collection of books, then accounted sacred by the Jews. If we can ascertain what the recognised Canon of Scripture among the Jews was in his time, we know at once what we are to receive as canonical. Now there is no doubt whatever upon this point. We, and all reformed churches, are quite in agreement with the Jews here. It is a matter undisputed by any one, that those books of the Old Testament which we venerate as canonical, were the only Scriptures known to the Jews, when our Saviour preached in Judea.
The Roman Catholic Church receives as canonical, certain books which are rejected by the Reformers, and called by them The Apocrypha. This word signifies what is concealed, and seems originally to have been applied to those books which were not published and universally known as canonical Scriptures; but were confined to some few heretical congregations, known only to them, and concealed except from the initiated. And then it came to mean, as with us, specially those books sometimes classed as belonging to the Old Testament, but never received by the Jews as such. These books were appended to the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, and thence transferred to the Vulgate or Latin translation made from the Septuagint. Some of these books, as Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, are in every way to be recommended, as containing wise and pious precepts, though not directly sanctioned by Divine authority. The books of Maccabees are good and reliable history. While others are mere extravagant romances, of no value whatever.
Let it be observed that the Roman Church does not deny the fact upon which the Reformers proceeded — viz., that these Apocryphal books were never received as canonical by the Jews. It will be seen, on reference to the preface of the Douay Bible — i.e., the English version of the Bible sanctioned by the Roman Church — that the canonicity of the Apocrypha is made to rest, solely on the dogmatic authority of the Church.
In the case of the New Testament, the whole of Christendom is agreed. All the books making up its canon were composed within the compass of a single generation; and therefore easily capable of being marked off from all other writings. Every single book of the New Testament was written either by an apostle, or in the case of two of the gospels, by immediate companions of apostles. And, as though to make assurance doubly sure, the life of St. John was extended over a long period, in order that no book might go out to the world, as canonical and inspired, but what he had sanctioned as such; and in this matter he exercised his Master's authority.
There were indeed some congregations at an early time, which had not known some of the books:— such as the Epistle to the Hebrews, the 2nd Epistle of St. Peter, the two shorter Epistles of St. John, and the Apocalypse: but, upon investigation, it is clearly seen that they never rejected these writings, but only that the writings had not at that moment reached them.
And never at any time were inferior or spurious writings allowed to usurp the place of Scripture. There are several ancient books in existence, certainly written very soon after, and some even before, the Canon of the New Testament was settled: such as the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, an Epistle ascribed to Barnabas, and certainly of very ancient date: some Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp, who were St. John's disciples, and a curious allegory, called the Shepherd of Hermas. These books are genuine and perhaps more or less valuable; but no one ever mistook them for Scripture. There are also extant, but very little known, certain manifest forgeries:— such as a pretended Epistle of Christ to King Abgarus, several pretended gospels, and some spurious Epistles. We call these forgeries manifest, for they abound in the most palpable anachronisms and mistakes, and never seem to have deceived any one. Some of the stories about the early life of Jesus are in marked contrast with the simplicity and truthfulness of the real Gospels, and are filled with the wildest accounts of his miracles.
Next, we may say a few words as to the various divisions and sub-divisions we find in our Bibles. The distinction into the Old and New Testaments is obvious enough; and signifies the separation between what preceded and what followed the coming of Christ in the flesh.
From an early period the Jews made a threefold division of their Scriptures: into the law, the prophets, and the sacred writings; to which allusion is made by our Lord himself. A great deal has been said as to the origin of this division: and the following may be taken as the most probable. The law of Moses stood, of course, by itself, as it contained their national covenant, which subsequent scripture writers explained and illustrated, but did not add to it. This law was read through in the synagogues once in the course of the year: a certain portion being read every sabbath morning, and constituting what we should call a first lesson. And each of these divisions was subdivided into seven portions, one of which was allotted to each of the seven readers who read the lesson.
There arose also the custom of reading, as a second lesson, some portion of the rest of the Scriptures, which might illustrate the first lesson out of the law. The books, therefore, out of which these selections were taken constitute a class apart, under the general name of The Prophets; although the greater part of the historical books were included among them. And the remaining books constituted the third class, under the name of the Sacred Writings.
The sequence of the books in the Hebrew Bibles is clearly that due to synagogue requirements; whereas that observed in our English and in all modern Bibles, is the more natural arrangement, and is derived from the Latin Vulgate, which again received it from the Septuagint or early Greek version of the Old Testament.
Our division is — 1st, the law; 2nd, the historical books in their chronological order; 3rd, the devotional books in their presumed order; and 4th, the prophetical in order, partly of time and partly of importance.
In the New Testament, till comparatively a recent epoch, the books had no settled divisions; only running titles at the top or in the margin of the MSS, to denote what the text was treating of. The arrangement of the books has always been as we now have them.
Our present division into chapters and verses is really very modern. In the middle of the thirteenth century, i.e., during the reign of our Henry III., about the time when our first parliament sat, a certain Dominican, Cardinal Hugo De Sancto Caro, while preparing a concordance for the Vulgate (the first of that nature extant) divided the entire Bible into chapters, which were copied from him into all the subsequent editions and translations, and have remained unchanged to the present day. He did not subdivide into verses; but placed down the margin at equal distances the letters A. B. C. D. for convenience of reference.
