1. The Peshitto.

The Aramaean or Syriac (preserved to this day as their sacred tongue by several Eastern Churches) is an important branch of the great Semitic family of languages, and as early as Jacob's age existed distinct from the Hebrew (Gen. xxxi. 47). As we now find it in books, it was spoken in the north of Syria and in Upper Mesopotamia about Edessa, and survives to this day in the vernacular of the plateau to the north of Mardin and Nisibis3. It is a more copious, flexible, and elegant language than the old Hebrew (which ceased to be vernacular at the Babylonish captivity) had ever the means of becoming, and is so intimately akin to the Chaldee as spoken at Babylon, and throughout Syria, that the latter was popularly known by its name (2 Kings xviii. 26; Isa. xxxvi. 11; Dan. ii. 4)4. As the Gospel took firm root at Antioch within a few years after the Lord's Ascension (Acts xi. 19-27; xiii. 1, &c.), we might deem it probable that its tidings soon spread from the Greek capital into the native interior, even though we utterly rejected the venerable [pg 007] tradition of Thaddaeus' mission to Abgarus, toparch of Edessa, as well as the fable of that monarch's intercourse with Christ while yet on earth (Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., i. 13; ii. 1). At all events we are sure that Christianity flourished in these regions at a very early period; it is even possible that the Syriac Scriptures were seen by Hegesippus in the second century (Euseb., Eccl. Hist., iv. 22); they were familiarly used and claimed as his national version by the eminent Ephraem of Edessa in the fourth. Thus the universal belief of later ages, and the very nature of the case, seem to render it unquestionable that the Syrian Church was possessed of a translation, both of the Old and New Testament, which it used habitually, and for public worship exclusively, from the second century of our era downwards: as early as a.d. 170 ὁ Σύρος is cited by Melito on Gen. xxii. 13 (Mill, Proleg. § 1239)5. And the sad history of that distracted Church can leave no room to doubt what that version was. In the middle of the fifth century, the third and fourth general Councils at Ephesus and Chalcedon proved the immediate occasions of dividing the Syrian Christians into three, and eventually into yet more, hostile communions. These grievous divisions have now subsisted for fourteen hundred years, and though the bitterness of controversy has abated, the estrangement of the rival Churches is as complete and hopeless as ever6. Yet the same translation of Holy Scripture is read alike in the public assemblies of the Nestorians among the fastnesses of Koordistan, of the Monophysites who are scattered over the plains of Syria, of the Christians of St. Thomas along the coast of Malabar, and of the [pg 008] Maronites on the mountain-terraces of Lebanon. Even though these last acknowledged the supremacy of Rome in the twelfth century, and certain Nestorians of Chaldaea in the eighteenth, both societies claimed at the time, and enjoy to this day, the free use of their Syriac translation of Holy Scripture. Manuscripts too, obtained from each of these rival communions, have flowed from time to time into the libraries of the West, yet they all exhibit a text in every important respect the same; all are without the Apocalypse and four of the Catholic Epistles, which latter we know to have been wanting in the Syriac in the sixth century (Cosmas Indicopleustes apud Montfaucon, “Collectio Nova Patrum et Script. Graec.,” Tom. ii. p. 292), a defect, we may observe in passing, which alone is no slight proof of the high antiquity of the version that omits them; all correspond with whatever we know from other sources of that translation which, in contrast with one more recent, was termed “old” (ܩܕܡܑ or ܑܡܕܩ) by Thomas of Harkel a.d. 616, and “Peshitto” (ܦܫܝܬܬܐ or ܐܬܬܝܫܦ) the “Simple,” by the great Monophysite doctor, Gregory Bar-Hebraeus [1226-86]. Literary history can hardly afford a more powerful case than has been established for the identity of the version of the Syriac now called the Peshitto with that used by the Eastern Church, long before the great schism had its beginning in the native land of the blessed Gospel.

The first printed edition of this most venerable monument of the Christian faith was published in quarto at Vienna in the year 1555 (some copies are re-dated 1562), at the expense of the Emperor Ferdinand I, on the recommendation and with the active aid of his Chancellor, Albert Widmanstadt, an accomplished person, whose travelling name in Italy was John Lucretius. It was undertaken at the instance of Moses of Mardin, legate from the Monophysite Patriarch Ignatius to Pope Julius III (1550-55), who seems to have brought with him a manuscript, the text whereof was of the Jacobite family, although written at Mosul, for publication in the West. Widmanstadt contributed a second manuscript of his own, though it does not appear whether either or both contained the whole New Testament. This beautiful book, the different portions of which have separate dedications, was edited by Widmanstadt, by Moses, and by W. Postell jointly, in an elegant type of the modern Syriac character, the vowel and diacritic points, especially the linea occultans, being [pg 009] frequently dropped, with subscriptions and titles indicating the Jacobite Church Lessons in the older, or Estrangelo, letter. It omits, as was natural and right, those books which the Peshitto does not contain: viz. the second Epistle of Peter, the second and third of John, that of Jude and the Apocalypse, together with the disputed passage John vii. 53-viii. 11, and the doubtful, or more than doubtful, clauses in Matt. xxvii. 35; Acts viii. 37; xv. 34; xxviii. 29; 1 John v. 7, 8. It omits Luke xxii. 17, 18, see Chap. XII on the passage. This editio princeps of the Peshitto New Testament, though now become very scarce (one half of its thousand copies having been sent into Syria), is held in high and deserved repute, as its text is apparently based on manuscript authority alone.

Immanuel Tremellius [1510-80], a converted Jew (the proselyte, first of Cardinal Pole, then of Peter Martyr), and Professor of Divinity at Heidelberg, published the second edition in folio in 1569, containing the New Testament in Hebrew type, with a literal Latin version, accompanied by the Greek text and Beza's translation of it, having a Chaldee and Syriac grammar annexed. Tremellius used several manuscripts, especially one at Heidelberg, and made from them and his own conjecture many changes, that were not always improvements, in the text; besides admitting some grammatical forms which are Chaldee rather than Syriac. His Latin version has been used as their basis by later editors, down to the time of Schaaf. Tremellius' and Beza's Latin versions were reprinted together in London, without their respective originals, in 1592. Subsequent editions of the Peshitto New Testament were those of the folio Antwerp or Royal Spanish Polyglott of Plantin (1571-73), in Hebrew and Syriac type, revised from a copy written about a.d. 1200, which Postell had brought from the East: two other editions of Plantin in Hebrew type without points (1574, 8vo; 1575, 18mo), the second containing various readings extracted by Francis Rapheleng from a Cologne manuscript for his own reprints of 1575 and subsequently of 1583: the smaller Paris edition, also in unpointed Hebrew letters, 1584, 4to, by Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, who prepared the Syriac portion of the Antwerp Polyglott in 1571: that of Elias Hutter, in two folio volumes (Nuremberg, 1599-1600), in Hebrew characters; this editor venturing to supply in Syriac of his own making the single passages wanting [pg 010] in the editio princeps of Widmanstadt, and the spurious Epistle to the Laodiceans. Martin Trost's edition (Anhalt-Cöthen, 1621, 4to), in Syriac characters, with vowel-points, a list of various readings, and a Latin translation, is superior to Hutter's.

The magnificent Paris Polyglott (fol. 1645) is the first which gives us the Old Testament portion of the Peshitto, though in an incomplete state. The Maronite Gabriel Sionita, who superintended this part of the Polyglott, made several changes in the system of vowel punctuation, possibly from analogy rather than from manuscript authority, but certainly for the better. He inserted as integral portions of the Peshitto the version of the four missing Catholic Epistles, which had been published in 1630 by our illustrious oriental scholar, Edward Pococke, from a manuscript in the Bodleian (Orient. 119)7: and another of the Apocalypse, edited at Leyden in 1627 by Louis De Dieu, from a manuscript, since examined by Tregelles, in the University Library there (Scaliger MS. 18), and from one sent him by Archbishop Ussher, which is now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (B. 5. 16). Of the two, the version of the Catholic Epistles seems decidedly the older, and both bear much resemblance to the later Syriac or Harkleian translation, but neither have claim to be regarded as portions of the original Peshitto, to which, however, they have been appended ever since.

Bp. Walton's, or the London Polyglott (fol. 1654-7), affords us little more than a reprint of Sionita's Syriac text, with Trost's various readings appended, but interpolates the text yet further by inserting John vii. 53-viii. 11. This passage, which is the “Pericope de adultera,” is found in Archbishop Ussher's copy, dated a.d. 1627, and made from a Maronite MS. of much esteem at Kenobin under Mt. Lebanon; also in Brit. Mus. 14,470, in Cod. Barsalibaei at New College, Oxford, and in the Paris Nat. Library xxii, of which the two last copies are Harkleian, and the one in the British Museum is Peshitto8. We are left to conjecture as to the real date and origin of these translations, except that as far [pg 011] as the Harkleian is concerned, Dr. Gwynn has shown that according to the Paris and Brit. Mus. MSS. they are claimed for Paul, a contemporary of Thomas of Harkel.

Giles Gutbier published at Hamburg (8vo, 1664) an edition containing all the interpolated matter, and 1 John v. 7, 8 in addition, from Tremellius' own version, which he inserted in his margin. Gutbier used two manuscripts, by one of which, belonging to Constantine L'Empereur, he corrected Sionita's system of punctuation. A glossary, notes, and various readings are annexed. The Sulzbach edition 12mo, 1684, seems a mere reprint of Plantin's; nor does that published in Rome in 1713 for the use of the Maronites, though grounded upon manuscript authority, appear to have much critical value.

A collation of the various readings in all the preceding editions, excepting those of 1684 and 1713, is affixed to the Syriac N. T. of J. Leusden and Ch. Schaaf (4to, Leyden, 1708-9: with a new title-page 1717). It extends over one hundred pages, and, though most of the changes noted are very insignificant, is tolerably accurate and of considerable value. This edition contains the Latin version of Tremellius not too thoroughly revised, and is usually accompanied with an admirable “Lexicon Syriacum Concordantiale” of the Peshitto New Testament. Its worth, however, is considerably lessened by a fancy of Leusden for pointing the vowels according to the rules of Chaldee rather than of Syriac grammar: after his death, indeed, and from Luke xviii. 27 onwards, this grave mistake was corrected by Schaaf9. Of modern editions the most convenient, or certainly the most accessible to English students, are the N. T. which Professor Lee prepared in 1816 for the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Eastern Church Lessons noted in Syriac, and that of Wm. Greenfield [d. 1831], both in Bagster's Polyglott of 1828, and in a small and separate form; the latter editor aims at representing Widmanstadt's text distinct from the subsequent additions derived from other sources. Lee's edition was grounded on a collation of three fresh manuscripts, besides the application of other matter previously available for the [pg 012] revision of the text; but the materials on which he founded his conclusions have never been printed, although their learned collector once intended to do so, and many years afterwards consented to lend them to Scrivener for that purpose; a promise which his death in 1848 ultimately hindered him from redeeming. An edition of the Gospels printed in 1829 by the British and Foreign Bible Society for the Nestorian Christians was based on a single manuscript brought from Mosul by Dr. Wolff. Besides these, two editions have been published by the American Bible Society, at Oroomia, Persia, in 1846, and at New York (a reprint of the former) in 187810.

From the foregoing statement it will plainly appear that no edition of the Peshitto Syriac has yet been published with that critical care on the part of editors which its antiquity and importance so urgently demand. It is therefore a matter of deep satisfaction that the work commenced by the late Philip Pusey has been brought near conclusion by the Rev. G. H. Gwilliam, for the University of Oxford. Mr. Gwilliam has informed the editor that the Peshitto “Tetraevangelium” will be the first part published, and will exhibit in its apparatus criticus readings taken from forty manuscripts, some of which have been collated throughout, others in parts. From the account given in the third volume of “Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica,” we learn that the authorities on which he bases his text in this elaborate edition are as follows:—

It is necessary to mention briefly this remarkable wealth of evidence, probably to be largely increased by future investigations, in which the Peshitto presents no inconsiderable parallel to the vast amount of authorities on which the Greek Text of the New Testament depends, because people are apt to underrate the grand position of the Peshitto version, when comparing it with the Curetonian Syriac, of which the sole evidence consists only of two codices, if the newly-discovered one turns out to be what was anticipated.

It is not easy to determine why the name of Peshitto, “Simple,” “Common,” should have been given to the oldest Syriac version of Scripture, to distinguish it from others that were subsequently made11. In comparison with the Harkleian it is the very reverse of a close rendering of the original. Perhaps the title refers to its common and popular use12. We shall presently submit to the reader a few extracts from it, contrasted with the same passages in other Syriac versions; for the present we can but assent to the ripe judgement of Michaelis, who, after thirty [pg 014] years' study of its contents, declared that he could consult no translation with so much confidence in cases of difficulty and doubt13.

2. The Curetonian Syriac.

The volume which contained the greater part of the Curetonian portions of the Gospels was brought by Archdeacon Tattam in 1842 from the Monastery of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert (p. 140). Eighty leaves and a half were picked out by Dr. Cureton, then one of the officers in the Manuscript department of the British Museum, from a mass of other matter which had been bound up with them by unlearned possessors, and comprise the Additional MS. 14,451 of the Library they adorn, and two more reached England in 1847. They are in quarto, with two columns on a page, in a bold hand and the Estrangelo or old Syriac character, on vellum originally very white, the single points for stops, some titles, &c. being in red ink; there are no marks of Church Lessons by the first hand, which Cureton (a most competent judge) assigned to the middle of the fifth century. The fragments contain Matt. i. 1-viii. 22; x. 32-xxiii. 25; Mark xvi. 17-20; John i. 1-42; iii. 5-vii. 37; (but many words in iii. 6-iv. 6 are illegible); xiv. 10-12; 15-19; 21-23; 26-29; Luke ii. 48-iii. 16; vii. 33-xv. 21; xvii. 23-xxiv. 44, or 1786 verses, so arranged that St. Mark's Gospel is here immediately followed by St. John's. Three more leaves of this version (part, perhaps, of the same MS.) were found among the Syriac MSS. procured by Dr. Sachau, and now at Berlin (Royal Libr. Orient. quart. 528). They contain Luke xv. 22-xvi. 12; xvii. 1-23; John vii. 37-52; viii. 12-19. They were published by Roediger (Monatsbericht, Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, July, 1872), and were privately printed by the late Professor Wright to range with Cureton's volume. Within the last year the discovery has been announced of another Curetonian MS., which was found in the Library of the Convent on Mount Sinai by Mrs. Lewis. An edition of it is now in progress, but will not be published soon enough for notice in this work. The Syriac text of the London MS. was printed in fine Estrangelo type in 1848, and freely imparted to such scholars [pg 015] as might need its help; but it was not till 1858 that the work was published14, with a very literal translation into rather bald English, a beautiful and exact facsimile (Luke xv. 11-13; 16-19) by Mrs. Cureton, and a Preface (pp. xcv), full of interesting and indeed startling matter. Dr. Cureton went so far as to persuade himself that he had discovered in these Syriac fragments a text of St. Matthew's Gospel that “to a great extent, has retained the identical terms and expressions which the Apostle himself employed; and that we have here, in our Lord's discourses, to a great extent the very same words as the Divine Author of our holy religion Himself uttered in proclaiming the glad tidings of salvation in the Hebrew dialect ...” (p. xciii): that here in fact we have to a great extent the original of that Hebrew Gospel of St. Matthew of which the canonical Greek Gospel is but a translation. It is beside our present purpose to examine in detail the arguments of Dr. Cureton on this head15, and it would be the less necessary in any case, since they seem to have convinced no one save himself: but the place his version occupies with reference to the Peshitto is a question upon which there has been and still prevails a controversy which largely concerns the issue between contending schools of textual critics16.

Any one who shall compare the verses we have cited from them in parallel columns (pp. 38-40) will readily admit that the translations have a common origin, whatever that may be; many other passages, though not perhaps of equal length, might be named where the resemblance is closer still; where for twenty words together the Peshitto and the Curetonian shall be positively identical, although the Syriac idiom would admit other words and another order just as naturally as that actually employed. Nor will this conclusion be shaken by the not less manifest fact that throughout many passages the diversity is so great that no one, with those places alone before him, would be led to suspect any connexion between the two versions; for resemblances in such a case furnish a positive proof, not to be weakened by the mere negative presumption supplied by divergencies. Add to this the consideration that the Greek manuscripts from which either version was made or corrected (as the case may prove) were materially different in their character; the Peshitto for the most part favouring Cod. A17, the Curetonian taking part with Cod. D, or with the Old Latin, or often standing quite alone, unsupported by any critical authority whatever; and the reader is then in possession of the whole case, from whose perplexities we have to unravel our decision, which of these two recensions [pg 017] best exhibits the text of the Holy Gospels as received from the second century downwards by the Syrian Church.

