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SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES TO CHAP. I.

Note [A], page 10.

Acts iv. 12. Dr. Priestley explains the clause thus, "No such cures are wrought by any other power:" and the Impr. Vers. renders the verse, "Nor is there healing in any other; for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we can be healed." This interpretation had been before maintained by J. D. Michaelis and others, and was probably approved by Wetstein and Archbishop Newcome. It must be confessed, also, that it derives some appearance of probability from the use of owɛola in verse 9. But against it there are strong objections.

1. This sense of owrnpía is not supported by any scriptural example. The word is in a very few instances applied to signal deliverances from temporal calamities, (see chap. vii. 25; xxvii. 34. Heb. xi. 7,) but we do not find it specifically applied to recovery from disease. Its almost universal meaning in the New Testament is that spiritual and eternal deliverance from the guilt and dominion of sin, which is the capital blessing of the Christian religion.

2. The interpretation would be scarcely vindicable on the ground of truth. For, if we take the word to denote healing in the general sense, the assertion would not have been agreeable to fact: since, even at that period, the medical art was adequate to the curing of many diseases; and many others must have been thrown off by the ordinary powers of men's constitutions. Or, if we conceive that a miraculous healing alone was intended, (which, however, would not comport with the absolute terms of the passage, and could hardly be defended from the charge of disingenuousness,) there would have been also a want of strict truth in the statement: for God had granted miraculous cures through the means of other prophets, in former ages; and it was by no means impossible that such favours might be shown again.

3. The natural succession of ideas, and the usual manner of the sacred writers, render it much more probable that the apostle would rise, from the particular case, (which had been sufficiently disposed of in verse 10,) to that infinitely more important and glorious salvation which was habitually present to his thoughts, and which it was his ardent desire to recommend to mankind: that salvation which, while it secured the highest good, involved also an eventual deliverance from every physical and temporal evil.

The remarks of the elder Rosenmüller well deserve to be transcribed. "But what is this salvation, which Peter here declares? The sequel shows that he did not speak exclusively of the disordered in body and their healing. The signification of σwrŋpía, though with the article, is any salvation, any deliverance from evils either felt or apprehended: and therefore, by way of eminence, deliverance from the penal consequences of sin, and the acquisition of eternal happiness. This is rendered the more probable from the fact, that diseases were always conceived to be penal visitations for sin. The sense, therefore, of Peter's words is this: CHRIST is the only Saviour of men; from him, as the sole Author of these blessings, men obtain deliverance from all the calamities of the present life: at least upon this ground, that natural and outward sufferings are no more to be regarded as punishments of sin, or manifestations of the Divine anger but, above all things, on JESUS alone rests the salvation of souls." Schol. in loc.

"Though it is indisputable that the only subject of inquiry, strictly speaking, in this judicial examination, was through whom the cripple had been restored to soundness of limbs; yet, after the apostle had answered this question, in vers. 9, 10, he could very properly take the opportunity of speaking concerning Jesus as the Only True Messiah, or Redeemer of the nation; and that only through him, only in accepting and following his divine doctrine, can spiritual health and salvation be obtained. It was even to be expected (see chap. ii. 36,) that he would bear testimony to this great truth in the assembly of the Jewish Council. Indeed, after renewed investigation, I cannot perceive any other sense of this whole verse, than that it speaks of Jesus as the Messiah in the general sense, and not in particular of the cure of the cripple, upon which the apostle had given sufficient information before." Stolz, in loc.

Note [B], page 28.

Acts xx. 28. It would be superfluous and impertinent to readers of biblical knowledge, to introduce a disquisition on the reading of this text: since Griesbach's, Knapp's, or Vater's New Testament may be presumed to be in the hands of every scholar attentive to the grounds of his faith. But since the publication of the last edition of this treatise, a contribution has been made to the criticism of the New Testament, which, it may well be hoped, leaves us little more to expect or desire. Dr. John Martin Augustine Scholz, Professor of Bible Interpretation in the Roman Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Bonn, has published the results of his labo

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rious diligence, through four or five years of travelling and personal collating of manuscripts, and eight years more for reducing his collections to order, and applying them to the text of the Greek Testament. To this he has added five years more, for the more completely elaborating his work upon the latter part, that is, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Revelation. Probably no person ever has, by personal labour, done more for the final and satisfactory settlement of all the questions which concern the readings of the New Testament. He had the advantage of all preceding editors, Mill, Wetstein, Griesbach, Matthæi, Knapp, Tittmann, and those of inferior note. He explored the most important public and private libraries in France, Germany, Italy, Greece both continental and insular, and the Greek monasteries at Jerusalem. His being a Roman Catholic was likely to procure for him more favour and aid, particularly in Rome, Turin, Modena, and other places, than would be accorded to any Protestant. He also obtained new collations of the manuscripts, however carefully they had been before examined, in England, Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, and Russia. Nor did his researches stop with the Greek text; but he collated with Griesbach's N. T. all the manuscripts of the Ancient Versions that he could meet with, and reexamined the citations in the Fathers and the Acts of Councils. He was led to one general result of the utmost importance; a conviction that the stream of manuscript authority which flowed from Palestine and the Lesser Asia, in a north-westerly direction, through the Greek churches, was more pure than that which had taken its course through Egypt: and this, in the face of the fact that those manuscripts, which are in point of individual age the oldest, belong to the latter class. This he conceives to have been the stumbling-block of other editors, especially Griesbach. They, finding all the oldest manuscripts to belong more to the Alexandrian than to the Byzantine class, were betrayed into the belief that they possessed a weight, though few in number, exceeding the united testimony of all the Byzantine, which are junior and much more numerous. On the other hand, Scholz maintains that the Egyptian churches, addicted as they were to boundless speculations, and to the admixture of their philosophy with their theology, were under a stronger temptation to the exercise of their criticism in making, from conjecture, what they deemed emendations; while the less disputatious and more practical Christians, upon the more northerly line, were in general the more simple and straightforward