The introduction of verses is still more modern, being unknown for 200 years after the division into chapters; and our own earlier English Bibles, such as Wycliffe's at the end of the fourteenth century, and Tyndal's and Coverdale's in the first half of the sixteenth century, have the chapters, but not the verses.
The history of the verses is this. About the year 1450, near the time of the introduction of printing, when the Hebrew Bibles began to be much sought after, a certain Rabbi Mordecai Nathan, a learned Jew of Venice, published a concordance of the Hebrew Bible, and adopted Cardinal Hugo's chapters, which were found convenient. And he added the subdivision into verses, which, as far as the Old Testament is concerned, remained as at present. But for a century afterwards, that is till about 1550, this division into verses seems to have been unknown in the Christian Bibles. It is said to have been introduced by the celebrated French printer, Robert Stephens, who, adopting the Jewish verses for the Old Testament, added the verses now in use for the New. And this arrangement was speedily transferred to all Bibles and Testaments. The first English Bible in which verses appear, is that published by Archbishop Parker in 1568, commonly called the Bishop's Bible, and which immediately preceded our present, or King James' Bible.
There are many inconveniences attending our chapters and verses, as they appear to have been made quite arbitrarily, and often interrupt the sense. It should never be forgotten that they were originally intended solely for concordances, and for facility of reference. And every Bible student should accustom himself to get rid of the notion that they have any other use.
It may be mentioned, in conclusion, that the word Bible is really a plural noun, meaning the Books merely, i.e., of course the sacred books. And this plural character should never be lost sight of; for we may fall into serious mistakes if we forget the different times, and in part the different objects, of the several books making up the Bible.
It so happens that the same word in Greek, expresses Covenant and Testament. The Old Scriptures are called by St. Paul, 2 Cor. 3:14, The Old Testament, because they contain the old covenant made with Israel. And this name becoming fixed to the first volume; it soon became customary to call, by way of contrast, the second volume, the New Testament.
(3) Some Account of Manuscripts.
2nd. Edition, Volume 1, November 1856.
(1st. Edition, November [01 1856 096])
[01 1856 092]
No doubt the most ancient writing material was stone. This was the substance that most readily presented itself, when men were rather anxious to preserve indestructible records than to multiply copies. Probably the account of altars being built, and of a name being solemnly imposed upon them — as when Laban and Jacob parted in mount Gilead — may refer to the inscriptions then cut on the stone, which was to serve as a memorial. At any rate we have positive information that in the oldest known documents that were intended as books, viz., the commandments received by Moses from Jehovah, were engraved on stone.
No material could have been more durable. But it was, at the same time, costly and cumbrous. There are inscriptions in Egypt of a very hoar antiquity indeed, reaching up perhaps to the very dawn of human postdiluvian history; but then they are on the tombs of kings, demanding a royal treasury for their execution, and a royal sepulchre for their place. Where stone was lacking, as in the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, men were driven to adopt other expedients, and we find at Nineveh and Babylon, no longer inscriptions carved in rock, but impressions stamped in clay.
From a very early period — we cannot say when — leather must have come into use, as making books at least more portable than the stone or the clay. Nothing was more likely to suggest itself; and in all probability the rolls occasionally mentioned in the Bible were made of leather. Bark of trees is said to have served for books; and it is affirmed that the Latin word Liber — whence we derive many words in our own language — was originally this inner bark. Allied to this last was the better-known and more widely-used papyrus, furnished by a kind of reed that is almost peculiar to the Nile, and which certainly came into very early use. For, however fragile the papyrus books may appear, there are some in the British Museum, to which is assigned an age that reaches back to the time of the Exodus.
The export of papyrus seems to have formed a considerable item in the trade of Egypt. And the Ptolemaean dynasty boasted of being at once the patrons of literature, and the owners of the most convenient material for writing. Papyrus was probably cheap and readily obtained. But a new, a more expensive, and a far more valuable material had come to be known a few generations before the Christian era, destined to preserve some of the most precious documents of that era. Without parchment, it may be questioned whether the Scriptures would have come to us in the abundant quantity of copies that we possess. Probably on a less expensive sheet the same pains would not have been taken to make those copies accurate.
About the early half of the second century before Christ, when the Romans were engaged in contesting the empire of Eastern Europe with the kings of Macedonia, there arose out of the ruins of some of the larger fragments of Alexander's dominions, a small kingdom in the north-west of Asia Minor, that owed much of its fortune to the favour of the Romans, and perhaps for that reason incurred the suspicion and dislike of its neighbours. It was called the kingdom of Pergamos, from the city of that name, afterwards immortalised as the seat of one of the seven churches which the apostle addressed in the beginning of his apocalypse. A town still stands on or near the ancient site, preserving in the name of Bergamo the recollection of Pergamos.