We must not dissemble the fact that Cureton's view of the superior antiquity of the Curetonian to the Peshitto has been adopted by many eminent scholars. So for example Dr. Hort, who was obliged to account for the relation of the two by a baseless supposition of an imaginary recension at Edessa or Nisibis when the Peshitto was drawn up as a Syrian “Vulgate” (The New Testament in Greek, pp. 135-7). So with more strength of argument Dr. Nestle in “Real Encyclopedie für protestanche Theologie en Kirche18.”

1. Now it is obvious to remark, in the first place, that the Peshitto has the advantage of possession, and that too of fourteen centuries standing. The mere fact that the Syriac manuscripts of the rival sects, whether modern or as old as the seventh century, agree with each other in the most important points, and at least to a large extent with the citations from Ephraem and Aphraates, as will be shown, seems to bring the Peshitto text, substantially in the same state as we have it at present, up to the fourth century of our era. Of this version, again, there are many codices, of different ages and widely diffused; of the Curetonian there is indeed one, of the fifth century, so far as the verdict of a most accomplished judge can determine so delicate a question: yet surely this is not to be much preferred, in respect to antiquity, to those ancient copies of the Peshitto which we have enumerated on pp. 10, 11, and which include a MS. of the fifth century, several others nearly as ancient, and two which are dated in the sixth century, the Florentine of a.d. 586, and the Vatican of a.d. 548. Another “Curetonian” MS., lately discovered, is still under examination, and we have, as yet, no adequate account of it. From the Peshitto, as the authorized version of the Oriental Church, there are many quotations in Syriac books from the fourth century downwards; Dr. Cureton, perhaps the profoundest Syriac scholar of his day in England, failed to allege any second citation from the Gospels by a native writer which [pg 018] might serve to keep in countenance the statement of Dionysius Barsalibi, late in the twelfth century, that “there is found occasionally a Syriac copy made out of the Hebrew, which inserts the three kings in the genealogy” (Matt. i. 8)19. With every wish to give to this respectable old writer, and to others who bear testimony to the same reading, the consideration that is fairly their due, we can hardly fail to see that the weight of evidence enormously preponderates in the opposite scale.

2. It will probably be admitted that in external proof Cureton's theory is not strong, while yet the internal character of the version may be deemed by many powerfully to favour his view. Negligent or licentious renderings (and the Curetonian Syriac is pretty full of them) cannot but lessen a version's usefulness as an instrument of criticism, by increasing our difficulty of reproducing the precise words of the original which the translator had before him; but in another point of view these very faults may still form the main strength of Dr. Cureton's case. It is, no doubt, a grave suggestion, that the more polished, accurate, faithful, and grammatical of the two versions—and the Peshitto richly deserves all this praise—is more likely to have been produced by a careful and gradual revision of one much its inferior in these respects, than the worse to have originated in the mere corruption of the better (Cureton, Pref. p. lxxxi). A priori, we readily confess that probability inclines this way; but it is a probability which needs the confirmation of facts, and by adverse facts may be utterly set aside. Cureton's remark that “upon the comparison of several of the oldest copies now in the British Museum of that very text of the Gospels which has been generally received as the Peshitto, the more ancient the manuscripts be, the more nearly do they correspond with the text of these Syriac fragments” (Pref. p. lxxiii), is confirmed by other, and subsequent, labourers in the same field. The received text of the Peshitto was printed from MSS. of a late type. It was the opinion of P. E. Pusey (whose name has already been mentioned in these pages) that a revision of the Peshitto text was made in the eighth century. The oldest Syriac Massoretic MS. which we possess is dated a. gr. 1210 = a.d. 89920, but a copy of the Gospels (Add. 14,448), the date of which appears to [pg 019] be a. h. 80 = a.d. 699-700, contains a text which approximates to the type of the printed Peshitto, but exhibits marginal notes in a later hand, referring, however, chiefly to pronunciation and accentuation. There is no evidence that any formal revision took place; but it would appear certain that as questions of orthography, of grammar, and of pronunciation were fixed by the decisions of the Massoretes and grammarians, the faults (as they were deemed) of the older readings were emended by scribes. Hence it is, that if we open a codex of the Peshitto Gospels of about the date of the Codex Curetonianus, we find many resemblances of the kind indicated by Cureton, between the fifth century Peshitto text and the Curetonian text, because both belong to an early, and perhaps less accurate era of transcription21. But the resemblances only extend to matters of grammar and spelling. In more important readings, the fifth century form of the Peshitto does not approximate to the Curetonian text. This was clearly seen by Pusey, as a result of the collation of a large number of Peshitto MSS. He found that the text of the oldest of them was substantially the same as that which is printed in the Polyglotts. The grammar may have been improved, but the translation was not revised. This argument has been elaborated in two volumes of the Oxford “Studia Biblica,” in part by the use of Philip Pusey's materials, in part by independent researches. In vol. i, paper viii, “A Syriac Biblical MS. of the fifth century,” the readings which appear to be peculiar to that MS. (about seventy in number, for it only contains SS. Matthew and Mark) are set out22. Of these twenty-two can be compared with the Curetonian; and it is found that only three approximate more nearly than the printed Peshitto to the text which, it is contended, is older than the Peshitto. Further on23 a stronger argument is adduced; for it is shown that in eleven passages, where the fifth century codex has a different reading from the printed Peshitto, the Curetonian, instead of agreeing with the ancient text (as ex hypothesi it ought) approximates to the printed Peshitto, and sometimes agrees with it. In vol. ii, paper iii, “The materials for the criticism of the Peshitto New Testament,” other evidence is adduced in support of the same conclusions. St. Matt. v. 31-48 [pg 020] is given, with varr. lectt. derived from twenty distinct authorities, so as to place before the reader the Peshitto in its best and most ancient form. The same passage is set out in the Curetonian form. The various readings in the Peshitto in the eighteen verses amount to at least thirty-one; but the majority are the merest minutiae of spelling and pronunciation. Only one deserves serious attention; and even that, more for accuracy than in relation to the sense of the context; so little has the Syriac New Testament been altered, or corrupted, in the course of ages of transcription. Again, when comparison is made with the Curetonian, while twenty-eight variations from the best form of the Peshitto occur in the above passage, only four find any support in an old Peshitto MS., and but one of the four is of any interest. In addition to these there is one place where the Curetonian agrees with the oldest Peshitto MSS., against the printed Peshitto text. It is plain then that, as far as the enquiry has yet been pursued, the peculiar readings of the Curetonian cannot be traced backwards through the form of text in the oldest Peshitto MSS. If such a revision of the Peshitto, as Dr. Hort's theory postulates, ever took place, it must have been made at a very remote period in the history of Syriac Christian literature; and the new text must have been substituted for the old by measures so drastic that the old (as far as we know) survives only in one Nitrian and (as we are told) in one Sinaitic MS. But this is not only improbable in itself, but is contrary to the analogy supplied by the Latin versions.

Those who contend for the superior antiquity of the Curetonian rely in great part on the character of the quotations in the two great Syriac writers, Aphraates and Mar-Ephraem, who flourished in the century preceding the era in which our oldest Peshitto MSS. were transcribed24. Both writers abound in quotations from the New Testament, but many of them are very free, or mere adaptations. A large number in St. Ephraem are certainly from the Peshitto. Wright, in his edition of Aphraates, was inclined to attribute that writer's quotations to the same source. This has been traversed by others, who contend that the quotations in Aphraates more nearly resemble the Curetonian, or the text of Tatian's Diatessaron, as far as we know it. [pg 021] The question of the source of St. Ephraem's quotations has been fully discussed in “Studia Biblica,” iii, paper iv, by Rev. F. H. Woods, who has also taken some notice of those in Aphraates. Mr. Woods holds, as do others (though, as we think, on insufficient evidence) that the text of the Peshitto was not fully settled in the days of Aphraates and Ephraem. His conclusion is that it is quite clear, that Ephraem, in the main, used the Peshitto text (op. cit., p. 107), but as regards Aphraates, he holds that the quotations approximate more closely to the Curetonian. Yet Dr. Zahn, and many others, think that Aphraates used the Diatessaron. The statement of these differences of opinion is enough in itself to show that the source of quotations in these ancient Syriac books is not always easy to determine. Hence it follows that arguments based on the writings of Aphraates and Ephraem are precarious. Moreover, a variation from the Peshitto does not necessarily indicate the employment of another version. The variation might be derived from a Greek text; for there was constant intercourse between Greek and Syrian Christians, and many of the latter were well acquainted with Greek.

While we seek in vain amongst the readings of MSS., and the writings of Syriac authors, for any satisfactory explanation of the origin of the Curetonian, the work itself may perhaps reveal something of its nature, if not of its history. We have already seen25 that in the opinion of certain textual critics the history of the Latin Vulgate must have its counterpart in the history of the Bible of Edessa. The origin of Jerome's translation is well known. It is supposed that the Peshitto grew in like manner out of an earlier translation. It is contended that the Ur-Peshitto is represented to us by the text of the Curetonian; and the two texts have been compared in order to establish this relation. In so doing, no sufficient account has been taken of the phenomena presented by the differences between the Peshitto and the Curetonian. When it is argued that in some of those differences the Peshitto text bears marks of emendation, of the improving touch of a later hand, we answer26, that in others there are as evident marks in the Curetonian of alteration and [pg 022] corruption. Indeed, to so large an extent do these prevail, that there are good grounds for the suspicion which has been entertained that the Curetonian (at least as exhibited by the editor from his MS.) is itself the later version. In order to give effect to this argument, it would be necessary to show the entire extant Curetonian text, side by side with the corresponding portions of the Peshitto; otherwise it is scarcely possible to realize (i) how manifestly the Curetonian is an attempt to improve upon the Peshitto text; and (ii) how frequently (as a later composition) it demands an acquaintance with the Gospels on the part of the reader; and (iii) how it is pervaded by views of Gospel history, which belong to the Church rather than to the sacred text. But even the short passages, which we have printed as specimens, afford illustrations of the argument.

1. In St. Matthew xii. 1-4, where the Peshitto exhibits the Textus Receptus, saying that the disciples were hungry, and began to pluck ears of corn and to eat, the Curetonian improves upon the Peshitto thus:—“and the disciples were hungry and began to pluck ears of corn, and break them in their hands, and eat”—introducing words borrowed from St. Luke27.

2. (α) But in the next verse of the passage, where the words “on the sabbath” are absolutely required in order to make the Pharisees' question intelligible to the first readers of St. Matthew, the Curetonian must needs draw on the common knowledge of educated readers by exhibiting the question thus:—“Why are thy disciples doing what is not lawful to do?” Of course the Peshitto is here an “improvement” on the Curetonian, in reading the words “on the Sabbath”; but that does not affect our argument. Would a primitive version, intended for first converts, have left the reader ignorant what the action objected to might be? whether to pluck ears in another man's field, or to rub out grain on the Sabbath? But a later editor, who revised the text for some purpose (it matters not, at present, for what purpose), might consider the explanatory words superfluous.

(β) In like manner in ver. 4, “the bread of the table of the Lord,” a simple phrase, which every one could understand, has become in the Curetonian “face-bread,” an expression which [pg 023] demands knowledge of the earlier Scriptures on the part of the reader, and displays the erudition of the editor, as do his emendations in the list of names in the first chapter of St. Matthew28.

3. The other passage which we print (St. Mark xvi. 17-29) will illustrate our third criticism. The Curetonian is, “Our Lord Jesus then, after He had commanded His disciples, was exalted to heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.” The simpler Peshitto phrase runs thus, “Jesus our Lord then, after He had spoken with them, ascended to heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.” The two slight touches of improvement in the Curetonian are evident, and belong to that aspect of the record which finds expression in the Creeds, and in the obedience of the Church. A similar touch appears in the Curetonian addition to ver. 17—them that believe on me.

Again in Matt. v. 32 we read (with all authorities), “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for the cause of fornication,” &c.; so the Peshitto; but the Curetonian substitutes adultery, and thereby sanctions, not the precept delivered by our Lord, but the interpretation almost universally placed upon it. Now either the Curetonian has alone preserved the true text, or the Curetonian is an emended version. The first supposition is unreasonable; the latter is alone suitable to this and to many other passages.

Not less curious is the addition in ver. 41, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him two others.” The Curetonian (with D and some Latin copies) make our Lord say, “Go three miles.” If we cannot admit that this is the true text, then it is an emendation; for it is no accidental change.

But there is a distinct group of emendations which vividly illustrates our contention, that the Curetonian form of Syriac text is pervaded by views of Gospel history which belong rather to the Church than to the sacred records. While fully accepting the Catholic dogma of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin, we must grant that it is in the nature of a pious opinion, which Christian sentiment recognized as true, but which is not explicitly stated in the New Testament. Hence we view with grave suspicion a class of emendations which are obviously [pg 024] framed to confute the heresy of the Helvidians. Such a class is found in St. Matt. i. In ver. 16, Pesh., “Joseph the husband of Mary;” Cur., “Joseph to whom was espoused Mary the Virgin.” Ver. 19, Pesh., “Joseph her husband, being a just man;” Cur., “Joseph, because he was a righteous man.” Ver. 20, Pesh., “Fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife;” Cur., “Mary thy espoused.” Ver. 24, Pesh., “Joseph ... took unto him his wife;” Cur., “took Mary.” The Curetonian translator, for dogmatic purposes, makes four distinct and separate omissions, in three of which he stands unsupported—of the word husband in two places, of the word wife in two others. These are emendations of a deliberate and peculiar kind. We cannot account for all these vagaries by remarking that the Curetonian has often the support of the so-called Western family of text29. We must face the question whether the MS. of an ancient version, which exhibits such singular phenomena on its first page, is worthy to be set above that version, which is the common heritage of the whole Syriac Church, and which appears to be the basis of the Curetonian itself. To determine the place of a document in our Apparatus Criticus, we must know something of its history. Of the history of the Curetonian version we know nothing. Its internal character inspires grave doubts of its trustworthiness. We note its peculiarities with interest; but we do not yet see our way to yield much deference to its authority. The Peshitto bears witness to that form of text, which was received in very ancient times in the Syriac Church. The Curetonian, like the Palestinian, is interesting as showing what readings were accepted locally, or by individual editors30.

3. The Harkleian or Philoxenian Syriac.

Of the history of the Harkleian Syriac version, which embraces the whole New Testament except the Apocalypse, we possess more exact information, though some points of difficulty may still remain unsolved. Moses of Aghel in Mesopotamia, who translated into Syriac certain works of the Alexandrian Cyril about a.d. 550, describes a version of the “New Testament and Psalter made in Syriac by Polycarp, Rural-Bishop31 (rest his soul!), for Xenaias of Mabug,” &c. This Xenaias or Philoxenus, from whom the original translation takes its name, was Monophysite Bishop of Mabug (Hierapolis) in Eastern Syria (488-518), and doubtless wished to provide for his countrymen a more literal translation from the Greek than the Peshitto aims at being. His scheme may perhaps have been injudicious, but it is a poor token of the presence of that quality which “thinketh no evil,” to assert, without the slightest grounds for the suspicion, “More probable it is that his object was of a less commendable character; and that he meant the version in some way to subserve the advancement of his party32.” Dr. Davidson will have learnt by this time, that one may lie under the imputation of heresy, without being of necessity a bigot or a dunce.

Our next account of the work is even more definite. At the end of the manuscripts of the Gospels from which the printed text is derived, we read a subscription by the first hand, importing that “this book of the four holy Gospels was translated out of the Greek into Syriac with great diligence and labour ... first in the city of Mabug, in the year of Alexander of Macedon 819 (a.d. 508), in the days of the pious Mar Philoxenus, confessor, Bishop of that city. Afterwards it was collated with much diligence by me, the poor Thomas, by the help of two [or three] approved and accurate Greek Manuscripts in Antonia, of the great city of Alexandria, in the holy monastery of the Antonians. It was again written out and collated in the aforesaid place in the year of the same Alexander 927 (a.d. 616), Indiction iv. How much toil I spent upon it and its companions the Lord alone knoweth ... &c.” It is plain that by “its companions” the other parts of the N. T. are meant, for a similar subscription (specifying but one manuscript) is annexed to the Catholic Epistles.

