us from other times and other places throughout the world? It would be childish to expect a literal or verbal agreement, or that every manuscript should be preserved from injury or mutilation. The various readings are, in fact, known to be counted by tens of thousands. And still, what is their combined result upon the real meaning of the holy volume, i. e., upon the revelation it conveys? The answer may be safely given in the words of the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, great especially and of singular sagacity in matters of precisely this character: "The real text of the sacred writers," says Bentley, "does not now (since the originals have been so long lost) lie in any MS. or edition, but is dispersed in them all. 'Tis competently exact, indeed, in the worst MS. now extant; nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost in them. Choose as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst, by design, out of the whole lump of readings even put them into the hands of a knave or a fool, and yet, with the most sinistrous and absurd choice, he shall not extinguish the light of any one chapter, nor so disguise Christianity but that every feature of it will still be the same." I have made the supposition that we had a single undoubted manuscript of the fourth century. As a matter of fact, we have three-two of which were certainly written early in the fourth century, and the other either in the latter part of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth. I am speaking now of the celebrated Vatican, Sinaitic, and Alexandrian MSS., the most precious as they are the most venerable written treasures in the world. A brief account of them, interesting in itself, will throw light upon my present argument for the authenticity of the sacred books. Observe that a manuscript, written when the fathers and bishops of the Church assembled from all parts of the 'Remarks upon a late Discourse of Free-Thinking, by Phileleutheros Lipsiensis, P. I., sect. 32. Christian world at Nice, in A.D. 325, is separated from S. John, the last of the twelve apostles, by an interval not greater than divides us from the founding of Virginia or New York, or the strife of the great rebellion in England. It may be useful to remind you of some of the grounds which entitle us to pronounce with certainty that the Vatican and Sinaitic manuscripts were written in the fourth century. No one doubts that the autographs themselves of the apostles have perished. They were doubtless written upon the material usually employed for books in their day, the comparatively cheap papyrus, though traces of the employment of the finer and more durable parchment are not wanting in the New Testament.' It would certainly be a valuable aid in judging of a manuscript of the fourth century if we could compare it directly with a Greek writing of the first, the period of S. Paul and S. John. Now, Providence has in an unexpected way supplied the means of this very comparison. Out of Herculaneum, buried from sight and almost from memory by the dread eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, have been dug Greek papyri MSS., among them some dissertations of the Epicurean Philodemus, now preserved in the Museum of Naples, written in the same peculiar Greek uncials, or inch-long letters, with out breathings or accents, or separation of words and sentences by spaces or punctuation. The very look and size of these papyrus leaves as they were joined in the roll, forming a book or volume, were imitated on the more durable and delicate vellum codices, such as the Vatican and Sinaitic MSS. The uncial writing has its perfectly well-recognized development of change and fashion, large initials, spaces, breathings, accents, and finally, at the close of the ninth century, the general substitution of the cursive style of letter. The materials prevailing 12 S. Tim. iv. 13. We may compare a fac-simile of some lines from the Philodemus with some from the oldest uncial MSS. of the New Testament in F. H. Scrivener's introduction to the Crit- in each age, also, fix decisively the time of the writing. The date in the colophon was not formally added till the ninth century, when the Damascene paper, made from cotton rags, began to be used. In the twelfth century linen paper at times, when glazed and well wrought, rivalling in elegance the vellum-began to appear. It is obvious, therefore, that the look and material of the Vatican MS. would speak very clearly of its age to an expert. On still closer inspection, the division of its text into chapters and paragraphs, after the older fashion, never found subsequent to A.D. 340, when the Ammonian sections and canons of Eusebius were universally adopted, serve still more precisely to ascertain its date. Let us pause a moment to look at the three oldest MSS. of the Scriptures-the Vatican, the Sinaitic, and the Alexandrian. I. In the great library of the Vatican at Rome, since A.D. 1448, when the library was founded by Nicolas V., there has been kept, except during one short interval, the treasure known to biblical scholars as Codex B, class 1209. Ordinary visitors are permitted to see nothing of it but the red morocco binding. It is a quarto volume, containing seven hundred and fifty-nine thin and delicate vellum leaves, having on each page three columns of Greek in the uncial character. The entire Greek Bible, the Old Testament in the Septuagint version, is still contained in this precious manuscript, with the exception of the following portions that have yielded to the ravages of time: Genesis to xlvi. 48, Psalms cv.