The kings who ruled there imitated the Ptolemies in patronising learning, and founding a library. They excited, in consequence, the jealousy of the Egyptian sovereigns; one of whom, Ptolemy Epiphanes, about 190 B.C., in order to arrest the growth of a library that bade fair to rival that of Alexandria, prohibited the exportation of papyrus. Thereupon, the king of Pergamos, driven to his own resources, encouraged the invention of a new writing material. And a peculiar preparation of skins became known, called, from Pergamos, Charta Pergamene, or parchment.
This is the story, which has been sometimes doubted. But at any rate, it was in Pergamos that the parchment attained its greatest celebrity, and from that city it certainly took its name. Parchment, and its finer kind, vellum, have ever since retained the renown of uniting a convenient form and surface with a tolerably imperishable nature. Nothing but the cost, ever prevented this becoming the one material for books. The story of papyrus being no longer exported from Egypt may be true. But if so, the prohibition could only have been temporary; for papyrus was certainly used in Italy, and without doubt, elsewhere also. At a later epoch, as we know from the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and indeed down to the Arabian occupation of Egypt in the seventh century, papyrus still seems to have been the ordinary substance for writing in most parts of Europe.
The seizure of Egypt, however, by the Mahommedans, is said to have stopped the use of papyrus thenceforward forever. It is not likely that it was known at any time afterwards. Soon there came in the dark ages, when almost all records of the ancient civilisation seemed about to perish; and only the monasteries still preserved some few valued treasures of literature. Parchment became now the only material for writing, and, little as it was required, it rose in price: so that it was considered a great possession. We are told of a certain Gui, count of Nevers, presenting to the Chartreux of Paris, a service of plate, and of the monks asking for parchment instead. Now also arose the custom of erasing what was written on old parchment, and of re-writing something on it of more immediate interest. In this way, doubtless, many relics of antiquity have disappeared. While, from the imperfect manner in which the old writing was sometimes effaced, it has occasionally been recovered. A manuscript thus restored, from under the second writing above it, is called a palimpsest, and a codex rescriptus. There is, for instance, in the British Museum, one of the oldest known manuscripts of Homer's poems thus resuscitated. Recently Cardinal Angelo Mai discovered in the Vatican Library of Rome a lost treatise of Cicero de Republicâ, over which had been written a commentary of St. Augustin on the Psalms. And one of the most precious existing MSS. of the New Testament is now in Paris, over which had been written the works of the Syrian father Ephraim.
The want of something cheaper than parchment was soon met by the discovery of paper; which seems to have come gradually, and as it were imperceptibly, into use. There is no evidence that cotton paper was used in Europe earlier than the 9th century; while that made from linen was not known before the 12th. In this case, as in many other European discoveries, the Chinese are said to have preceded us, though without ever making their inventions very extensively useful. It must be also clearly recollected that the newly-discovered material was supposed to be in the place of the papyrus which was gone: as the name of the ancient reed-made papyrus was quickly applied to the paper made from the cotton or the linen.
The quality of the material upon which any manuscript may be written, goes of course a considerable way in determining its age. The parchment of one century is not the same as that of another. Nothing written on cotton paper can be older than Charlemagne; and nothing on linen paper, than William the Conqueror. Moreover the quality of the material decided most unerringly the kind of characters traced, and so gives us a corroborating testimony to the age of a document.
The characters of every branch of the three great languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, were all originally much the same. Many of our own printed capital letters approach most nearly to the oldest known types of the Phoenician and the Greek alphabets. They were generally hard, and composed of straight lines, indicating that they had first been cut upon stone; just as the cuneiform characters of Nineveh and Babylon are precisely such as would be stamped on clay with the blunt end of a style.
From the ancient Phoenician type, two chief branches divided: the ancient Greek and the ancient Hebrew character. The former are represented almost exactly by the capital Greek letters now in use; while the latter have no living representatives, but are known by inscriptions on coins of the Maccabaean dynasties, and on the ruins of Palmra: for the Greek small letters, and the Hebrew square characters, are comparatively modern.
All the ancient Greek manuscripts are therefore written only with the capital, or, as they are called, the uncial letters; being those which would naturally be formed by any one writing carefully on a valuable parchment. But with the use of paper, a new letter became known, viz., what we call the small letter, or which is also called the cursive character. This small Greek letter was absolutely unknown before the use of paper was discovered. Therefore every manuscript so written is certainly of a date posterior to the age of Charlemagne.
That age was one of considerable activity, and of vigorous effort to escape from the gloom that was settling about Europe. One sign of that activity was the use of paper for the quicker and cheaper writing then demanded. Whether from the use of a cheaper material, or because of the need of quickness, it is certain that men then began to write more rapidly and carelessly, and could no longer wait to form the careful uncial or capital letter, but, by making them quickly, contracted them into the cursive or small characters, which bore about the same relation to the uncials as our hand-writing now does to our printing. And these small letters were not the well-formed elegant things turned out by our modern type foundries: they were irregular, and ugly, and illegible, differing very much in different manuscripts; so that, even when they came to be printed, it was some time before the printers made them otherwise than had been exhibited in the scrawls of the 13th and 14th centuries. We have begun to make them more regularly and carefully, and have eschewed all those abominable contractions in which the early printers delighted. But still it ought to be borne in mind, as a fact not very generally known, that our small Greek letters, now printed, are really more carefully formed from the bad writing of the manuscripts just anterior to the discovery of printing; and that this bad writing was only a hurried way of dashing through the uncial or capital letters, such as we see on the classical monuments, and in the parchment MSS.