That the labour of Thomas (surnamed from Harkel, his native place, and like Philoxenus, subsequently Monophysite Bishop of Mabug) was confined to the collation of the manuscripts he names, and whose various readings, usually in Greek characters, with occasional exegetical notes, stand in the margin of all copies but one at Florence, is not a probable opinion. It is likely that he added the asterisks and obeli which abound in the version33 and G. H. Bernstein (De Charklensi N. T. transl. Syriac. Commentatio, Breslau, 1837) believes that he so modified the text itself, that it remains in the state in which Polycarp left it only in one codex now at Rome, which he collated for a few chapters of St. John.

We have been reminded by Tregelles, who was always ready to give every one his due, that our own Pococke in 1630, in the Preface to his edition of the Catholic Epistles not included in the Peshitto, both quotes an extract from Dionysius Barsalibi, Bishop of Amida (Diarbekr), who flourished in the twelfth [pg 027] century, which mentions this version, and even shows some acquaintance with its peculiar character. Although again brought to notice in the comprehensive “Bibliotheca Orientalis” (1719-28) of the elder J. S. Assemani [1687-1768], the Harkleian attracted no attention until 1730, in which year Samuel Palmer sent from Diarbekr to Dr. Gloucester Ridley four Syriac manuscripts, two of which proved to belong to this translation, both containing the Gospels, one of them being the only extant copy of the Acts and all the Epistles. Fortunately Ridley [1702-1774] was a man of some learning and acuteness, or these precious codices might have lain disregarded as other copies of the same version had long done in Italy; so that though he did not choose to incur the risk of publishing them in full, he communicated his discovery to Wetstein, who came to England once more, in 1746, for the purpose of collating them for his edition of the N. T., then soon to appear: he could spare, however, but fourteen days for the task, which was far too short a time, the rather as the Estrangelo character, in which the manuscripts were written, was new to him. In 1761 Ridley produced his very careful and valuable tract, De Syriacarum N. F. Versionum Indole atque Usu Dissertatio, and on his death his manuscripts went to New College, of which society he had been a Fellow. The care of publishing them was then undertaken by the Delegates of the Oxford Press, who selected for their editor Joseph White [1746-1814], then Fellow of Wadham College and Professor of Arabic, afterwards Canon of Christ Church; who, though now, I fear, chiefly remembered for the most foolish action of his life, was an industrious, able, and genuine scholar. Under his care the Gospels appeared in two vols. 4to, 177834 with [pg 028] a Latin version and satisfactory Prolegomena; the Acts and Catholic Epp. in 1799, the Pauline in 1803. Meanwhile Storr (Observat. super N. T. vers. Syr., 1772) and Adler (N. T. Version. Syr., 1789) had examined and described seven or eight continental codices of the Gospels in this version, some of which are thought superior to White's35.

The characteristic feature of the Harkleian is its excessive closeness to the original: it is probably the most servile version of Scripture ever made. Specimens of it will appear on pp. 38-40, by the side of those from other translations, which will abundantly justify this statement. The Peshitto is beyond doubt taken as its basis, and is violently changed in order to force it into rigorous conformity with the very letter of the Greek. In the twenty verses of Matt. xxviii we note seventy-six such alterations: three of them seem to concern various readings (vers. 2-18; and 5 marg.); six are inversions in the order; about five are substitutions of words for others that may have grown obsolete: the rest are of the most frivolous description, the definite state of nouns being placed for the absolute, or vice versa; the Greek article represented by the Syriac pronoun; the inseparable pronominal affixes (that delicate peculiarity of the Aramaean dialects) retrenched or discarded; the most unmeaning changes made in the tenses of verbs, and the lesser particles. Its very defects, however, as being servilely accurate, give it weight as a textual authority: there can be no hesitation about the readings of the copies from which such a book was made. While those employed for the version itself in the sixth century resembled more nearly our modern printed editions, the three or more codices used by Thomas at Alexandria must have been nearly akin to Cod. D (especially in the Acts), and, next to D, support BL, 1, 33, 69. “Taken altogether,” is Dr. Hort's comment, “this is one of the most confused texts preserved: but it may be rendered more intelligible by fresh collations and better editing, even if they should fail to distinguish the work of Thomas of Harkel from that of his predecessor Polycarpus” (Introd., p. 156).

The number of MSS. of this Harkleian version is far greater [pg 029] than it was supposed to have been. The important discovery of the Mohl MS., now in the possession of the Cambridge University Library, brings down the Epistle to the Hebrews to the conclusion, so that we now possess the Pauline Epistles complete in this revision.

The following account of the MSS. of the Harkleian, consists in his own words of what Mr. Deane has seen himself, many of which he has collated. The letters are those by which he intended to have designated these MSS. had his sight enabled him to complete his revision.

The last of these would probably be the text from which any new edition would be printed. It is a most remarkable MS., executed with great care, and by a good Syrian scholar. Students should observe especially the curious diacritic point by which he designates the Nom. pendens. “I have not seen,” Mr. Deane adds, “that elsewhere, though doubtless it exists36.”

4. The Palestinian or Jerusalem Syriac.

There are extant several scattered fragments of the Old and New Testaments, in a form of Syriac entirely distinct from the versions already described. These fragments are all in one dialect, and are apparently parts of a single version. The most considerable portion is an Evangelistarium which was discovered virtually by Adler, who collated, described, and copied a portion of it (Matt. xxvii. 3-32) for that great work in a small compass, his “N. T. Versiones Syriacae” (1789): S. E. Assemani the nephew had merely inserted it in his Vatican Catalogue (1756). It is a partial Lectionary of the Gospels in the Vatican (MS. Syr. 19), on 196 quarto thick vellum leaves, written in two columns in a rude hand, the rubric notes of Church Lessons in Carshunic, i.e. Arabic in Syriac letters, with many mistakes. From a subscription, we learn that the scribe was Elias, a presbyter of Abydos, who wrote it in the Monastery of the Abbat Moses at Antioch, in the year of Alexander 1341, or a.d. 1030. Adler gives a poor facsimile (Matt. xxvii. 12-22): the character is peculiar, and all diacritic points (even that distinguishing dolath from rish), as well as many other changes, are thought to be by a later hand. Tregelles confirms Assemani's statement, which Adler had disputed, that the first six leaves, showing traces of Greek writing buried beneath the Syriac, proceeded from another scribe. The remarkable point, however, about this version (which seems to be made from the Greek, and is quite independent of the Peshitto) is the peculiar dialect it exhibits, and which has suggested its name. Its grammatical forms are far less Syriac than Chaldee, which latter it resembles even in that characteristic particular, the prefixing of yud, not nun, to the third person masculine of the future of verbs37; and many of the words it employs can be illustrated only from the Chaldee portions of the Old Testament, or from the Jerusalem, or Palestinian, Targum and Talmud38. Adler's [pg 031] account of the translation and its copyist is not very flattering, “satis constat dialectum esse incultam et inconcinnam ... orthographiam autem vagam, inconstantem, arbitrariam, et ab imperito librario rescribendo et corrigendo denuo impeditam” (Vers. Syr., p. 149). As it is mentioned by no Syriac writer, it was probably used but in a few remote churches of Lebanon or Galilee: but though (to employ the words of Porter) “in elegance far surpassed by the Peshitto; in closeness of adherence to the original by the Philoxenian” (Principles of Textual Criticism, Belfast, 1848, p. 356); it has its value, and that not inconsiderable, as a witness to the state of the text at the time it was turned into Syriac; whether, with Adler, we regard it as derived from a complete version of the Gospels made not later than the sixth century, or with Tischendorf refer it to the fifth39. Tregelles (who examined the codex at Rome) wrongly judged it a mere translation of some Greek Evangelistarium of a more recent date. Of all the Syriac books, this copy and Barsalibi's recension of the Harkleian alone contain John vii. 53-viii. 11; the Lectionary giving it as the Proper Lesson for Oct. 8, St. Pelagia's day. In general its readings much resemble those of Codd. BD, siding with B eighty-five times, with D seventy-nine, in the portions published by Adler; but with D alone eleven times, with B alone but three.

The information afforded by Adler respecting this remarkable document gave rise to a natural wish that the whole manuscript should be carefully edited by some respectable scholar. This has now been done by Count Francis Miniscalchi Erizzo, who in 1861-4 published at Verona in two quarto volumes “Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum ex Codice Vaticano Palaestino deprompsit, edidit, Latinè vertit, Prolegomenis ac Glossario adornavit Comes F. M. E.” This elaborate work, for such it is, although its execution fails on the whole to satisfy critics of the calibre of Land and the Abbé Martin, ends with a list of those chapters and verses of the Gospels (according to the notation of the Latin Vulgate), which the manuscript contains [pg 032] in full. Tischendorf, in the eighth edition of his Greek Testament, enriched his notes with the various readings these Church Lessons exhibit; their critical character being much the same as Adler's slight specimen had given us reason to expect40. The Lectionary closely resembles that of the Greek Church, the slight differences in the beginnings and endings of the Lessons scarcely exceeding those subsisting between different Greek copies, as noticed in our Synaxarion. It contains the Sunday and week-day Gospels for the first eight weeks beginning at Easter (with a few verses lost in two places of Week viii); the Saturday and Sunday Gospels only for the rest of the year; the Lessons for the Holy Week, complete as detailed in Vol. I. 85, with two or three slight exceptions; and the eleven Gospels of the Resurrection. In the Menology or Calendar of Immoveable Feasts, there is a greater amount of variation in regard to the Saints' Days kept, as indeed we might have looked for beforehand. We subjoin a list of those whose Gospels are given at length in the manuscript, together with the portions of Scripture appointed for each day, in order that this curious Syriac service-book may be compared with that of the Greeks.

A new edition of Adler's Evangelistarium was projected by the late Dr. P. A. de Lagarde, who made a fresh collation of the MS. shortly before his death. The results have been published in a posthumous work entitled “Bibliothecae Syriacae a Paulo de Lagarde collectae,” 1892. The latter part contains the Evangelistarium, with the text set out in the order of the Gospels, instead of that of the Church Lessons, and notes are added on the readings of the MS. and its correctors, and on the edition of Miniscalchi Erizzo.

Mr. J. Rendel Harris has published in “Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai” a leaf containing Gal. ii. 3-5, 12-14; iii. 17, 18, 24-28.

In the Bodleian Library are four fragments, Col. iv. 12-18; 1 Thess. i. 1-3; iv. 3-15; 2 Tim. i. 10-ii. 7; Titus i. 11-ii. 5, an edition of which has been accomplished by the Rev. G. H. Gwilliam46.

5. The Karkaphensian or Syriac Massorah.

Assemani (Biblioth. Orient., tom. ii. p. 283), on the authority of Gregory Bar-Hebraeus, mentions what has been supposed to have been a Syriac “version” of the N. T., other than the Peshitto and Harkleian, which was named “Karkaphensian” (ܩܪܩܦܢܬܐ or ܐܬܢܦܩܪܩ), whether, as he thought, because it was used by Syrians of the mountains, or from Carcuf, a city of Mesopotamia. Adler (Vers. Syr., p. 33) was inclined to believe that Bar-Hebraeus meant rather a revised manuscript than a separate translation. Cardinal Wiseman, in the course of those youthful studies which gave such seemly, precocious, deceitful promise (Horae Syriacae, Rom. 1828), discovered in the Vatican (MS. Syr. 152) a Syriac manuscript of readings from both Testaments, with the several portions of the New standing in the following order; Acts, James, 1 Peter, 1 John, the fourteen Epistles of St. Paul, and then the Gospels, these being the only books contained in the true Peshitto. In the margin also are placed by the first hand many readings indicated by the abbreviation ܛܘ (or ܘܛ) [with a line over the last letter], the title of some scribe or teacher47. The codex is on thick yellow vellum, in large folio, with the two columns so usual in Syriac writing; the ink, especially the points in vermilion, has often grown pale, and it has been carefully retouched by a later hand; the original document being all the work of one scribe: some of the marginal notes refer to various readings. There are several long and tedious subscriptions in [pg 035] the volume, whereof one states that the copy was written “in the year of the Greeks 1291 (a.d. 980) in the [Monophysite] monastery of Aaron on [mount] Sigara, in the jurisdiction of Calisura, in the days of the Patriarchs John and Menna, by David a deacon of Urin in the jurisdiction of Gera” [Γέρρα, near Beroea or Aleppo]. It may be remarked that Assemani has inserted a letter in the “Bibliotheca Orientalis” from John the Monophysite Patriarch [of Antioch] to his brother Patriarch, Menna of Alexandria. This manuscript, of which Wiseman gives a rather rude facsimile, is deemed by him of great importance in tracing the history of the Syriac vowel-points. Other Karkaphensian manuscripts have been examined since Wiseman's time; and all, whether containing more, or less, of the actual text, agree in the parts which are common, with, however, some independent readings. We subjoin Matt. i. 19 in four texts, wherein the close connexion of the Karkaphensian and the Nestorian recension with the Peshitto is very manifest.

Curetonian.

Nestorian Massorah. Cod. Add. Brit. Mus. 12,138.

Harkleian—from White.

* Marg. παραδειγματίσαι.

Jacobite Massorah (“Karkaphensian”). Cod. Add. Brit. Mus. 12,178.

Peshitto Text—from the MSS.

ܝܘܣܦ ܝܢ ܟܙܠܗ ܒܐܢܐ ܗܘܐ ܝܘܣܦ ܕ ܫܢ ܒܠܠܗ ܒܐܢܐ ܗܘܐ ܘܠ ܀

The reader must not be misled by this specimen to infer that the Karkaphensian always coincides with the Peshitto. It is not a continuous text, but only those verses or passages are quoted where some word or words occur concerning which some annotation is required in reference to orthography or pronunciation. Whole verses or parts of verses are often omitted48.

Very recently, since the last illness of Dr. Scrivener had commenced, [pg 036] the results of a wider examination of Syriac MSS. in different Libraries have been made more generally known by Mr. Gwilliam's Essay in the third volume of “Studia Biblica49.” According to the investigations of the leading Syriac scholars, it appears that the Karkaphensian is not a distinct version, but a kind of Massorah—the attempt to preserve the best traditions of the orthography and pronunciation of the more important or difficult words of the Syriac Vernacular Bible. This Massoretic teaching differs from the Hebrew Massorah, in that whilst the latter supplies us with all that we know of the form of the Jewish Scriptures50, the Syriac Massorah is younger than our oldest copies of the Syriac Bible. The following are Syriac Massoretic MSS.:—

Thus the Massorah is extant in two forms, corresponding to the two branches of the Syrian Church. But only one MS. is Nestorian (Cod. Add. 12,138), whilst all except that one are Jacobite.

The name Karkaphensian is connected with the Jacobite Massorah, and signifies the kind of text which was favoured in the Scriptorium of the Skull Convent51. Allusions to the Skull Convent are found; the adjective itself occurs in St. Matt. xxvii. 33, and the parallel passages, as a translation of κρανίου. It is known that grammatical and philological studies were pursued by Jacob of Edessa (d. a.d. 710), probably by Joseph Huzita, rector of the school at Nisibis (vi); and a tract attached to Add. 12,178 suggests a connexion between these criticisms and the labours of one “Thomas the Deacon52.”

We have now traced the history of the several Syriac versions, so far at least as to afford the reader some general idea of their relative importance as materials for the correction of the sacred text. We will next give parallel renderings of Matt. xii. 1-4; Mark xvi. 17-20 from the Peshitto, the Curetonian, and the Harkleian, the only versions known in full; for Matt. xxvii. 3-8, in the room of the Curetonian, which is here lost, we have substituted the Jerusalem Syriac, and have retained throughout Thomas' marginal notes to the Harkleian, its asterisks and obeli. We have been compelled to employ the common Syriac type, though every manuscript of respectable antiquity is written in the Estrangelo character. Even from these slight specimens the servile strictness of the Harkleian, and some leading characteristics of the other versions, will readily be apprehended by an attentive student (e.g. of the Curetonian in Matt. xii. 1; 4; Mark xvi. 18; 20).