1 Novum Testamentum Græce. Textum ad fidem Testium Criticorum recensuit, vc. &c. Dr. J. M. A. Scholz; 4to. Leipzig, vol. i. 1830; and vol. ii. 1836.

copyists. They might and did make numerous mistakes, but these were the unintentional errors of mere transcription, or formularies arising from the introducing or connecting of Church-Readings, which are usually of easy detection; whereas the other class of men introduced alterations from the opinion that they were only correcting the errors of their exemplars, and rendering their own copies more perfect, or even (for such critical boldness had become habitual to the Alexandrine school, and was shown in their revisions of Homer and other Greek authors,) they deliberately altered the text to render it more perspicuous, more impressive, less liable to some objection,—in a word, what they thought that the apostle or evangelist either did at first write, or intended to write, or, according to their notions and rules of language, ought to have written. Not only does Dr. Scholz support these charges by a minute sifting of internal evidence, but he adduces many of the Fathers of the 3d, 4th, and 5th centuries as making the same complaint.

Thus he breaks up and repudiates the Three Recensions of Dr. Griesbach, at which that eminent critic had arrived with so longcontinued labour; as Dr. Laurence had done many years ago, with rather more of a tinge of asperity than is pleasing. But Scholz does

2 Now Archbishop of Cashel, in his acute Remarks upon the Systematical Classification of Manuscripts adopted by Griesbach, in his edition of the Greek Testament, Oxf. 1814. A statement of the question, and an investigation of it, distinguished by candour and equity, learning and research, is in the Eclectic Review, N. S. vol. IV. July, &c. 1815, which will well reward the reader's referring to it. To cite two or three paragraphs needs no apology. "The long and patient attention which Griesbach-devoted to the criticism of the Greek Testament, together with his acknowledged candour and love of truth, may have afforded facility to the admission of his classification among the learned; and it may appear presumptuous in any man less acquainted with sacred literature to question its propriety. But have not the most eminent critics entertained opposite opinions, on points of critical importance ?—— -A complete examination of manuscripts, versions, and fathers, proves the inviolability of the Christian Scriptures. They all coincide in exhibiting the same Gospels, and Acts, and Epistles; and, among all the copies of them which have been preserved, there is not one which dissents from the rest in either the doctrines or the precepts which constitute Christianity. -For the knowledge of this fact, we are indebted to such men as Griesbach, whose zealous and persevering labours to put us in possession of it, entitle them to our grateful remembrance. To the superficial and to the novice in theology, the long periods of life and the patient industry, which have been applied to critical investigation, may appear as mere waste, or, at the best, as only amusing employment; but to the serious inquirer, who from his own conviction can declare that he is not following cunningly-devised fables, the time, the talents, and the learning which have been devoted to critical collation, will be accounted as well expended for the result which they have accomplished. The real theologian is satisfied, from his own examination, that the accumulation of many

not satisfy himself with pulling down; he also builds up. He maintains that the most exact application of the rules of criticism conducts us to two and only two classes of textual authority for the New Testament, the Alexandrine and the Byzantine, as we have before explained that with the latter stream are confluent many inferior rivulets, from different countries, but all originally derived from a north-western Palestine origin; that this text is marked with decisive characteristics; that, though the documents exhibiting it be the more recent, being chiefly written after the tenth century, yet, having been most rigorously scrutinized and put to every test, they bear decisive evidence of being faithful copies from older, and those again from still older manuscripts, which, if they had not been lost in the wreck of time, would now have been admitted by all to have a higher title than the Alexandrian to the confidence of men as the purest text.

It may be said that Dr. Scholz, being a Roman Catholic priest, is peculiarly liable to the prejudices of his communion and of his order, and that an inclination to the text of the Vulgate may, without his own consciousness, be a cause of bias to his judgment. This is certainly possible; but justice compels me to say that his great work, the Greek Testament, exhibits no appearance of any such bias, and much to prove the contrary; and that, in his other important and valuable labour, the completion of Brentano's and Dereser's version of the whole Bible, from the Hebrew and Greek, with an ample apparatus of Introductions and Annotations, I have observed an honourable superiority to what might be supposed unavoidable, a secret and powerful direction to the mind extraneous to simple scriptural evidence. Even the two great texts on which Roman Catholic partisans so much insist, are not by Scholz applied in the way usual with his brethren. Matt. xvi. 18, 19, he explains as investing Peter with a permanent presidency over the other apostles and other high prerogatives; but he gives not the most distant hint of any connexion of Peter with the see of Rome: and

thousands of various readings, obtained at the expense of immense critical labour, does not affect" [so as to alter the total results,] "a single sentiment in the whole New Testament. And thus is CRITICISM, which some despise and others neglect, found to be one of those undecaying columns, by which the imperishable structure of CHRISTIAN TRUTH is supported."

I cannot venture, upon conjecture, to specify whom I consider as, next to a certainty, the writer of that excellent article; but I think it cannot be a mistake to ascribe it to the author of an admirable review in the same work (June, 1829,) of Dean TURTON's Vindication of the Literary Character of the late Prof. Porson, by Crito Cantabrigiensis.

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