In the case of the Hebrew letters, we have an entirely new mode of proceeding. There are no Hebrew MSS. in existence older than the 10th century, that same age which saw the discovery of paper and the use of small cursive letters. The only ancient monuments of the old Hebrew letter — such as the coins of the Maccabees — a coin of Bar Cochab — and the inscriptions at Palmra — are not the same as the present beautiful square Hebrew character.
We are, therefore, irresistibly driven to the conclusion that these elegant letters come from the schools of Babylon and Tiberias, where the doctors of the post-Christian dispersion so long congregated, and which were broken up about the 10th century — that is, about the time of the oldest document in which these square letters are found. They are precisely of the form which pains-taking scrupulous men, like the masoretic doctors of Babylon, would make out of the harder and more irregular letters hitherto used. And, indeed, the rise of these specimens of calligraphy is almost contemporary with the rise of the ecclesiastical or black letter in Europe, in the more valuable MSS. which the hardworking monks painted, rather than wrote. Formerly there was a current opinion that the Jews at the Babylonish captivity, in Daniel's and Ezra's time gave up their own letters and adopted those of their masters. And so the square characters came to be called Chaldean. The improbability and the baselessness of the story, never seem to have struck any one. But as soon as it was discovered that the Babylonians never used this letter, the story was given up. So likewise, when it is known that these square characters had no existence before what is also called the Captivity — in that period when the Babylonian Jews were governed, under the Sassanians and the Caliphs, by their own Prince of the Captivity — there can be little doubt that this period saw the invention of the square characters; and that the story of the adoption of them in the time of Ezra, really arose from confounding together the first and the second captivities at Babylon.
(4) The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament.
2nd. Edition, Volume 1, December 1856.
(1st. Edition, December 1856 [01 1856 115])
[01 1856 111]
This name is given to that ancient Greek translation of the Bible which was executed in Egypt sometime before the advent of Christ, and which was called the Septuagint (that is, the seventy), because of the tradition that it was performed by that number of translators.
This version had obtained so high a reputation — in many cases quite superseding the original Hebrew — that numberless incredible stories were once extant, as to its origin. These have been rejected by modern research: and the following is generally allowed to have been the true account.
The Ptolemies — especially Ptolemy Philadelphus — not only patronised Greek learning, and strove to make their metropolis Alexandria the literary, as well as the commercial, centre of the world; but they were also very anxious to cultivate the friendship of the Jews, whose country, consisting of a succession of natural fastnesses, has ever formed an important outpost of Egypt. Both literary curiosity, therefore, and political prudence, conspired in making those kings desirous to possess, in the vulgar tongue, the venerable law of the Jews. Hence Ptolemy Philadelphus (or his father — it is uncertain which) requested of the high priest at Jerusalem, to procure competent scribes for him, who might translate the laws of Moses from the Hebrew into the Greek. The translation, thus effected, became one of the valuable treasures he had collected in his library at Alexandria. Its composition must have been somewhere about the year 280 B.C. It seems to have been gradually followed at different times by translations of other parts of the Jewish Scriptures; and the whole, executed indeed by various hands, was completed sometime before the advent of Christ.
This is the simple account, in substance quoted by one Aristobulus, who is cited by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History; and it is corroborated in the Prologue to the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, written (as the author there tells us) in the time of Ptolemy Physcon, rather more than 100 years before Christ. From 280 B.C. to 120 B.C. may therefore be safely taken as the period of its execution. And we may be satisfied that the law of Moses was translated by royal command, to which the rest of the book was gradually added.
This Alexandrian or Septuagint version, being thus made in the common speech of the East, was read even in Palestine, where Greek had become the ordinary language of intercourse. It alone is quoted by the philosopher Philo, and the historian Josephus: and (which is of more interest to us), the writers of the New Testament almost constantly refer to it: for at that epoch it stood in the same relation to the Hebrew as our common English version does, and was therefore used by all who wrote books for universal perusal.
On account of its celebrity, the most extravagant stories were current as to its source. Josephus says that seventy-two elders were chosen for the work, six from each tribe, and that their labours occupied exactly seventy-two days. Philo even asserts that these seventy-two men were shut up in separate cells; that each of them translated the entire Bible, apart from all intercourse with his coadjutors; and that these seventy-two independent translations were found to agree exactly, in every particular, with each other. These marvellous fables seem to have been invented, for the purpose of giving to this version the authority of the high priest, and of the council at Jerusalem. They obtained nearly universal credit, as is evident from the fact that the name of Septuagint (i.e., seventy), arose from the fiction of the seventy-two elders. There is no doubt that these stories are fictitious, for there is positive internal evidence that the several books were executed at different times, and by different hands; and indeed there are strong reasons for believing that the translators were natives of Alexandria, and not of Palestine.