We hoped to include in this account some description of the MS. lately discovered by Mrs. Lewis in the Monastery of St. Catherine, at Mount Sinai, and brought in copy last spring to Cambridge. It is now undergoing the careful and skilful examination which the character of the accomplished assistants of Mrs. Lewis ensures, and it is impossible at present to anticipate the verdict upon it which those scholars may recommend, and which may be finally adopted by the learned world at large. The photographic illustration of a page, which has been made public53, does not suggest that the MS. possesses any very remarkable antiquity. But it is due to our argument upon the mutual relations of the Peshitto and the Curetonian to remark, that the Curetonian will even then rest upon only two MSS., one of them being a palimpsest, in face of the numerous supports of the Peshitto, and that even if the Curetonian be proved, as seems improbable, to date from somewhat further back than we have supposed, the claim of the Peshitto to production in the early part of the second century, and to a superior antiquity, will not thereby be removed.

Syriac Versions. Matthew XII. 1-4.

peshitto

curetonian.

harkleian.

Parallel Renderings. Matthew XXVII. 3-8

peshitto.

jerusalem syriac.

harkleian.

Syriac Versions. Mark XVI. 17-20

peshitto.

curetonian.

harkleian.

(1) The Old Latin, previous to Jerome's Revision.

There are passages in the works of the two great Western Fathers of the fourth century, Jerome [345?-420] and Augustine [354-430], whose obvious and literal meaning might lead us to conclude that there existed in their time many Latin translations, quite independent in their origin, and used almost indifferently by the faithful. When Jerome, in that Preface to the Gospels which he addressed to Pope Damasus (in 384), anticipates but too surely the unpopularity of his revision of them among the people of his own generation, he consoles himself by the reflection that the variations of previous versions prove the unfaithfulness of them all: “verum non esse quod variat etiam maledicorum testimonio comprobatur.” Then follows his celebrated assertion: “Si enim Latinis exemplaribus fides est adhibenda, respondeant [pg 042] quibus: tot enim sunt exemplaria pene quot codices54.” The testimony of Augustine seems even more explicit, and at first sight conclusive. In his treatise, De Doctrina Christiana (lib. ii. cc. 11-15), when speaking of “Latinorum interpretum infinita varietas,” and “interpretum numerositas,” as not without their benefit to an attentive reader, he uses these strong expressions: “Qui enim Scripturas ex hebraea lingua in Graecam verterunt, numerari possunt, Latini autem interpretes nullo modo. Ut enim cuique primis fidei temporibus in manus venit codex Graecus, et aliquantulum facultatis sibi utriusque linguae habere videbatur, ausus est interpretari” (c. 11); and he soon after specifies a particular version as preferable to the rest: “In ipsis autem interpretationibus Itala55 ceteris praeferatur. Nam est verborum tenacior cum perspicuitate sententiae” (cc. 14-15).

When, however, the surviving codices of the version or versions previous to Jerome's revision came to be studied and published by Sabatier56 and Bianchini57, it was obvious that though there were many points of difference, there were still traces of a source common to many, if not to all of them; and on a question of this kind, occasional divergency, however extensive, cannot weaken the impression produced by resemblance, if it be too close and constant to be attributable to chance, as we have just seen. The result of a careful and thorough examination and comparison of the existing Old Latin texts, is a conviction that they are all but off-shoots from one, or at most two, parent stocks. Now when, this fact fairly established, we look back at the language employed by Jerome and Augustine, we can easily see [pg 043] that, with some allowance for his habit of rhetorical exaggeration, the former may mean no more by the term “exemplaria” than that the scattered copies of the Latin translation in his own day varied widely from each other; and though the assertions of Augustine are too positive to be thus disposed of, yet he is here speaking, not from his own personal knowledge so much as from vague conjecture; and of what had been done, not in his own time, but “in the first ages of the faith.”

On one point, however, Augustine must be received as a competent and most sufficient witness. We cannot hesitate to believe that one of the several recensions current towards the end of the fourth century was distinguished from the rest by the name of Itala58, and in his judgement deserved praise for its clearness and fidelity. It was long regarded as certain that here we should find the Old Latin version in its purest form, and that in Italy it had been thus used from the very beginning of the Church, “cum Ecclesia Latina sine versione Latina esse non potuerit” (Walton, Proleg. x. 1). Mill indeed reminds us that the early Church at Rome was composed to so great an extent of Jewish and other foreigners, whose vernacular tongue was Greek, that the need of a Latin translation of Scripture would not at first be felt; yet even he would not place its date later than Pius I (142-157), the first Bishop of Rome after Clement who bears a Latin name (Mill, Proleg. § 377). It was not until attention had been specially drawn to the style of the Old Latin version, that scholars began to suggest Africa as the place, and the second half of the second century as the time, of its origin. This opinion, which had obtained favour with Eichhorn and some others before him, may be considered as demonstrated by Cardinal Wiseman, in his “Two letters on some parts of the controversy concerning 1 John v. 759.” So far as his argument rests on the Greek character of the Roman Church, it may not bring conviction to the reflecting reader. Even though the early Bishops of Rome were of foreign origin, though Clement towards the end of the first, Gaius the presbyter late in the second century, who are proved by their names to be Latins, yet chose to write in Greek; [pg 044] it does not follow that the Church would not contain many humbler members, both Romans and Italians, ignorant of any language except Latin, and for whose instruction a Latin version would be required. On the ground of internal evidence, however, Wiseman made out a case which all who have followed him, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Davidson, Tregelles, accept as irresistible; indeed it is not easy to draw any other conclusion from his elaborate comparison of the words, the phrases, and grammatical constructions of the Latin version of Holy Scripture, with the parallel instances by which they can be illustrated from African writers, and from them only (Essays, vol. i. pp. 46-66)60. It is impossible to exhibit any adequate abridgement of an investigation which owes all its cogency to the number and variety of minute particulars, each one weak enough by itself, the whole comprising a mass of evidence which cannot be gainsaid. In the works of Apuleius and of the African Fathers, Tertullian [150?-220?], Cyprian [† 258], and in the following century, Arnobius, Lactantius, Augustine, we obtain a glimpse into the genius and character of the dialect in which the earliest form of the Old Latin version is composed. We see a multitude of words which occur in no Italian author so late as Cicero; constructions (e.g. dominantur eorum, Luke xxii. 25; faciam vos fieri, Matt. iv. 19) or forms of verbs (sive consolamur ... sive exhortamur, 2 Cor. i. 6) abound61, which at Rome had long been obsolete; while the lack of classic polish is not ill-atoned for by a certain vigour which characterizes this whole class of writers, but never degenerates into barbarism.

The European and Italian forms of the Old Latin version will be discussed afterwards.

The following manuscripts of the version are extant. They [pg 045] are usually cited by the small italic letters of the alphabet, according to the custom set by Lachmann (1842-1850), which has been considerably extended, and partially altered, since his time. His a b c d of the Gospels, d e of the Acts, and g of St. Paul, remain the same, but his f and ff of St. Paul = our d and e, and his h = Primasius.

To these thirty-eight codices must be added extracts from the Latin Fathers, of which the Latin interpreter of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Priscillian, and Primasius are the most important for the history of the version. For Tertullian, considerable labour will be saved to the student by the work of H. Roensch (Das neue Testament Tertullians, Leipzig, 1871), who has arranged in order his quotations, direct and indirect; for Cyprian, Hartel's excellent edition (vol. iii in the Vienna Corpus) is marred by his having edited the Testimonia, which consist of direct quotations from the Bible, arranged under various heads, from a late and inferior MS. (see O. L. Bibl. Texts, ii. p. xliii). The works of Priscillian, who suffered death as a heretic in 385, have been quite lately discovered and edited by Dr. G. Schepss (vol. xviii in the Vienna Corpus); the quotations in them bear a strong resemblance to those of the so-called “Speculum” of St. Augustine (m), and are mainly from the Epistles. Primasius, bishop of Hadrumetum (d. 558?), was the author inter alia of a commentary on the Apocalypse; in this he incorporated nearly the entire text of that book, and as this text agrees almost word for word with the citations found in Cyprian's Testimonia, we thus obtain a complete African text of a book in which so many MSS. are defective. In addition to this he quoted largely from another Latin translation of the Apocalypse—that of the Donatist Ticonius—whose version seems to be a good specimen of a later text approximating more closely to the Vulgate; these have also been published quite recently by Professor Haussleiter (Zahn's Forschungen, iv. Teil, Leipzig, 1891).

When we come to arrange these authorities for the Latin version before Jerome, we find a complicated and difficult task before us; for few of our MSS. present a consistent type of text. We will confine ourselves therefore to grouping them in the three great families described by Dr. Hort (Introd. p. 78), whose division has been accepted by most textual critics, and to pointing out how here and there even that division must be accepted with some modification.

The African family is comparatively easy to fix, from the rich store of biblical quotations found in the African Fathers. Tertullian indeed does not give us so much help as we should have expected, as he seems to have largely used a Greek Bible and translated it into Latin himself. Cyprian's quotations, however, are valuable, as he apparently confined himself strictly to the Latin Bible current in his time; he may be taken as the standard of the early African version; to him we must add, for the Gospels, the Bobbio MS. (k) and the Codex Palatinus (e), which, however, represents a stage somewhat later than k; for the Acts, the Fleury palimpsest (h); for the Apocalypse, Primasius and h; and a later and revised stage in the so-called “Speculum” (m), and in the quotations from Ticonius preserved in Primasius.

Existing simultaneously with the African family we find another type of text current in Western Europe, though whether it is a revision of the African text or is of independent origin, it is hard to say. This type Dr. Hort calls the European. It is represented in the Gospels by b, which may be taken as the typical European MS.; by a in St. Matthew, i (Luke and Mark), n and a2 (giving us fragments of all the Gospels from the same MS.); t in St. Mark; in a slightly revised form by h of St. Matthew; in a form marked by special local characteristics, in the Irish MSS. r1 and p (St. John); to a certain extent also by q (i.e. in its renderings, and turns of expression, as distinct from the type of Greek text underlying it); of the early Fathers, the Latin version of Irenaeus may probably be referred to this family.

For the European text in the Acts, Dr. Hort cites the Gigas Holmiensis (g), and the Milan Lectionary g2, and the Bobbio fragments at Vienna (s); for the Epistles, the Corbey MS. of St. James (ff), though this has possibly a tinge of Africanism in it (see Bp. Wordsworth and Dr. Sanday in “Studia Biblica,” i. pp. 113, 233); and g again for the Apocalypse.

The Italian family presents us with a type of text mainly European, but doubly revised; first in its renderings, “to give the Latinity a smoother and more customary aspect,” and secondly in its underlying text, which has been largely corrected from the Greek; in both these points the Italian MSS. are a sort of stepping-stone between the European MSS. and Jerome's Vulgate; and as many of the Biblical quotations in Augustine's works agree closely with them, it is distinctly probable that it was this [pg 056] revision which he praised as the Itala. To this group we would assign f in the Gospels, and less notably q; in the Epistles the Freisingen fragments q of St. John and St. Peter, and r r2 of St. Paul's Epistles, and the Göttweig fragments r3 of Romans and Galatians.

But it will be seen that this arrangement leaves a large number of MSS. unaccounted for; many of the Old Latin MSS. present texts which it is impossible to class either as African, European, or Italian. Some of them possess all three characteristics; some have been half corrected from the Vulgate; and local variation, independent translation from the Greek, and in the case of the Graeco-Latin MSS., assimilation to the Greek, have still further complicated matters. Among these mixed texts must be placed a in SS. Mark, Luke, and John (with occasional Africanisms, and a large element quite peculiar to itself); c, which gives us a text very near the Vulgate in St. John; d, that apparently insoluble problem; ff1 and f2g1sδ; l, a text which to a large extent is almost pure Vulgate, but which at the same time preserves a number of readings, mostly interpolations, that are quite peculiar.

We must bear in mind too that even the MSS. which seem to represent most consistently one type of text, show here and there strange vacillations; e, African throughout as it seems at first sight, must have been copied from an ordinary European MS. in the last few chapters of St. Luke; the parent MS. of r obviously did not contain the pericope de adultera, for that passage has been supplied in a Vulgate text; and other instances might be added.

(2) Jerome's revised Latin Version, commonly called the Vulgate.

The extensive variations then existing between different copies of the Old Latin version, and the obvious corruptions which had crept into some of them, prompted Damasus, Bishop of Rome, in a.d. 382, to commit the important task of a formal revision of the New, and probably of the Old Testament, to Jerome, a presbyter born at Stridon on the confines of Dalmatia and Pannonia, probably a little earlier than a.d. 345. He had just returned to Rome, where he had been educated, from his hermitage in Bethlehem, and in the early ripeness of his scholarship [pg 057] undertook a work for which he was specially qualified, and whose delicate nature he well understood62. Whatever prudence and moderation could do in this case to remove objections or relieve the scruples of the simple, were not neglected by Jerome, who not only made as few changes as possible in the Old Latin when correcting its text by the help of “ancient” Greek manuscripts63, but left untouched many words and forms of expression, and not a few grammatical irregularities, which in a new translation (as his own subsequent version of the Hebrew Scriptures makes clear) he would most certainly have avoided. The four Gospels, as they stand in the traditional Greek order without Western variation, revised but not re-translated on this wise principle, appeared in a.d. 384, accompanied with his celebrated Preface to Damasus (“summus sacerdos”), who died that same year. Notwithstanding his other literary engagements, it is probable enough that his recension of the whole New Testament for public use was completed a.d. 385, though the proof alleged by Mill (N. T., Proleg., § 862), and by others after his example, hardly meets the case. In the next year (a.d. 386), in his Commentary on Galat., Ephes., Titus, and Philem., he indulges in more freedom of alteration as a translator than he had previously deemed advisable; while his new version of the Old Testament from the Hebrew (completed about a.d. 405) is not founded at all on the Old Latin, which was made from the Greek Septuagint; the Psalter excepted, which he executed at Rome at the same date, and in the same spirit, as the Gospels. The boldness of his attempt in regard to the Old Testament is that portion of his labours which alone Augustine disapproved64 (August, ad [pg 058] Hieron. Ep. x. tom. ii. p. 18, Lugd. 1586, a.d. 403), and indeed it was never received entire by the Western Church, which long preferred his slight revision of the Old Latin, made at some earlier period of his life. Gradually, however, Jerome's recension of the whole Bible gained ground, as well through the growing influence of the Church of Rome as from its own intrinsic merits: so that when in course of time it came to take the place of the older version, it also took its name of the Vulgate, or common translation65. Cassiodorus indeed, in the middle of the sixth century, is said to have compared the new and old Latin (of the New, perhaps of both Testaments) in parallel columns, which thus became partially mixed in not a few codices: but Gregory the Great (590-604), while confessing that his Church used both “quia sedes Apostolica, cui auctore Deo praesideo, utrâque utitur,” (Epist. Dedic. ad Leandrum, c. 5), awarded so decided a preference to Jerome's translation from the Hebrew, that this form of his Old Testament version, not without some mixture with his translation from the Septuagint (Walton, Polyglott, Prol. x. pp. 242-244, Wrangham), and his Psalter and New Testament as revised from the Old Latin, came at length to comprise the Vulgate Bible, the only shape in which Holy Scripture was accessible in Western Europe (except to a few scattered scholars) during the long night of the Middle Ages.