-cxxxvii., Heb. ix. 14 to the end, First and Second S. Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Revelation. The uncials are simple, elegant, and distinct. There are no capitals and very few stops. Certain peculiarities in the spelling suggest that it had its origin in Alexandria. The absence of the Ammonian sections and Eusebian canons, of which we have already spoken, point unmistakably to the early part of the fourth century as the time when it was written. This most venerable manuscript contains a history for the thoughtful scholar: the purity of the vellum, the faded ink, the shape of the letters, the arrangement of the columns, besides the disposition of the contents, fix its date; while in certain portions, a scribe-between the eighth and the eleventh century-" with mistaken diligence," as critics would now decide, has sought to retouch the letters, to supply accents and breathings, and here and there an elaborate capital. The latter portions of the manuscript, that had perished, have been supplied by a scribe of the fif teenth century. The papal librarian Bombasius, in 1521, gave an account of Codex B to Erasmus. It formed part of the plunder carried from Italy to Paris in the early years of Napoleon's empire. It remained several years in the royal library at Paris, till in 1810 a Roman Catholic scholar, I. L. Hug, drew attention to the treasure in his treatise on the Antiquity of the Vatican Manuscript. Since its return to Rome it has been guarded with a vigilance in strong contrast with the foregoing period of neglect. No one, not even scholars like Tregelles and Tischendorf, not officially connected with the library, were permitted to copy, much less collate, the precious manuscript, in whole or in part. The librarian Cardinal Mai, who died in 1854, caused it to be printed in five quarto volumes, but the work was very unskilfully done; and the attempt has since been renewed by Vercellone in five other volumes, of which he lived to put forth two. It is to be regretted that this work could not have been placed in the hands of experts like Tregelles or Tischendorf, who can pronounce upon the claims of a manuscript with the same unerring sagacity that enabled a Cuvier or Agassiz to reproduce the history of a fossil or a bone. The result of fourteen days' labor allowed to Tischendorf upon the Vatican treasure has given us the most valuable critical results. Tregelles believed there was no doubt that it was older than the Council of Nice. 2. The second of the great Greek MSS. of Holy Scripture, the Codex Sinaiticus, or Aleph (N), was found by 1De Antiquitate Vaticani Codicis Commentatio. Tischendorf in the Convent of S. Catherine,' on Mount Sinai in 1859. He had previously, in 1844, obtained forty-three leaves of the same MS., containing a portion of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. The three hundred leaves recovered in 1859 contained, besides fragments of the Old Testament, the New Testament entire, and also the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The treasure is now in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, and a fac-simile has been published (in 1862 and 1863) at the expense of the emperor. No competent judges have now any doubt that this manuscript stands next in age to that in the Vatican: the singular fineness of the vellum; the peculiar simplicity of the uncials; the absence of capitals, breathings, accents, and spaces, both mark its capacity to endure, and fix its origin in the first half of the fourth century. The presence in it, on the other hand, of the Ammonian sections and Eusebian canons, for the division of the text, lead us to place its date a little lower than that of the Vatican MS., but not later than A.D. 350. The Sinaitic, as well as the Vatican codex, has along with the proofs of its great antiquity the unmistakable attempts of later hands to supply deficiencies or to amend defects, faded words being sometimes rewritten, and accents, breathings, and capitals here and there inserted. A curious question was raised concerning the Sinaitic manuscript soon after its discovery, and the ensuing discussion settled a number of interesting points. An audacious impostor, Constantine Simonides by name, a Greek of Syme-a worthy compeer of the famous George Psalmanazar of the last centurywas first brought into notice by his fabulous history of Uranius, the son of Anaximenes. Simonides was an accomplished calligraphist, and had been employed by Tischendorf, with whom he quarrelled. When Tischendorf, in 1860, issued his first fac-similes of the Sinaitic manuscript, Simonides boldly declared that he had himself written the whole of it, between November, 1839, and 'Founded by the Emperor Justinian, A.D. 530. |