There can be little doubt that our Lord and his apostles referred to this version, when they quoted the ancient Scriptures. It was for many ages the only Bible known in the Church. Very few Christians, indeed, before the Reformation era, knew anything of the Hebrew language, or suspected the existence of a Hebrew Bible. All old translations of the Bible were made (with the exception of the Syriac) from this. The Vulgate, for centuries the authorised text in the Latin church, was made from the Septuagint, and not directly from the Hebrew. And from the first, the Greek church has never acknowledged any other version except this venerable translation, now more than 2,000 years old.
It must be remembered that the Hebrew original, and the Greek translation, have come to us through two absolutely independent, and even hostile channels. The Hebrew we owe entirely to the Jews; our copies are simply what they have given to us. Whereas the Septuagint has reached us through the hands of the Christian church. These two guardians of the Scriptures had no intercourse whatever with each other. And their united testimony is of the strongest possible description. Where they differ, as they occasionally do, in unimportant details, we have only the firmer confidence that these two venerable recensions have descended to us by quite separate streams. And it may be observed that these differences, however embarrassing they may be to the critic, are really of no consequence to the Christian. We may hesitate in pronouncing sentence upon those points where the two versions are at variance; but every item of our faith is unaffected by them. We might cast out every passage where they do not agree, without shaking a single article out of the Creed.
Looking upon the matter, however, with the eye of the critic, opinions are divided as to which of these is to be preferred. Till the reformation, there was no doubt at all about this subject. The Latin church knew and recognised only the Vulgate; the Greek church only the Septuagint; the reformers, with one voice, preferred the Jewish Old Testament, to what was only a translation of a translation from it. They have been followed by most modern scholars. Of late, however, some among ourselves have seen reason for giving precedence to the Septuagint over the Hebrew; and they ground their judgement mainly upon the circumstance, that our Lord and his apostles quoted, almost uniformly, from the Greek version.
But, in reality, no conclusion ought to be drawn from this. The founders of Christianity, as a thing of course, quoted from the Bible in common use, which was the Septuagint at that time. And whenever this Septuagint differs from the Hebrew in an important respect (as when some point of doctrine is concerned), then it will be found that the quotation comes from the Hebrew. Thus, in the beginning of St. Matthew's Gospel, the names in our Lord's genealogy are spelled as the Septuagint spells them; for it was of no importance which way they were written. Whereas, in the second chapter, the quotation from Hosea, "Out of Egypt I have called my son," is from the Hebrew, and not from the Septuagint, which has "Out of Egypt I have called his children," and which does not convey a sense applicable to Christ.
In all probability, the Hebrew text represents the recension used in the synagogues everywhere except in Egypt; while the Septuagint was another edition, in private use, also read in the synagogues by the Hellenists of Alexandria. This supposition is corroborated by the fact, that the existing Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases (which arose from the custom of interpreting the Hebrew into the vulgar tongue of Palestine, during the synagogue service), agree not with the Septuagint, but with the Hebrew.
It seems to follow necessarily that the synagogue edition must have been the authorised copy. The Septuagint must have occupied the same place as our own English version now does; very good and excellent, doubtless, but yet containing some faults, which at once prevent its being put into the same rank with the original. We have, moreover, positive assurance that the Jews have taken the most scrupulous, and even superstitious, care of their text; so that accidental mistakes in transcription are hardly supposable; and we are as sure that the Greek text has never been so carefully preserved, and is faulty in many places.
There are two parts of the New Testament which follow the Septuagint exactly, even where this differs decidedly from the Hebrew. These two parts are the speech of Stephen, recorded in Acts 7, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. In both of these documents we are certain that we are reading the words of men who had the Septuagint translation, and not the Hebrew original, in their hands. Stephen, we know, was a deacon of the Grecians (i.e. of the Hellenists — the very community which produced this version). And there are unmistakable marks, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, of its having been written by a native of Alexandria, the birth-place of the Septuagint. Now, in each of these two documents, the name Jesus occurs in rather an embarrassing manner. In Stephen's speech, we are told of the "tabernacle of witness, which our fathers brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles." And in the Hebrews 4, we read, "If Jesus had given them rest" In both of these places it is Joshua that is meant, of which name Jesus is only the Greek form, and is the form always used in the Septuagint.
Then again Stephen speaks of 75 people going down to Egypt with Jacob; whereas our copies of the Book of Genesis distinctly assert that there were but 70. The truth is, that our English Bible here follows the Hebrew, whereas Stephen quoted the Septuagint. Then in Hebrews 5, we find the following quotation from Psalm 40: "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not; but a body hast thou prepared me"; and yet on turning to the 40th Psalm itself in our Bibles, we find the expression to be, "Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened"; which is a literal translation from the Hebrew of the Psalm in question, and different from what we read in the Epistle. But if we refer to the Septuagint version of Psalm 40, we at once see that the passage, as it stands in the Epistle to the Hebrews, was taken directly from it.