But it was not a pure Vulgate text that was thus used; the old versions went on side by side with it for centuries, and even when they were thus nominally superseded, fragments of them found their way into probably all existing MSS. We have already remarked (in c g &c.) how the same MS. will present us with an Old Latin text in some books of the New Testament, and with a Vulgate text in others; we shall note the same phenomenon in other MSS., especially the British and Irish (see the MSS. numbered 51, 67, 78, 85, 87 below), which preserve on the whole a pure Hieronymian text, but are coloured here and there from the earlier versions. Variation was still further increased by the apparently numerous local or provincial recensions which were made, sometimes anonymously, sometimes [pg 059] under the editorship of famous men. Many of the Irish MSS., for instance, seem to have been corrected immediately from the Greek; but the two most notable recensions of the text came, not, as we might have expected, directly from Rome, but from Gaul; they are those of Alcuin and Theodulf in the ninth century. That of Alcuin was undertaken at the desire of Charles the Great66, who bade him (a.d. 797) review and correct certain copies by the best Latin MSS. without reference to the original Greek. Charles' motive was not so much critical as a wish to obtain a standard Bible for church use, and consequently of simple and intelligible Latin. Alcuin obtained bibles for this purpose from his native Northumbria, the scene at the beginning of the eighth century of an earlier recension of the text; for it was to their monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow (see below, p. 71) that Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid had brought the bibles and other books collected in Rome and elsewhere during their journeys; and it was in Northumbria that the magnificent Anglian texts (such as those numbered 29, 64, 82, 91, &c.) were written, perpetuating the pure Vulgate text contained at that time in the Roman MSS.67

At Christmas in 801, Alcuin presented Charles with a copy of the revised Bible68; specimens of this revision are to be found in the MSS. numbered below, 5, 9, 25, 37, 117, and others.

About the same time, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans (787-821), undertook a similar revision, and not of a less scientific character, but followed a different method. Theodulf, himself a Visigoth and born near Narbonne, seems to have done little more than introduce into France the Spanish type of MSS., which was mixed, confused, full of interpolations, and of very slight critical value69; this however he corrected carefully and enriched with a large number of marginal readings. This revision is preserved for us in the Theodulfian Bible at Paris (no. 18 below), [pg 060] less correctly in its sister volume at Puy (no. 24), the Paris MS. (no. 22 below), and partly also in the correction of the Bible of St. Hubert (no. 6).

Two centuries later the text had again degenerated, and our Primate Lanfranc (1069-89) attempted a similar task, perhaps rather with a view to theology than textual criticism (“secundum orthodoxam fidem studuit corrigere”)70. In 1109 Stephen Harding, third abbot of Citeaux, made a further revision, partly from good Latin MSS., partly from the Greek, partly, in the Old Testament, from the Hebrew, as he obtained help from some learned Jewish scholars71. In 1150 his example was followed by Cardinal Nicolaus Maniacoria72. As these individual efforts seemed to have but slight success, the task was taken up in the thirteenth century more fully and systematically by bodies of scholars, in the so-called “Correctoria Bibliorum;” here the variant readings with their authorities, Greek, Latin, ancient, modern, and citations from the Fathers, were carefully registered. The most noticeable examples of these correctoria are (1) the “Correctorium Parisiense” prepared by the Paris theologians. Roger Bacon had a poor opinion of the work done by these students; for some time the MSS. of the Bible that were copied and bought and sold in Paris, he says, were corrupt; they were bad to begin with, and copied carelessly by the booksellers and their scribes, while the theologians were not learned enough to discover and amend the mistakes73. This correctorium is also frequently, but according to Denifle (p. 284) wrongly, called Senonense, as if it was undertaken at the instance of the Bishop of Sens; there is, however, no correctorium Senonense, only the correctiones Senonenses, i.e. corrections made in the Paris Correctorium by the Dominicans residing at Sens; (2) the “Correctorium” of the Dominicans, prepared under the auspices of Hugo de S. Caro, about 1240, the final corrected [pg 061] form of which is now preserved at Paris, B.N. Lat. 16719-16722 (see below, p. 70, no. 23)74; this, however, was again an attempt, not so much to get at Jerome's actual text as, to bring the Latin text into accordance with the Greek or Hebrew75; (3) a better and more critical revision, the “Correctorium Vaticanum,” a good MS. of which is in the Vatican Library (Lat. 3466); the author of this has done his best to restore Jerome's reading throughout, although well learned in Greek and Hebrew; and he has with some probability been identified by Vercellone with a scholar much praised by Roger Bacon as a “sapientissimus homo,” who had spent nearly forty years in the correction of the text76 (Denifle suggests Wilh. de Mara).

These remedies, partial and temporary as they were, seemed all that was possible before the invention of printing; and, indeed, by an unfortunate chance, the worst of the three correctoria, the “Parisiense,” was made use of by Robert Stephen.

Among the earliest productions of the press, Latin Bibles took a prominent position; and during the first half-century of printing at least 124 editions were published77. Of these perhaps the finest is the earliest, the famous “forty-two line” Bible, issued at Mentz between 1452 and 1456, in two volumes, and usually ascribed to Gutenberg78. This is usually called the “Mazarin Bible,” from the copy which first attracted the notice of bibliographers having been discovered in the Library of Cardinal Mazarin; in the New Testament, the order of books is Evv., Paul., Act., Cath., Apoc. Mr. Copinger enumerates twenty-five copies on vellum and paper as still known to exist; there are two in the British Museum. The first Bible published at Rome is dated 1471, and was printed by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two vols., folio; the first octavo edition, or “poor man's [pg 062] Bible,” was printed at Basle in 1491 by Froben. The early editions, however, reproduced the current mediaeval type of text, or copied from each other, the only exceptions being those printed by Froben, whose copies, says Mr. Copinger, were sought after, for their accuracy, by the best scholars in Europe, and whose edition of 1502 with the “glossa ordinaria” sometimes stands quite alone in possessing the true reading. The first, edition with a collection of various readings appears to be one published at Paris in 150479, followed by others at Venice and Lyons in 1511, 1513; and a definite revision of the text was attempted by Cardinal Ximenes, in the famous Complutensian Polyglott (1514, &c.; see Chap. V)80, in which he made use of the Bible of Alcalá (see below, no. 42); but though an advance was made on previous editions, the text was still far from pure. Erasmus, in his famous edition of the Greek Testament, appended a Latin translation; this he made himself directly from the Greek, but in his notes he discusses the current Vulgate text and gives readings from MSS. which he had examined; of these he mentions those at the Royal Library at Mechlin, St. Paul's Cathedral, London, Corsendonk Austin Priory, Constance Cathedral, St. Donatian (Abbaye des Dunes) of Bruges; of these the first and third only can be now identified, see below, pp. 84, 81, nos.81 134, 109. The first edition of a really critical nature was that of Robert Stephen, in 1528; for this he used three good MSS., the Exemplar S. Germani parvum (Par. lat. 11937), the Corbey Bible (Par. lat. 11532-3), and the Bible of St. Denis (Par. lat. 2); see below, nos. 22, 20, 10; and he published a more important edition in 1538-40 (reprinted 1546), in which he made use of seventeen MSS., of which the following82, numbered 19, 21, 22, 100 below, have been identified. This edition is practically the foundation of the Modern Vulgate, and is cited by Wordsworth as ϛ. Later, John Hentenius, in his folio edition of the Bible, (Louvain, 1547, and often reprinted); cited by Wordsworth as [Gothic: H] seems to have used about thirty-one MSS. and two printed copies; but as no various readings are cited from individual [pg 063] MSS., they cannot well be identified; see his preface. Lucas Brugensis (see his catalogue at the end of the Hentenian Bible of 1583, p. 6) also gives a long list of MSS., which seem impossible to be identified83, and we must also bear in mind the corrected editions published by Th. Vivian (Paris), and Junta (Venice), 1534 (both are small copies of the New Testament, corrected occasionally from the Greek), Isidore Clarius (Venice, 1542), J. Benedictus (Paris, 1558), Paul Eber (1565), and Luke Osiander (1578).

When the Council of Trent met, the duty of providing for the members of the Church of Rome the most correct recension of the Latin Bible that skill and diligence could produce was obviously incumbent on it; and in one of its earliest sittings (April 8, 1546) the famous decree was passed, ordaining that of the many published editions of the Holy Scripture “haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio, quae longo tot saeculorum usu in ipsa ecclesia probata est” should be chosen, and “in publicis lectionibus, disputationibus, praedicationibus, et expositionibus pro authentica habeatur” (Sess. iv. Decr. 2); and directing that “posthac sacra Scriptura, potissimum vero haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio quam emendatissime imprimatur.” No immediate action, however, was taken in the matter, and for forty years the editions were still printed and published by private scholars; the Hentenian, for the time being, becoming almost the standard text of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Pius IV had indeed begun the task of correcting the Vulgate Bible, but without immediate result, and under his successors the matter still rested, till the accession of Sixtus V (1585-90)84, a Pope as energetic in his labours on the Holy [pg 064] Scripture as in other spheres of activity. He appointed a commission on the subject, under the presidency of Cardinal Carafa; and after they had presented the Pope with the result of their work, in the beginning of 1589, he devoted himself personally to the study, reading through the whole Bible more than once, and using his best endeavours to bring it to the highest pitch of accuracy. The result of this appeared in a folio edition of the Bible in three volumes, in 159085, accompanied by a Bull, in which, after relating the extreme care that had been taken in preparing the volume, Sixtus V declared that it was to be considered as the authentic edition recommended by the Council of Trent, that it should be taken as the standard of all future reprints, and that all copies should be corrected by it. The edition itself (cited by Wordsworth as [Gothic: S]) was not without faults, and indeed received a good number of corrections by hand after the proofs were printed off; it presents a text more nearly resembling that of Robt. Stephen than that of John Hentenius. In a few months, however, Sixtus was dead; a number of short-lived Popes succeeded him, and in Jan. 1592, Clement VIII ascended the throne. Almost immediately he gave orders for the copies of the Sixtine Vulgate to be called in; it has been hitherto supposed simply on account of its inaccuracy, but Professor Nestle (pp. 17 ff.) argues reasonably enough that this ground is insufficient, and suggests that the revocation was really due to the influence of the Jesuits, whom Sixtus had offended by placing one of Bellarmine's books on the Index Librorum prohibitorum. Be that as it may, in the same year the Clementine edition of the Vulgate (Wordsworth's [Gothic: C]) was published, differing from the Sixtine in many places, and presenting a type of text more nearly allied to Hentenius' Bible. To avoid the appearance of a conflict between the two Popes, the Clementine Bible was boldly published under the name of Sixtus, with a preface by Bellarmine asserting that Sixtus had intended to bring out a new edition in consequence of errors that had occurred in the printing of the first, but had been prevented by death; now, in accordance with his desire, the work was completed by his successor. The opportunity, however, was too good a one for Protestants to miss, and Thomas James in his “Bellum Papale sive Concordia discors” [pg 065] (London, 1600), upbraids the two Popes on their high pretensions and the palpable failure of at least one, possibly both of them86.

From this time forward the Clementine Vulgate (sometimes under the name of Clement, sometimes under that of Sixtus, sometimes under both names)87 has been the standard edition for the Roman Church; by the Bull of 1592, every edition must be assimilated to this one, no word of the text may be altered, nor even variant readings printed in the margin88.

Thus the modern attempts at a scientific and critical revision of this version have come from students mainly outside the communion of the Roman Church.

The design of Bentley for a critical Greek Testament is described below (Chap. V); it was obvious that for its prosecution the MSS. of the Vulgate would have to be collated as carefully as those of the Greek text itself; and accordingly the variant readings of a good number were collected by Bentley himself, nos. 3, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 155, 160; other MSS. were collated by his friend and colleague John Walker, who worked much at Paris in 1719 and the following years; to him we owe collations of nos. 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 52, 96, 97, 102, 151, 164, while he obtained collations of the Tours MSS. (nos. 106, 107, 108, 166) from L. Chevalier, through their common friend Sabatier; and of the Oxford MSS. (nos. 86, 87, 89, 90, 148, 161), from David Casley. Walker died, however, in November, 1741, six months before the great Bentley, and the projected edition came to naught89. Their collations have not been published, but are contained in the following volumes, in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: B. 17. 5 containing collations by Walker, Chevalier, Casley, and Bentley; and B. 17. 15 containing collations [pg 066] by Bentley; and they have been made use of by Bishop Wordsworth in his edition of the Vulgate90.

Two attempts are being made now to restore the text of St. Jerome: that of Dr. Peter Corssen, of Berlin, and the Oxford edition under the hands of the Bishop of Salisbury. Dr. Corssen's published results at present consist only of the Epistle to the Galatians (“Epistula ad Galatas,” Berlin, Weidmann, 1885), but he has been spending several years in the accumulation of material, and other books of the New Testament will probably be published before very long. The Bishop of Salisbury after nearly eleven years' preparation, in conjunction with the Rev. H. J. White and other friends, published the first volume of his edition, containing St. Matthew's Gospel, in 1889; St. Mark following in 1891, and St. Luke in 1892; and it is hoped that the rest of the New Testament may be published in due course. More than thirty MSS., those numbered 5, 6, 18, 21, 28, 29, 37, 41, 51, 56, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 97, 98, 106, 115, 128, 129, 130, 132, 147, 148, 153, 154, 159, 175 below, have been carefully collated throughout for this edition, and a large number of others are cited in all the important passages, besides correctoria, and the more noticeable of the earlier printed Bibles.

To enumerate all the known MSS. of the Old Latin version was an easy task; to enumerate those of the Vulgate is almost impossible. It is computed that there are at least 8,000 scattered throughout the various Libraries of Europe, and M. Samuel Berger, the greatest living authority on the subject, has examined more than 800 in Paris alone. Nor would an exhaustive enumeration be of much critical value, as a large number of comparatively late MSS. probably contain the same corrupt type of text.

In the following list it is hoped that most of the really important MSS. are included; the writer has had the unwearied and invaluable aid of M. Samuel Berger91, besides that of many other kind friends, in its compilation. It has been thought best to arrange the MSS. on a double system; first according to their contents:—A. Bibles, whole or incomplete; B. New Testament; [pg 067] C. Gospels; D. Acts and onwards; E. Epistles and Apocalypse; and secondly under each of these heads, A-E, according to countries (alphabetically):—Austria, British Isles, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States.

For other lists the student is referred to Le Long, Bibliotheca Sacra, ed. 1723, vol. i. p. 235; Vercellone, Variae Lectiones, Romae, 1860, vol. i. p. lxxxiii f., ii. p. xvii f.; Berger, p. 374 f.; and for a fuller treatment of the history and text of the Vulgate, to Bishop Westcott's article “Vulgate” in Smith's Bible Dictionary; Kaulen, Geschichte d. Vulgata, Mainz, 1865; Fritzsche, “Lateinische Bibelübersetzungen” in Herzog, Realencyclopädie, second ed., vol. viii; P. Corssen in Die Trierer Adahandschr., Leipzig, 1889; and the important work of S. Berger, Histoire de la Vulgate pendant les premiers siècles du moyen âge, Paris, 1893; to economize space, this will be quoted below simply as “Berger.”

After the list of MSS. are added indices of the various notations by which respectively Bentley, Tischendorf, Wordsworth, &c., have cited them.

We now subjoin the various notations of these MSS., Bentley's, Walker's, Casley's, Tischendorf's, Wordsworth's:—

Bentley's notation.

Walker's and Casley's notation.

Tischendorf's notation.

Wordsworth's notation.

(1) The Egyptian or Coptic Versions.

Most ancient authors, from Herodotus downwards, referring to the heathen period of Egyptian history, mention two distinct modes of writing; the sacred and the common. In place of the former, however, Clement of Alexandria (Strom. v. 4, p. 657), who has left the most precise account of Egyptian writing, substitutes two modes, which he designates hieroglyphic and hieratic (or [pg 092] priestly) respectively; but since the hieratic is only a cursive adaptation of the hieroglyphic, the two are treated as one by other writers under the common designation of “sacred” (ἱερά). Both these forms of the sacred writing are abundantly represented in extant monuments, the one chiefly in sculptured stone, the other on papyrus rolls, as we might have anticipated.

The common writing is designated by various names. It is sometimes the “demotic” or “vulgar” (δημοτικά Herod. ii. 36, δημώδη Diod. iii. 3); sometimes the “native” or “enchorial” (ἐγχωρία in the trilingual inscriptions of Rosetta and Philae); sometimes “epistolographic” or letter-writer's character (Clem. Alex. l. c.); and in a bilingual inscription recently (1866) discovered at Tanis (Reinisch u. Roesler, Die zweisprachige Inschrift von Tanis, Wien, 1866, p. 55), it is called “Egyptian” simply (ἱεροῖς γράμμασιν καὶ Αἰγυπτίοις καὶ Ἑλληνικοῖς). This last designation, as Lepsius remarks (Zeitschr. f. Aegyptische Sprache, iv. p. 30, 1866), shows how completely the common writing had outstripped the two forms of sacred character at the time of this inscription, the ninth year of Ptolemy Euergetes I. This demotic character also is represented in a large number of extant papyri of various ages.