The Psalms in our English Prayer Books are taken from an older translation than the Psalms are which appear in our English Bibles; and as all modern translations started from the Septuagint (through the Vulgate), and by degrees were brought nearer and nearer to the Hebrew; so the Prayer-book Psalms, taken from Archbishop Parker's translation of 1568, lean much more towards the Septuagint than do the Bible Psalms, which were not translated till 1611. If we compare Psalm 14 in one of these English versions with Psalm 14 in the other version, we shall be able very easily to see one instance where the Hebrew and the Septuagint are at variance. In the Prayer-book, this 14th Psalm has eleven verses; in the Bible it has but seven; the former following the Septuagint, the latter the Hebrew. And we shall also find that St. Paul, when he quotes this Psalm in Romans 3, agrees with our Prayer-book version, i.e., with the Septuagint.
In some other respects we may readily perceive the influence of the old Greek edition on our modern editions. The names we give to the five books of Moses are unknown in the Hebrew Bible, which calls the books by the first words in each. They appeared first in the Septuagint, then they were transferred to the Vulgate, and from that to our modern Bibles.
There is another trace of the Septuagint, which is much more serious. The Jews, from time immemorial, never pronounce the word Jehovah, or write it in any but in the Hebrew characters. Now the translators of the Septuagint were Jews, imbued with the common prejudice of their nation. In consequence the word Jehovah does not once appear in the Septuagint; it is invariably rendered by Kurios, or Lord, which was a common title of respect between man and man. This peculiarity passed into the Vulgate, where Dominos is the equivalent term for Jehovah; and, for some unexplained reason — probably on account of the influence exercised by learned Jews over the reformers — it has been almost always retained in our common English Bibles. From this circumstance, a great deal of the meaning of the Bible is sometimes neglected; and the proper name of the invisible God does not appear where it ought to be. In our printed Bibles, it will be seen that when Lord stands for Jehovah, it consists of four capital letters, thus: — LORD.
The writers of the Septuagint were all Jews, and therefore never wrote the word Jehovah with Greek letters. The word Jehovah never once occurs in the entire New Testament. There is no kind of doubt that they used the title kurios, or the LORD, just as the Septuagint translators had done — as a well-understood equivalent for Jehovah. And when this title of LORD became, in an emphatic manner, fixed upon the Redeemer, he was thereby proclaimed to be Jehovah.
As might have been expected, the text of the Septuagint was never so carefully preserved as that of the Hebrew. From an early epoch, it seems to have been in an imperfect condition. At the beginning of the third century of the Christian era, the illustrious Origen devoted a large portion of his life to the amendment of this text; and, for this purpose, he published his celebrated work, The Hexapla (or Six-fold; containing six parallel columns of different editions of the Bible). By comparing these together, he produced an improved text, known as the Hexaplarian. It would have been of the utmost interest to have preserved this work: but, from its great size (it is said to have been in fifty volumes) transcription was, in a manner, impossible. After lying for many years in the library of Caesarea, it is believed to have perished when the Arabs took that city in the seventh century. But the amended text was preserved; and has been almost universally adopted as the text of the Septuagint, since the days of Origen.
There are two principal MSS. of the Septuagint in existence. The one, called the Alexandrian, is in the British Museum. It was sent over as a present to Charles 1 by the Patriarch of Alexandria. It is written on parchment, in four volumes: mutilated in some parts; and so old, that the ink of the letters has, in some places, eaten right through the page; it is believed to belong to the 5th or 6th century; and represents the Hexaplarian text, or the text amended by Origen. The other is called the Vatican, because it is in the library of that name in Rome. Its history is unknown, but is thought to be rather older than the Alexandrian; and it represents the text as it existed before Origen.
There is one circumstance connected with the Septuagint that must not be passed over. It was here that first appeared the books called Apocrypha; and from it were transferred to the Vulgate, where the church of Rome decided that they are to remain. The reformers rejected them from the Canon, because they had never been in the Hebrew; and did not therefore form part of the Jewish Bible, when our Saviour fixed the seal of his authority upon it.
It ought to be mentioned that the book of Daniel, as it appears in all extant editions of the Septuagint, is not the original Septuagint version of Daniel. A Greek translation of this book by Theodotion was put in its place, soon after Christ, on account of its acknowledged imperfections. The proper Septuagint translation of Daniel was lost until the end of the last century, when it was discovered in the library of Cardinal Chigi at Rome.
(5) The Vulgate.
2nd Edition, Volume 1, January 1857.
(1st. Edition, January 1857 [01 1857 128])
[01 1857 125]
For some period after the first profession of Christianity in the West of Europe, all christian writers seemed to have used the Greek as the ecclesiastical language, and not the Latin — no doubt for two reasons, mainly. In the first place, the apostles and early emissaries from the East spoke Greek, and, in many cases, no other tongue. Respect for these teachers, and imitation of them, naturally produced a continuation of their speech. In the second place, there existed a strong and a reasonable wish to preserve the unity of the Church, and to keep it from separating into fragments.