These two modes of writing, however—the sacred and the vulgar—besides the difference in external character exhibit also two different languages, or rather (to speak more correctly) two different forms of the same language. Of ancient writers indeed the Egyptian Manetho alone mentions the existence of two such forms (Joseph. c. Ap. i. 14), saying that in the word Hyksos the first syllable is taken from “the sacred tongue” (τὴν ἱερὰν γλῶσσαν), the second from the “common dialect” (τὴν κοινὴν διάλεκτον): but this solitary and incidental notice is fully borne out by the extant monuments. The sacred character, whether hieroglyphic or hieratic, presents a much more archaic type of the Egyptian language than the demotic, differing from it very considerably, though the two are used concurrently. The connexion of the two may be illustrated by the relation of the Latin and the Italian, as the ecclesiastical and vulgar tongues respectively of mediaeval Italy. The sacred language had originally been the ordinary speech of Egypt; but having become antiquated in common conversation it survived for sacred uses alone. Unlike the Latin however, it retained its archaic written character [pg 093] along with its archaic grammatical forms. (See Brugsch, De Natura et Indole Linguae Popularis Aegyptiorum, Berlin, 1850, p. 1 sq.)

The earliest example of this demotic or enchorial or vulgar writing belongs to the age of Psammetichus (the latter part of the seventh century b.c.); while the latest example of which I have found a notice must be referred to some time between the years a.d. 165-169, as the titles (Armeniacus, Parthicus, &c.) given to the joint sovereigns M. Aurelius and L. Verus show94. During the whole of this period, comprising more than eight centuries, the sacred dialect and character are used concurrently with the demotic.

The term Coptic is applied to the Egyptian language as spoken and written by Christian people and in Christian times. It is derived from the earliest Arabic conquerors of Egypt, who speak of their native Christian subjects as Copts. No instance of this appellation is found in native Coptic writers, with one very late and doubtful exception (Zoega, Catal., p. 648). Whence they obtained this designation, has been a subject of much discussion. Several theories which have been broached to explain the word will be found in J. S. Assemani, Della Nazione dei Copti, &c., p. 172 (printed in Mai, Script. Vet. Coll., V. P. 2), and in Quatremère, Recherches Critiques et Historiques sur la Langue et la Littérature de l'Égypte, Paris, 1808, p. 30 sq. A very obvious and commonly adopted derivation is that which connects it with the town Coptos in Upper Egypt; but as this place was not at that time prominent or representative, and did not lie directly across the path of the Arab invaders, no sufficient reason appears why it should have been singled out as a designation of the whole country. In earlier ages, however, it seems [pg 094] to have been a much more important place, both strategically and commercially (see Brugsch, Die Geographie des alten Ägyptens, i. p. 200; Egypt under the Pharaohs, i. p. 212 sq., Eng. trans.). Even as late as the Roman epoch Strabo (xvii. p. 815) describes it as “a city with a mixed population of Egyptians and Arabians” (πόλιν κοινὲν Αἰγυπτίων τε καὶ Ἀράβων), and elsewhere (xvi. p. 781) he mentions it as a station of Egyptian traffic with Arabia and India. Possibly therefore this Arabic name for the Egyptians is a survival of those early times. On the whole, however, it seems more probable that the Arabic word is a modification of the Greek Αἰγύπτιος (Schwartze, Das alte Aegypten, i. p. 956). [And this derivation seems now to be generally accepted, the Greek word αἰγύπτιος being represented in Coptic by ⲄⲨⲠⲦⲒⲞⲤ, or ⲔⲨⲠⲦⲀⲒⲞⲤ, whence came Qibt (the common form) and our Coptic. (Stern, Koptische Grammatik, p. 1.)]

From this account it will appear that the Coptic, as a language, cannot differ materially from the demotic. As a matter of fact the two are found on examination to represent two successive stages of the same language—a result which history would lead us to anticipate. But while the language is essentially the same, the character of the writing is wholly different. The demotic character was derived ultimately from the hieroglyphic. Hence it represents the same medley of signs. Only a small number are truly alphabetic, i.e. denote each a single sound. Others represent syllables. Others again, and these a very large number, are not phonetic at all, but pictorial. Of these pictorial or ideographic signs again there are several kinds; some represent the thing itself directly; others recall it by a symbol; others again are determinative, i.e. exhibit the class or type, to which the object or action belongs. It is strange that this very confused, cumbrous, and uncertain mode of writing should have held its ground for so many centuries, while all the nations around employed strictly phonetic alphabets; but Egypt was proverbially a land of the past, and some sudden shock was necessary to break up a time-honoured usage like this and to effect a literary revolution. This moral earthquake came at length in Christianity. Coincidently with the evangelization of Egypt and the introduction of a Christian literature, we meet with a new and strictly phonetic alphabet. This new Egyptian or Coptic alphabet comprises thirty letters, [pg 095] of which twenty-four are adopted from the Greek alphabet, while the remaining six, of which five represent sounds peculiar to the Egyptian language and the sixth is an aspirate, are signs borrowed from the existing Egyptian writing. If there is no direct historical evidence that this alphabet was directly due to Christianity, yet the coincidence of time and historic probability generally point to this. The Christians indeed had a very powerful reason for changing the character, besides literary convenience. The demotic writing was interspersed with figures of the Egyptian deities, used as symbolic or alphabetical signs. It must have been a suggestion of propriety, if not a dictate of conscience, in translating and transcribing the Scriptures to exclude these profane and incongruous elements from the sacred text.

The date at which this important change was introduced into Egyptian writing has been a matter of much dispute. If it is correctly attributed to Christian influences, the new alphabet must have been coeval with the birth of a native Christian literature in Egypt. The earliest extant remains of such a literature, to which we can fix a date with any certainty, are the Epistles of St. Antony (who was born about the middle of the third century) to Athanasius and Theodore; but, as we shall see presently, one or both of the two principal Egyptian versions must have been already in common use at this time. Indeed, if the date assigned to a recently discovered writing be correct, the introduction of the new character was much earlier than this. On the back of a papyrus in the British Museum, containing the Funeral Oration of Hyperides, is a horoscope in Greek and Egyptian, the latter written in Greek characters, with the additional six letters almost, though not quite, identical with the forms in the ordinary Coptic alphabet. Mr. C. W. Goodwin, who describes this important document in Chabas, “Mélanges Égyptologiques,” 2me série, p. 294 sq., and in the “Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache,” vi. p. 18 sq., February, 1868, calculates (though he does not speak confidently) that it is the horoscope of a person born a.d. 15495.

Any account of the Coptic dialects must start from the well-known passage in the Copto-Arabic grammar of Athanasius, bishop of Kos in the Thebaid, who flourished in the eleventh century. “The Coptic language,” he writes, “is divided into three dialects; that is to say, the Coptic dialect of Misr, which is the same as the Sahidic; the Bohairic96, which gets its name from the province of Bohairah; and the Bashmuric in use in the region of Bashmur. At the present time only the Bohairic and Sahidic continue to be used. These different dialects are derived from one and the same language” (quoted in Quatremère, Sur la Langue &c., p. 20 sq.). For the present I will dismiss the Bashmuric, as it will require further investigation hereafter. The remaining two, the Bohairic and Sahidic, were the principal dialects of the language, being spoken in Lower and Upper Egypt respectively; and are largely represented in extant remains of biblical and ecclesiastical literature97.

The Sahidic and Bohairic dialects are well defined and separate from each other. Among other distinctive features the Sahidic delights in the multiplication of vowels as compared with the Bohairic; thus it has ⲉⲗⲉⲟⲟⲗⲉ for ⲁⲗⲟⲗⲓ, ⲙⲏⲏⲱⲉ for ⲙⲏⲱ, ϩⲁⲗⲁⲁⲧⲉ for ϩⲁⲗⲁⲧⲓ, ϣⲉⲗⲉⲉⲧ for ϣⲉⲗⲉⲧ, &c. Again the Sahidic has smooth-breathings where the Bohairic has aspirates, e.g. ⲡⲏⲩⲉ for ⲫⲏⲩⲓ “heavens,” ⲧⲏⲩ for ⲑⲏⲟⲩ “wind”; and it substitutes the simple aspirate for the stronger guttural, e.g. ⲱⲛϩ for ⲱⲛⲭ “life,” ⲡⲁϩ for ⲫⲁϧ “rend.” Besides these more general distinctions, the two dialects have special peculiarities, not only in their grammatical forms, but even in their ordinary vocabulary; thus Sah. ⲃⲱⲕ for Boh. ⲓ “to go,” Sah. ϩⲉ for Boh. ⲣⲏϯ [pg 097] “manner,” Sah. ϩⲁϩ for Boh. ⲙⲏϣ “a multitude,” “many,” and so forth. Indeed the relations of the Sahidic and Bohairic dialects to each other may be fairly illustrated, as will have appeared from these facts, by the relation of the Ionic and Attic, though the differences in the Egyptian dialects are greater than in the Greek. Like the Attic, the Bohairic is the more literary and cultivated dialect of the two.

The demotic writing does not give the slightest indication that there were different dialects of the spoken language (see Brugsch, Grammaire Démotique, p. 10). In the Coptic, i.e. Christian, literature we learn this fact for the first time; and yet in the earliest age of this literature the dialects are found to be fully developed. Brugsch, however, has shown (De Natura &c., p. 10) that transcriptions of several Egyptian words into Greek in the age of the Ptolemies occur in two different forms, which correspond fairly to the two dialects; and indeed it would seem probable that the separation of the Bohairic and Sahidic should be ascribed to the more remote time, when these regions formed separate kingdoms. The older Egyptian writing, whether sacred or demotic, would obscure the distinction of dialects, partly from a conservative fondness for time-honoured modes of representation, but chiefly owing to the nature of the character itself. Thus this character makes no provision for the nicer distinction of the vowel-sounds, while the dialectic differences depend very largely on the divergent vocalization. Thus again it sometimes represents allied consonants, such as l and r, by the same sign; while one of the most striking peculiarities of dialect is the common substitution of l in the dialect of the Fayoum for r in the Sahidic and Bohairic, as e.g. ⲏⲗⲡ for ⲏⲣⲡ “wine,” ⲗⲁⲙⲡⲓ for ⲣⲟⲙⲡⲓ “year,” ⲗⲓⲙⲓ for ⲣⲓⲙⲓ “weeping,” and the like.

Of the time when the Scriptures were translated into the two principal dialects of Egypt no direct record is preserved. Judging, however, from the analogy of the Latin and Syriac and other early versions, and indeed from the exigencies of the case, we may safely infer that as soon as the Gospel began to spread among the native Egyptians who were unacquainted with Greek, the New Testament, or at all events some parts of it, would be translated without delay. Thus we should probably not be exaggerating, if we placed one or both of the principal [pg 098] Egyptian versions, the Bohairic and the Sahidic, or at least parts of them, before the close of the second century98. There are, so far as I am aware, no phenomena whether of text or of interpretation in either, which are inconsistent with this early date. Somewhat later than this we meet with notices which certainly presuppose the common use of a native version or versions of the Scriptures. Quatremère (Sur la Langue &c., p. 9 sq.) and Schwartze (Das alte Aegypten, p. 956 sq.) have collected a number of such notices, from which we may gather that it was the exception and not the rule, when a native Egyptian bishop or monk in the early centuries could speak the Greek language besides his own. Thus for instance St. Antony, who was born about the year 250, could only speak his native tongue, and in conversing with Greeks was obliged to use an interpreter (Athan., Vit. Ant. 74; Hieron., Vit. Hilar. 30; Pallad., Hist. Laus. 26). His own letters, of which fragments are extant, were written in Egyptian. Yet he was a son of Christian parents, and as a boy listened constantly to the reading of the Scriptures (Athan., l. c., § 1). When only eighteen or twenty years old, we are told, he was powerfully influenced by hearing the Gospel read in church (§§ 2, 3); and throughout his life he was a diligent reader and expositor of the Scriptures. Indeed it is quite plain from repeated notices, that the Scriptures in the Egyptian tongue were widely circulated and easily accessible at this time (see esp. § 16 ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς [i.e. τοῖς μοναχοῖς] τῇ Αἰγυπτιακῇ φωνῇ ταῦτα; τὰς μὲν γραφὰς ἱκανὰς εἶναι πρὸς διδασκαλίαν κ.τ.λ.). Again his contemporary Theodore, a famous abbot to whom one of his letters is addressed, was equally ignorant of any language but his own, and had to use an interpreter in speaking with strangers and Alexandrians (Sahid. MS. clxxvii in Zoega, Catal., p. 371). The notices of Theodore's master Pachomius, the founder of Egyptian monasteries, point in the same direction. This famous person, who was converted as a young man in the early years of the fourth century, was till late in life unacquainted with any language but his own. Receiving a visit from an [pg 099] Alexandrian, another Theodore, he assigned to him as his companion and interpreter a monk who could speak Greek. After some time he himself applied himself to the study of this language that he might be able to converse with his new friend (Zoega, p. 77 sq., and references in Quatremère, Sur la Langue &c, p. 12). Pachomius drew up rules for the guidance of his monastery in the Egyptian language. These rules, which are extant in Greek and Latin translations (Migne, Patrol. Graec., xl. p. 947; Hieron., Op., ii. p. 53 sq.), demand a very diligent study of the Scriptures from the brethren, even from novices before admission into the order. Again and again directions are given relating to the use of manuscripts. These notices indeed refer chiefly to the Thebaid, which was the great seat of the Egyptian monasteries; but the first part of St. Antony's life was spent in the monasteries of Alexandria, and it was only later that he retired to the Thebaid (Athan., Vit. Ant. 49). Though probably more common in Lower than in Upper Egypt, the knowledge of Greek was even there an accomplishment denied to a large number of native Christians. Thus for instance, when Palladius visited John of Lycopolis, an abbot of the Nitrian desert, he found his knowledge of Greek so slight that he could only converse through an interpreter (Hist. Laus. 43). These, it will be remembered, are the most prominent names among the Egyptian Christians; and from such examples it must be plain that the ordinary monk would be wholly dependent on a native version for his knowledge of the Scriptures. Yet the monks swarmed both in Upper and Lower Egypt at this time. Palladius reckons as many as 7,000 brethren under Pachomius in the Tabennitic monastery (Hist. Laus. 38; comp. Hieron., Praef. in Reg. Pach. 2, ii. p. 54), while Jerome states that close upon 50,000 would assemble together at the chief monastery of the order to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's Passion (ib. § 7). After all allowance made for exaggeration, the numbers must have been very great. Even at a much later date the heads of the Egyptian Church were often wholly dependent on their native tongue. At the Robber Synod of Ephesus (a.d. 449) Calosirius, bishop of Arsinoe, spoke and signed through his deacon, who acted as interpreter (Labb., Conc. iv. p. 1119, 1179, 1188, ed. Colet.). And again two years later, when Dioscorus of Alexandria started for the Council of Chalcedon, he was [pg 100] accompanied by one Macarius, bishop of Tkou, a man of some note in his day, who could not be made to understand a word of Greek (Memph. MS. liv, in Zoega, Catal., p. 99).

[The above was the most complete account of the dialects of the Coptic language and of the early history of the Coptic versions at the time when it was written; but in the last ten years immense additions have been made to our knowledge—additions which have rather complicated than solved the problem. These have been mainly due to the process of new discovery and to the labour of many scholars. A large number of previously unedited Coptic MSS. have been published; many new MSS. have been discovered, and the grammar of the language has been studied with great minuteness. The credit of the discovery and editing of new MSS. must be largely given to the energy and industry of the French school at Cairo, and especially to a former member of it, M. Amélineau, who has published a very large number of texts; the advances in our knowledge of the grammar are due to the labours of the German school of Egyptologists, notably Stern, Erman, and Steindorff. More important in some ways has been the discovery of an immense number of documents of a completely new class, written on papyrus, partly in and near the Fayoum, but also throughout the whole of Upper Egypt. These documents present us with the language in an earlier stage than we had previously known, and in a class of writings such as letters, contracts, and other legal documents, which conform to the spoken language of different parts of Egypt99.

It is on the subject of the Egyptian dialects that our views have been most modified. We have seen that three dialects in all are mentioned by Athanasius of Cos: the Bohairic, the Sahidic, and a third, the Bashmuric. When therefore fragments of a third version of the Scriptures were discovered, the name Bashmuric was at once assigned to them. The early history of the discussions on this dialect were admirably summed up by Bishop Lightfoot. (3rd edition, pp. 401-403.)]

The first fragment, 1 Cor. ix. 9-16, was published at Rome in 1789 by Giorgi, from a MS. in the Borgian Museum, in the work which has been already mentioned. He designated it Bashmuric, and, as the dialect presents affinities to both the Bohairic and Sahidic, he assigned to it a corresponding locality. Herodotus (ii. 42) mentions the inhabitants of the Ammonian Oasis as speaking a language intermediate between the Egyptian and Ethiopian; and on the strength of this passage, combined with the phenomena just mentioned, Giorgi placed Bashmur in this region, deriving the word from the Coptic ⲥⲡⲁⲙⲏⲣ “the region beyond,” i.e. west of the Nile, and gave the dialect a second name Ammonian (p. lxviii sq.). In the same year Münter in his work on the Sahidic dialect (see above, p. 393), published this same fragment independently at Copenhagen. He had not seen Giorgi's work, but adopted provisionally his name Ammonian, of which he had heard, while at the same time he stated his own opinion that the variations of form are too slight to constitute a separate dialect (p. 76). In 1808 appeared Quatremère's work, to which I have more than once alluded. In it he included another fragment of this dialect (Baruch iv. 22-v. 22, and Epist. Jerem.), from a MS. in the Imperial Library of Paris. At the same time he pointed out that the passage in Herodotus will not bear the interpretation put upon it by Giorgi, and that, as a matter of fact, the Ammonians speak not a Coptic, but a Berber dialect. He also refuted Giorgi's opinion about the position of Bashmur, and showed conclusively (p. 147 sq.) from several notices in Arabic writers that this region must be placed in the Delta. In a later work (Mémoires Géographiques et Historiques sur l'Égypte, i. p. 233, 1811) he identified it more definitely with Elearchia, the country of the Bucoli, that fierce and turbulent race of herdsmen, who, living in the marshy pasture land and protected by the branches of the Nile, gave so much trouble to their Persian, Greek, and Roman rulers successively (see Engelbreth, p. x). The defiant attitude, which in earlier times these Bucoli assumed towards their successive masters, was maintained to the end by the Bashmurites towards their Arab conquerors. While the other Copts succumbed and made terms, they alone stubbornly resisted. At length the Arab invaders were victorious, and the Bashmuric race was extirpated. It would seem, [pg 102] therefore, that Bashmur is the Arabic modification of the Coptic ⲡⲥⲁⲙⲟⲩⲣ, “regio cincta,” the country girdled by the Nile.

But this being so, Quatremère, looking at the linguistic character of these fragments, denies that they belong to the Bashmuric dialect at all; and suggests for them a locality which will explain their affinities to both the Bohairic and Sahidic, assigning them to the Great and Little Oasis, and accordingly designating them Oasitic. In 1810 Zoega's “Catalogus,” a posthumous work, appeared, in which he published all the fragments of this third Egyptian dialect found in the Borgian collection, comprising (besides a portion of Isaiah) John iv. 28-53; 1 Cor. vi. 19-ix. 16; xiv. 33-xv. 35; Eph. vi. 18-24; Phil. i. 1-ii. 2; 1 Thess. i. 1-iii. 6; Heb. v. 5-9; v. 13-vi. 8-11; 15-vii. 5, 8-13; 16-x. 22, nearly all of these passages being more or less mutilated. And in the following years these same passages were edited by Engelbreth (Fragmenta Basmurico-Coptica Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Havniae, 1811), who had not seen Zoega's edition. Both Zoega and Engelbreth, though agreeing with Quatremère in the position of Bashmur (the former without having seen Quatremère's book), yet claimed these fragments as Bashmuric.

In this opinion there is good reason for acquiescing. It seems highly improbable that Athanasius of Kos, a Christian bishop, can have been ignorant of a dialect so important that the Christian Scriptures were translated into it (for the various fragments oblige us to suppose a complete version of the Old and New Testaments), a dialect moreover which, on Quatremère's hypothesis, was spoken not so very far from his own neighbourhood. And on the other hand it is not very probable that all traces of a dialect which was known to him should have perished, as would be the case if these fragments are not Bashmuric100. To counterbalance this twofold difficulty involved in Quatremère's hypothesis, the linguistic objections ought to be serious indeed. But until we are better acquainted with the early history of Egypt than we are ever likely to be, it will be impossible to say why the Bashmuric dialect should not be separated geographically from the Sahidic by a dialect like the Bohairic [pg 103] with which it has fewer, though still some special affinities. The interposition of an Ionic between two Dorian races in Greece will show the insecurity of this mode of argument.

[We must now continue the history. Although Bishop Lightfoot summed up in favour of the theory which would assign these fragments to the Bashmuric, his acuteness had noticed the difficulties which would be involved in the separation of that dialect from the Sahidic, with which it had close affinities by what was then called the Memphitic. The greater knowledge of Egyptian history, which he desired but did not hope for, has become possible. And the objection is supported.

In 1878 Stern examined the history and character of the third Egyptian dialect (Z. A. S. 16, 1878, p. 23), and showed that it was almost impossible on either linguistic or historical grounds to assign it to the district of Bashmur. He pointed out that all the fragments we possessed of it had come from Upper Egypt, that we had positive evidence that there was no version of the Scriptures in the Bashmuric dialect, and that in dialectic affinities it was clearly akin to Sahidic. He also found evidence in Tuki of the existence of another dialect there called Memphiticus Alter, and that this was supported by papyrus documents which came from the site of Memphis (see below), which have some, although not a complete, resemblance to the Bashmuric fragments. Hence he concluded that the third dialect was Middle Egyptian, and, guided by two or three words on a fragment of papyrus brought from the Fayoum, he decided that that district must have presented the characters of isolation and independence, which would make the development of a third dialect possible. The proof of his theory was not long to seek. Already in the year 1877 attention had been called to the fragments now known as the Fayoum papyri, and very soon they began to appear in European libraries; it was not long before Berlin and Vienna acquired very large collections. An examination of the Coptic papyri in these collections has proved conclusively the truth of Stern's conclusions. The vast majority of these present the same dialectic affinities as the third Bible translation, and show also (as these had hinted) that the orthography of the dialect was not fixed, in fact that hardly two documents present exactly the same linguistic character, although all are definitely distinguished from the other two dialects. [pg 104] It may therefore be confidently asserted that all the literature hitherto published as Bashmuric is in the dialect of the Fayoum.

But the discoveries do not stop here. As early as 1876 M. E. Revillont had published (Papyrus Coptes, 1876, p. 103) a collection of documents in the Louvre which came from the Monastery of Abba Jeremias, close to the Serapeum, near the site of the ancient Memphis. These were examined by Stern (Z. A. S. 23, 1885, p. 145 sq.), who shows that here we have again a different dialectic form. It has affinities to the Sahidic, affinities to the Bohairic, and affinities to the Fayoum dialect. It represents in fact the language of ancient Memphis, and an attempt has been made to call it Memphitic, but this would create endless confusion. Stern suggests Lower Sahidic (Unter Sahidisch), but the name Middle Egyptian is the one which has been generally adopted. It is this discovery that shows the necessity of avoiding the term Memphitic for the principal Egyptian version, and substituting the Arabic name 'Bohairic.' That was the language of the province on the sea-coast in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. And it was not until the eleventh century, and the removal of the Patriarchate to Cairo, that it became the language of the district of Memphis, that is, long after the decline of Memphis had begun.

But our knowledge of the dialects of Egypt was still further to be extended. About ten years ago excavations were undertaken by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in the Coptic Cemetery of Akhmîm, the ancient Chemnis or Panopolis in Upper Egypt. Amongst the results of this discovery were the Apocryphal fragments, which have created a considerable sensation lately. These seem to have been considered by their discoverers to possess so little interest, that they were only accidentally given to the world seven years afterwards. The Coptic fragments were more fortunate, and in 1884 M. Bouriant, head of the French School at Cairo, published considerable fragments of the Old Testament, including a hitherto unknown Apocryphal work, the Testament of Sophonias (Zephaniah), in a fifth dialect, to which, for some reason, he at the time gave the name of Bashmuric (Mémoires, i. 1884, p. 243). This dialect was examined by Stern (Z. A. S. 24, 1886, p. 129), who showed that, while its affinities were with the Middle Egyptian or Lower Sahidic, it represented a more primitive stage in the [pg 105] language, and that these documents are our oldest literary remains of the Coptic language.

In the place then of the two or three dialects known until recent years, we have now at least five: the Bohairic, Sahidic, Fayoumic, Middle Egyptian, and Akhmimic, not to speak of the Bashmuric, in which no literary remains exist. The exact relations of these dialects to one another have not yet been satisfactorily worked out, and the problem is complicated by the fact that most of them had no fixed or standard form, and that papyri (especially those containing documents in the popular speech) vary in every locality and every age. To write the history then of these dialects and of the New Testament in them is not at present possible; but the following may suggest some more or less tentative conclusions.

In the earlier stages of the Egyptian language as we have it now in a written form, there are apparently no certain signs of dialectic variations, although there is certainly evidence that such did exist in the spoken language; and the changes introduced by Christianity are of great interest. The old language was fixed and definite in its orthography, and it represented the traditions of a caste of scribes, and not of the popular speech. Christianity on the other hand was in Egypt a great popular movement; a new and simple alphabet became necessary; the Scriptures were translated, not into the literary language, but into that of the people; and the copies of these translations in each locality reflected the local peculiarities of speech which had existed for centuries, but which up to that time had left behind no literary memorial. Gradually, however, the Christian Church created for itself literary traditions, and a tendency towards unification set in round three centres, the monasteries of the Natron Lakes, the great home of monastic life in Lower Egypt, the monasteries of the Fayoum, and the great White Monastery Deir Amba Shenoudah near Sohag in Upper Egypt. Hence came the three dialects which have a more or less literary character. Then began the decay of the Coptic language. First the dialect of the Fayoum died out, then the Sahidic, until finally Bohairic became, as it is now, the church language of the whole country.

The relation of these changes to the history of the versions has not yet been satisfactorily worked out. It has been sufficiently [pg 106] proved that translations into Coptic existed in the third century, very probably in the second; but in what dialect they were made, and what relation they bore to the existing translations, has not yet been discovered, and the problem remains unsolved.]

(2) The Bohairic Version101.

The Bohairic version was not included in the Polyglotts, though others much later in date and inferior in quality found a place there. The first use of it is found in Bp. Fell's Oxford N. T. (1675), to which many readings were contributed by the Oxford Oriental scholar, T. Marshall, Rector of Lincoln College, who died in 1675, before the Coptic New Testament was published. It was afterwards employed by Mill, who recognized its importance, and gave various readings from it in the notes and appendix to his edition of the Greek Testament (1707). These readings he obtained partly from the papers of Marshall, who had contemplated an edition of the Coptic Gospels, but was prevented by death from accomplishing his design, and partly from the communications of a foreign scholar, Lud. Piques. The MSS. which supplied the former belonged at one time to Marshall himself, and are now in the Bodleian; the latter were taken from MSS. in the Royal Library at Paris (see Mill's “Prol.,” pp. clii, clx, clxvii).

The editio princeps of the Bohairic version appeared a few years later with the title “Novum Testamentum Aegyptium vulgo Copticum ex MSS. Bodleianis descripsit, cum Vaticanis et Parisiensibus contulit, et in Latinum sermonem convertit David Wilkins Ecclesiae Anglicanae Presbyter, Oxon. 1716.” The editor Wilkins was a Prussian by birth, but an Oxonian by adoption. In his preface he gives an account of the MSS. which he used, and which will be described below. The materials at his disposal were ample, if he had only known how to use them; but unfortunately his knowledge of the language was not thoroughly accurate, nor had he the critical capacity required for such a task. His work was very severely criticized at the time by two eminent Egyptian scholars, Jablonsky and La Croze, whose verdict has been echoed by most subsequent writers; and [pg 107] no doubt it is disfigured by many inaccuracies. But he may fairly claim the indulgence granted to pioneers in untrodden fields of learning, and he has laid Biblical scholars under a debt of gratitude which even greater errors of detail could not efface. With some meagre exceptions this was the first work which had appeared in the Egyptian tongue; and under these circumstances much may be forgiven in an editor. The defects which render caution necessary in using it for critical purposes are twofold. First. The text itself is not constructed on any consistent or trustworthy principles. It is taken capriciously from one or other of the sources at his disposal; no information is given respecting the authority for the printed text in any particular passage; and, as a rule, no various readings are added. In the prolegomena indeed (p. xi sq.) notices of two or three variations are given, but even here we have no specification of the MSS. from which they are taken. Secondly. The translation cannot be trusted. The extent of this inaccuracy may be seen from the examples in Woide, Append. Cod. Alex., p. 16 sq., and Schwartze, Evang. Memph. Praef., p. xxii. One instance will suffice. In 1 Cor. xiii. 3 Wilkins gives the rendering “ut comburar,” corresponding to the common reading ἵνα καυθήσωμαι; though the Memphitic has ⲏⲧⲁ ϣⲟⲩϣⲟⲩ ⲙⲙⲟⲓ = ἵνα καυχήσωμαι. Yet Wilkins' error has been so contagious that Tattam in his Lexicon gives καίειν “incendere” as a sense of ϣⲟⲩϣⲟⲩ, referring to this passage as an example, though its universal meaning is “to praise,” “to glorify.”

In 1829 the British and Foreign Bible Society published an edition of the Four Gospels in Coptic (Bohairic) and Arabic. It is a handsomely printed 4to, intended for the use of the native Christians of Egypt. In the Coptic portion, which was edited by Tattam, the text of Wilkins was followed for the most part, but it was corrected here and there from a recent MS. which will be described below, Evang. 14. This edition has no critical value.

Between the edition of Wilkins and those of Schwartze and Boetticher more than a century and a quarter elapsed; but no important step was taken during this period towards a more critical use of the Bohairic version. Wetstein appears to have been satisfied with the information obtainable from Mill and Wilkins. Bengel was furnished with a few various readings [pg 108] from the Berlin MSS. by La Croze; and Woide again in his preface, p. 13, gave a collation of Mark i. from the Berlin MS. of this Gospel. Griesbach seems not to have gone beyond published sources of information; and this has been the case with later editors of the Greek Testament.

The title of Schwartze's edition is “Quatuor Evangelia in dialecto linguae Copticae Memphitica perscripta ad Codd. MS. Copticorum in Regia Bibliotheca Berolinensi adservatorum nec non libri a Wilkinsio emissi fidem edidit, emendavit, adnotationibus criticis et grammaticis, variantibus lectionibus expositis atque textu Coptico cum Graeco comparato instruxit M. G. Schwartze.” St. Matthew and St. Mark appeared in 1846, St. Luke and St. John in the following year. The title of the work fully explains its aim. The editor was an exact Egyptian scholar, and so far it is thoroughly trustworthy. The defects of this edition, however, for purposes of textual criticism are not inconsiderable. (1) Schwartze's materials were wholly inadequate. Though the libraries of England, Paris, and Rome contain a large number of MSS. of different ages and qualities, not one of these was consulted; but the editor confined himself to one good MS. and one indifferent transcript, both in the Berlin library. These will be described below. The text of the Bohairic Gospels therefore still remains in a very unsatisfactory state. (2) His collation with the Greek text is at once superfluous and defective. This arises from his capricious choice of standards of comparison, the Codex Ephraem and the printed texts of Lachmann and Tischendorf (1843). If he had given an accurate Latin translation of the whole, and had supplemented this with a distinct statement of the reading of the Bohairic version, where variations are known to exist in other authorities, and where at the same time a Latin version could not be made sufficiently explicit, the result would have been at once more simple, more complete, and more available. As it is, he has contented himself with translating particular sentences (more especially those which are mistranslated in Wilkins), while his method of comparison necessarily overlooks many variations. With all its defects, however, this edition has a far higher value than its predecessor for critical purposes. Not the least useful part of Schwartze's notes is the collation of the published portions of the Sahidic Version, where also he has [pg 109] corrected errors in the edition of Woide and Ford (see below, p. 129 sq.).