This wish, however, was in vain. In the third century, there were many influences at work, which were fast tending to divide the huge Roman empire, and the Church along with it, into two parts. In the West, the people of Italy, Spain, Gaul, and that portion of the other continent then known emphatically as Africa, of which Carthage was the principal city, spoke Latin, and owed their civilisation and their Christianity also, almost entirely to Rome. They stood apart, therefore, from the people of the East, who spoke Greek, whose civilisation and Christianity both were of older date than those of Rome; and who, in some respects, considered the Italians as still barbarous. In consequence of this constitutional variance between the East and the West, the Greek language obtained no permanent footing in the latter, but was gradually driven back to its original seats; and Latin Christians began to discard the Greek, and to revert to Latin as their common tongue.
And as gradually, and almost imperceptibly, a Latin version of the scriptures came into notice, which soon displaced the Septuagint. It was a literal translation from that venerable document, as far as the Old Testament was concerned, and from the original Greek of the New Testament. The exact time and place when this version was made are quite uncertain; but from being called the Old Italic (Vetus Itala) in the 4th century, it must have been effected soon after the completion of the New Testament. It could not have been effected before that completion, because it contained the whole of the Canon; at the same time it must have come into being before the year 200, A.D., for it is referred to by the renowned Tertullian, an advocate of Carthage, who lived about that time. The age of the Old Italic may safely be placed in the first half of the second century; and its birth-place was very probably the neighbourhood of Carthage. It was here that Tertullian flourished, who was the first known christian writer who used Latin, and to the influence of whose name in the West the gradual adoption of Latin by other Christians has been traced.
For 200 years this Old Italic was the only authorised Bible in western Christendom. It was always quoted, and it obtained that veneration which once was paid to the Septuagint. Indeed by many Latin fathers it was considered faultless. As afterwards it was entirely superseded by the Vulgate, this Old Italic version, as a whole, perished. Fragments of it, however, found in various authors, have been collected and published by Flaminius Nobilius at Rome, in 1588, and again by Sabatier, at Rheims, in 1743.
After Origen's great revision of the Septuagint, in the middle of the third century, the world began to feel the inconvenience of having a disagreement between the Greek and the Latin scriptures; for while Origen's amended Greek text became the Textus Receptus, the Versio Itala agreed with the unamended Greek; and it occurred to Jerome, towards the close of the fourth century, to introduce the same changes into the Italic, that Origen had introduced into the Septuagint. This Jerome, one of the four great Latin fathers, and the patron, if not the inventor, of monastic institutions, is said to have performed the work hastily, and even carelessly, and yet this work — the corrected Italic — remains substantially in the Vulgate of the New Testament to this day, and in the Psalters of the Roman and the Gallican Missals.
Jerome himself, even while the work of correction was proceeding, became aware of its imperfection; he resolved, therefore, to apply not merely to the Septuagint, but to the Hebrew itself, for more thoroughly amending the Italic version. He laboured diligently, with the assistance of learned Jews, to acquire a knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, and then he recommenced his revision of the Italic. That part of this version, containing the Old Testament, was completely revised and re-edited; and yet we should be in error if we supposed that Jerome executed a new translation. He only did what our English translators did, he took the old translation for a basis, and amended those parts where he thought the Hebrew ought to be followed; but in substance the new edition resembled the old, and retained, in consequence, many of those peculiarities which the Vetus Itala had inherited from the Septuagint, such as the presence of the apocryphal books, the way of spelling the proper names, the titles of the books, the order in which the books stand, and especially that unnecessary retention of the word Dominus instead of Jehovah.
The New Testament; of course, he did not retouch, except to bring it up to the corrected Greek of Origen, and, for the same reason, (viz., because there was no Hebrew to go to) he might have been satisfied with the Septuagint version of the apocryphal books, in which version, indeed, they had originally appeared. But Jerome seems to have been so much under the influence of his learned Jewish friends, that he used certain Chaldee translations for correcting some of the books in the Apocrypha.
The improved edition of the entire scriptures, thus edited by Jerome, has been constantly styled the Vulgate (that is, the Versio Vulgata, or the version in common use); for during many centuries the western church knew of no other version. There can be no doubt of the importance of Jerome's labours; and yet we are told that it met, for some time, with the most decided opposition. In spite of the support given to it by Jerome's friend, Pope Damasus, people thought it was a needless innovation to alter that version of the Bible to which they were accustomed and it was not till about the year 600, (i.e. 200 years after the publication of Jerome's Vulgate), that it was fully sanctioned in the Latin Church. This victory it owed to the authority of Pope Gregory I, that great and good man, through whose exertions our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were converted to Christianity.
Let us remember that this famous Vulgate version of the Bible was originally founded on the Old Italic, which was a literal translation from the Greek. The New Testament and the greater part of the Apocrypha remained so, being only brought up to the revised text of Origen. But the Old Testament was corrected by means of the Hebrew, and the apocryphal books of Tobit and Judith by means of Chaldee translations.
There can be no doubt that if we could have the Vulgate, as it proceeded from Jerome, we should possess one of the most important versions of the Bible; but it is a matter of history that its text soon became corrupted. Two hundred years elapsed before it quite displaced the Old Italic; and on account of the two versions being both in use at once, they were in some places confused together, and old errors reintroduced into the Vulgate. Moreover, the transcribers, during the dark ages of Europe, were often ignorant men, who could not exactly copy what they had before them; and the readers were far too uncritical to notice or to care for any mistakes that might have crept in. Even so early as the time of Charlemagne, about the year 800, its defects were known, and the celebrated Alcuin attempted a revision of it. So likewise, in a later age, did Lanfranc, the learned Archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of William the conqueror. But these attempts, and others like them, produced really very little result, beyond probably arresting the accumulation of errors; for none in those ages, even those accounted greatly learned, had any acquaintance whatever with either the Hebrew or the Greek, and could only compare one copy of the Vulgate with another.
Of course, all translations of the Bible, effected during those ages, were made simply from the Vulgate, as it then existed. The Anglo-Saxon version, for instance, which was gradually made during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, was only a daughter of the Vulgate; and when, at a much later epoch, viz. 1378, at the very beginning of Richard the Second's reign, John Wickliff published his English Bible, he had no original to appeal to but the Vulgate, as commonly met with, imperfect as it avowedly was. When printing was introduced, in the middle of the fifteenth century, it was first directed to multiply copies of the Vulgate. The first printed book that issued from the press of Gutenberg was the Vulgate, now known as the Mazarin Bible, preserved in the library at Paris. As soon as printing presses were established in the various countries of Europe, they issued copies of the Vulgate, from the MSS. which happened to come to the printers' hands. And it was then that the imperfections of this ancient version became manifest; for these printed Bibles differed in many important respects: which, then, was the true copy, or how could it be regained?
It was a prominent question of the day, how to settle the text of the Vulgate; and it deeply engaged the attention of scholars in every kingdom. It was one of the concurrent causes that stirred men's minds, made them reflect on the grounds of their faith, and brought in the Reformation. By a combination of circumstances that cannot be regarded as fortuitous, the exile of the Jewish rabbis from Spain had lately scattered a knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and of the Hebrew language over Europe, while almost at the same time, the learned Greeks who fled from the victorious Turks, carried into the West their own tongue, and the Greek Testament. Scholars could now address themselves, with far greater means of success, to the amendment of the Vulgate, than they could do in the middle ages; and biblical criticism began to assume its proper place and dignity.
The Reformers did not hesitate to prefer the Hebrew of the Old, and the Greek of the New Testament, to any translation however venerable; but the Church of Rome, after a little delay, decided to adhere to what had existed for 1000 years. The Council of Trent, in 1546, took the subject of the scriptures into consideration, and finally determined that the Vulgate was the only authentic Bible, to which all other translations, and even the original itself, must conform. Still it was necessary to decide what was the Vulgate; and, after a great deal of discussion, the Popes undertook to produce a correct and an infallible, edition of the Vulgate, which should have the sanction of the church. In 1570, Sixtus V. issued this authorised Bible, forbidding, under an anathema, any further disturbing of the text. But the errors of this edition, called the Sixtine Bible, were too glaring to be passed over; and, consequently, in 1593, Clement VIII suppressed the work of his predecessor, and published a second infallible edition, known as the Clementine Bible, which is the edition now meant by the Vulgate, the only one appointed to be read. All subsequent Vulgates are nothing but reprints of the edition of 1593, with all its mistakes reproduced and perpetuated.
The Church of Rome did great injury to the cause of biblical knowledge by forbidding any improvement of the text of the Vulgate. By preferring a translation of a translation to the original itself, she has committed an absurdity (especially as Jerome, the author of the Vulgate, wished to go back to the Hebrew; and by pronouncing both the Sixtine and the Clementine editions, each in succession, infallibly true, she herself teaches men to question the dogmatic authority upon which alone she recommends the Vulgate to the people. The consequence of this lofty opinion of the Vulgate is, that no translation can be tolerated which is not made from it. Our own common version, for example, is repudiated by English Roman Catholics, and the Douay Bible and the Rheims New Testament are sanctioned, because they have been rendered from the Clementine edition of the Vulgate.
But it must not be forgotten that the Vulgate was really the basis of ours, as of all modern European versions. [?] The originals were only used to correct what was amiss in previous versions. Hence we find so many traces of the Vulgate in our English Bibles, some of which have been mentioned. It is worth remembering that that peculiarity common to our own, to the Vulgate, and the Septuagint, of substituting kurios, Dominus, or LORD for Jehovah, is, in every case, traceable to Jewish influence. The translators of the Septuagint were Jews; the guides of Jerome in his Hebrew were Jews; the reformers received their Hebrew from the Jews also.
The confusion that exists in our translation, in the rendering of the Greek article, is easily explained when one remembers that the Vulgate was in Latin, where there is no article.
It is somewhat singular that the very arguments against endeavouring to amend the present translation (most of whose errors are from the Vulgate) appear to have been used against the Vulgate itself, until Gregory the Great overbore them. — W. H. J.