Schwartze only lived to complete the four Gospels. He had, however, made some collations for the Acts and Epistles during his last visit to England; and after his death they were placed in the hands of P. Boetticher, who continued the work. The titles of Boetticher's editions are “Acta Apostolorum Coptice,” and “Epistulae Novi Testamenti Coptice,” both dated Halae, 1852. His plan, however, differs wholly from Schwartze's. He substitutes an 8vo size for the 4to of his predecessor; and he gives no translation or collation with the Greek, but contents himself with noting the variations of his MSS. in Coptic at the foot of the page. Thus his book is absolutely useless to any one who is unacquainted with the language. Moreover his materials, though less scanty than Schwartze's, are far from adequate. For the Acts and for the Catholic Epistles he employed Schwartze's collations of two English MSS., which he calls tattamianus and curetonianus, and himself collated or obtained collations of two others in the Paris Library (p), (m); while for the Pauline Epistles he again used Schwartze's collations of the same two English MSS., together with another Paris MS. (p), and the Berlin MSS., which will be described below. The account, which he gives in his preface, of the MSS. employed by him is so meagre, that in some cases they are with difficulty identified. Nor again are the collations used for this edition nearly complete. I have pointed out below the defects in Schwartze's collation of one of the English MSS., which I have partially examined; and Brugsch in an article in the “Zeitschr. der Deutschen Morgenl. Gesellsch.,” vii. p. 115 sq. (1853), has given a full collation of the Berlin MS. of the Epistle to the Romans, showing how many variations in this MS. are not recorded in Boetticher's edition. The Apocalypse has never appeared.

About the same time a magnificent edition of the whole of the New Testament in Coptic (Bohairic) and Arabic was published under the auspices of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The first part, which is entitled ⲡⲓ ⲭⲱⲙ ⲛⲛⲓ ⲇ ⲛⲛⲓⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲉⲧⲟⲩⲁⲃ, “The Book of the Four Holy Gospels,” bears the date 1847, Tattam's Coptic Lexicon having appeared in 1836102; the second, comprising the remaining books, [pg 110] including the Apocalypse, is called ⲡⲓ ⲭⲱⲙ ⲙⲁⲋⲃ ⲛⲧⲉ ϯⲇⲓⲁⲑⲏⲕⲏ ⲙⲃⲉⲣⲓ, “The Second Book of the New Testament,” and appeared in 1852. We are informed in a Coptic colophon at the end, that the Book was edited by “Henry Tattam the presbyter of the Anglican Church for the Holy Patriarch and the Church of Christ in Egypt.” The type is large and bold, and the volumes are very handsome in all respects, being designed especially for Church use. The editor's eminent services to Coptic literature are well known, but the titles and colophon do not suggest any high expectations of the value of this edition to the scholar. The basis of the text in this edition was a copy belonging to the Coptic Patriarch; but the editor collated it with MSS. in his own possession and with others belonging to the Hon. R. Curzon, adopting from these such variations as seemed to him to agree with the best readings of the Greek MSS. As no various readings are recorded, this edition is quite useless for critical purposes: nor indeed was the aim which the editor set before him consistent with the reproduction of the Bohairic New Testament in its authentic form. The interpolated passages for instance are printed without any indication that their authority is at all doubtful.

The following account of the Bohairic MSS. existing in European libraries, though probably very imperfect, will yet be found much fuller than any which has hitherto been given. Indeed the list in Le Long (Bibl. Sacr., i. p. 140 sq.) is the only one which aims at completeness; and the date of this work (1723) would alone disqualify it, as a guide on such a subject at the present time. Those manuscripts which I describe from personal inspection are marked with an asterisk. In other cases my authorities are given.

From this account of the MSS. it appears that, with the single exception of the Apocalypse, the Bohairic New Testament, as far back as we can trace its history, contained all the books of our present Canon. Nor have I noticed any phenomena in the language of the several books, which point to any want of uniformity or separation of date; though it is possible that a more thorough investigation and a more complete mastery of the language might reveal such. It seems clear, however, that the Apocalypse had not a place among the Canonical books. In the majority of cases it is contained in a separate MS. In the exceptions which I have investigated, where it is bound up with other books (the MSS. numbered 1, 12, of the Epistles and Acts), it is distinguished from them in some marked way; and probably this will be found to be the case with any which have not yet been examined. In short, there is not a single authenticated case of a MS. in which it is treated as of equal authority with the other Canonical books. Moreover in Copto-Arabic vocabularies it is omitted from its proper place at the end of the New Testament, all the other books being taken in order. This depreciation of the Apocalypse may perhaps be taken as indicating the date of the completion or codification of the Bohairic version. The earlier Alexandrian writers, Clement and Origen, in the first decades of the third century, quote the Apocalypse without hesitation as the work of St. John. The later Alexandrian Church also from the close of the third century onward seems to have had no doubt about its Apostolic authority (see Westcott, Canon, p. 321). But about the middle of the third century doubts were entertained respecting its authorship, to which expression was given by Dionysius of Alexandria (flor. a.d. 233-265), though even [pg 124] Dionysius did not deny its canonicity. The difficulty, however, may have been powerful enough to cause its exclusion from the Egyptian Canon.

The order of the several parts of the New Testament in the MSS. is (1) Gospels, (2) Pauline Epistles, (3) Catholic Epistles, (4) Acts. The Gospels occur in their common order. It is remarkable, however, that in the vocabularies St. John frequently stands first, so that we get the order, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, which (with the doubtful exception of the Sahidic) is unique. Of this, however, there is no trace in the MSS.; and, as some of these must carry the tradition further back than the vocabularies, the arrangement is perhaps to be explained in some other way. The Pauline Epistles include the Hebrews, which is placed after 1, 2 Thessalonians and before 1, 2 Timothy108, as in the Greek MSS. אABC, &c. (see p. 71). This accords with the general opinion of the Alexandrian school, which regarded this Epistle as the work of St. Paul (see Westcott, Canon, p. 323 sq.). In other respects the familiar order is observed in the Pauline Epistles, as is also the case with the Catholic Epistles109.

The Bohairic version is for the most part a faithful rendering of the original, and the Egyptian language which by this time had borrowed largely from the Greek vocabulary is fairly adequate for the purpose. This version therefore may generally be consulted even for minute variations in the text. The connecting particles are commonly observed; and as the language has both definite and indefinite articles, it may be employed, though with some caution, by the textual critic where other versions fail him. In one point, however, it is quite useless. When the question lies between a participle and a finite verb in the construction of a sentence, the looseness of the Egyptian syntax will seldom afford any clue to the reading which the translator had before him. Perhaps the weakest point in the language is the absence of a passive voice, for which the third person plural active, used impersonally, acts as a substitute. This produces strange awkwardnesses of expression. Thus John i. 6 ἀπεσταλμένος παρὰ Θεοῦ is rendered “whom they sent from God,” ⲉ ⲁⲩⲟⲩⲟⲣⲡϥ ⲉⲃⲟⲗϩⲓⲧⲉⲛ ⲫϯ, and i. 17 [pg 125] ὁ νόμος διὰ Μωυσέως ἐδόθη “The law they gave it by Moses,” ⲡⲓ ⲛⲟⲙⲟⲥ ⲁⲩⲧⲏⲓϥ ⲉⲃⲟⲗϩⲓⲧⲉⲛ ⲙⲱⲩⲥⲏⲥ. Another grave defect is the want of a word corresponding to the simple meaning of ἔχειν, which has to be rendered by various expedients according to the context.

To the adoption of Greek words there seems to be hardly any limit but the caprice of the translator. Already in the demotic writing we find a few of these foreign intruders naturalized; but in the Coptic, as used for ecclesiastical purposes, they occur in the greatest profusion. Very frequently their adoption cannot be explained by any exigencies of translation. Thus for instance the translator will sometimes render one Greek word by another, e.g. John xiii. 5, νιπτήρ by λακάνη or λεκάνη; Acts xix. 40, ἐγκαλεῖν by κατηγορεῖν; xxviii. 17, ἔθος by συνήθεια. Thus again he will diversify the rendering in the same passage, using indifferently the Greek and the Egyptian word for the same original, e.g. ϥⲱⲛⲧ and ⲡⲓⲣⲁⲍⲓⲛ (πειράζειν), Matt. iv. 1, 3; ϫⲣⲟϫ and ⲥⲡⲉⲣⲙⲁ, John viii. 33, 37; ⲡⲟⲩⲣⲟ and ⲕⲉⲥⲁⲣ (Καῖσαρ), John xix. 12, 15; ⲓϧ and ⲇⲉⲙⲱⲛ (δαιμόνιον), Matt. viii. 16, 28, 33. And again and again Greek words are used, where common Egyptian equivalents were ready to hand. The conjunctions ἀλλά, δέ, γάρ, οὖν, were doubtless needed to supply a want in the Egyptian language, which, like the Hebrew and Aramaic, was singularly deficient in connecting-particles; but we should hardly have looked for such combinations as ὅμως μέντοι, πόσῳ μᾶλλον, μήτι, οὐ γάρ, οὐχ ὅτι, ὅτι μὲν γάρ, καί γε, καίτοι, οὐ μόνον δέ, ἐφ᾽ ὅσον, πῶς οὖν, ἵνα κἄν, ἵνα μήπως, μενοῦνγε, and the like. Nor should we expect to find Greek terms introduced with such reckless prodigality as in the following sentences: John xviii. 3, ⲛⲉⲙ ϩⲁⲛⲫⲁⲛⲟⲥ ⲛⲉⲙ ϧⲁⲛ ⲗⲁⲙⲡⲁⲥ ⲛⲉⲙ ϩⲱⲛ ϩⲟⲡⲗⲟⲛ; Acts xxiii. 8, ⲙⲙⲟⲛ ⲁⲛⲁⲥⲧⲁⲥⲓⲥ ⲟⲩⲇⲉ ⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲟⲥ ⲟⲩⲇⲉ ⲡⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ; Acts xxvii. 12, ⲕⲁⲧⲁⲛⲧⲁⲛ ⲉ ⲫⲟⲓⲛⲓⲝ ⲉ ⲉⲣ ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲭⲓⲙⲁⲍⲓⲛ ϧⲉⲛ ⲟⲩ ⲗⲩⲙⲏⲛ; Rom. vi. 13, ⲛⲉⲧⲉⲛ ⲙⲉⲗⲟⲥ ⲛ ϩⲟⲗⲡⲟⲛ ⲛⲧⲉ ϯ ⲁⲇⲓⲕⲓⲁ.

[No definite discussion on the history or critical value of the Bohairic version is possible until the edition which is being prepared by the Rev. G. Horner is published; based as it is on a collation of all known MSS.

An opinion which at present seems to prevail largely among [pg 126] scholars is that of Stern (Z. A. S. 20, 1882, p. 202), who dates it to the fourth or fifth century, and ascribes it to the literary activity of the monks of the Natron Lakes. He has further suggested that it and the Sahidic may both be derived from, or at any rate connected with, the Akhmîm version (Z. A. S. 24, 1886, p. 134).

The last statement may be definitely dismissed; it is based upon a single sentence quoted from an apocryphal book of the Old Testament, and is definitely disproved in the case of the New Testament by a comparison of the two versions. They are not only different translations, but are based on a different Greek text. The first statement is apparently based upon language, and has undoubtedly an element of truth in it. The language of the version as we have it was probably revised and corrected, and reduced to a fixed orthography and a more definite form, but even here it is not possible to speak quite positively, and we know that there are considerable variations in orthography preserved in some of the MSS. which may represent the tradition of different monasteries. But, granting this, it does not by any means follow that there was not a Bohairic dialect and a Bohairic version at an earlier date, which is closely represented by this, as the Akhmim version was represented by the Sahidic, as regards the Greek text implied. In favour of an early version in the dialect of Lower Egypt is first the a priori argument of the probability of Christianity spreading earliest in the Delta. We know that by the middle of the third century it had spread among the native population of Alexandria (Dion. Al. ap. Eus. “H. E.” vi. 41), and probably had done so in the second century. If Greek had spread so little in the Delta in the fourth or fifth century as to make a Bohairic version necessary, it is not likely to have been more widely prevalent in the third. On these grounds then we should naturally expect Christianity to spread earliest among the native populations of the districts round Alexandria, and also that the New Testament or a portion of it would be translated very early into their language. Nor again does there seem any evidence for deriving the Bohairic dialect from the Akhmimish. It is true that the latter represents the language of Egypt in an earlier form, but it is not an earlier form of Bohairic.

To these a priori and negative considerations must be added the positive argument of Krall (Mitt. i. p. 111). He appears to have discovered earlier forms of the Bohairic dialect, and in [pg 127] addition points out that some of the commonest abbreviations in Coptic MSS. could only have been derived from the Bohairic, which seems to show that it was for Bohairic that the alphabet was first used. And this in the New Testament at any rate is supported by the text of the version. A study of this has shown that in the form in which we possess it in most printed editions and late MSS., although as a whole its agreement with the oldest Greek MSS. is undoubted, it contains a considerable number of later additions which agree with the traditional text. But, as Bishop Lightfoot showed, these clearly formed no part of the original Bohairic version, and subsequent investigation has made it clear that the evidence in favour of this statement is even stronger than he represented it (see Sanday, Appendices ad Novum Testamentum, App. III. p. 182 sq.). The original Bohairic text then represents a very pure tradition, untouched by the so-called Western additions which are found in the Sahidic version, and it is difficult to believe that a version so singularly free from these should be later than the Sahidic. Christianity spread in the Thebaid certainly as early as the beginning of the third century (Eus. “H. E.” vi. 1), and that century is the period to which internal evidence would assign the origin of the Sahidic version. An even earlier date is probably demanded both for the extension of Christianity in the Delta and for the text of the Bohairic version.]

(3) The Sahidic (or Thebaic) Version.

The Sahidic version did not attract attention till a comparatively late date. When Wilkins published what was then called the Coptic New Testament, he mentioned having found among the Oxford MSS. two which he described as “lingua plane a reliquis MSS. Copticis, quae unquam vidi, diversa” (Praef. p. vii). These are written in the Thebaic or Sahidic dialect, of which as we may infer from his language, he did not even know the existence. After no long time, however, we find La Croze and Jablonski, with other Egyptian scholars, turning their attention to the dialect of Upper Egypt: and at length in 1778, C. G. Woide issued a prospectus in which he announced his intention of publishing from Oxford MSS. the fragments of the New Testament “juxta interpretationem dialecti Superioris Aegypti, quae Thebaidica [pg 128] seu Sahidica appellatur.” In the same year he gave to the world some various readings of this version in J. A. Cramer's “Beyträge zur Beförderung theologischer und andrer wichtigen Kenntnisse,” Pt. iii, Kiel u. Hamburg, 1778. But before Woide's work appeared he was partially anticipated by other labourers in the same field.

In the same year 1778 appeared a grammar of the two Egyptian dialects by Raphael Tuki, Roman Bishop of Arsinoe, with the title “Rudimenta Linguae Coptae sive Aegyptiacae ad usum Collegii Urbani de Propaganda Fide, Romae.” It contains profuse quotations from the Sahidic version of the Old and New Testaments. This work, which preserves a large number of passages not to be found elsewhere, has been strangely neglected by textual critics110. Caution, however, must be observed in the use of it, as the passages are apparently obtained, at least in many instances, not directly from MSS. of the version itself, but through the medium of Arabo-Egyptian grammars and vocabularies; nor is Tuki's work generally at all accurate or critical111.

In 1785, J. A. Mingarelli published two fasciculi of an account of the Egyptian MSS. in the Nanian Library under the title “Aegyptiorum codicum reliquiae Venetiis in Bibliotheca Naniana asservatae, Bononiae.” In these he printed at length two portions of the Sahidic New Testament, Matt. xviii. 27-xxi. 15, and John ix. 17-xiii. 1.

In 1789, A. A. Giorgi (Georgius), an Augustinian eremite, brought out a work entitled “Fragmentum Evangelii S. Joannis Graeco-Copto-Thebaicum Saeculi iv. &c., Romae.” This volume contains John vi. 21-58, and vi. 68-viii. 23, introduced by an elaborate preface and followed by other matter. The MS. from which they are taken belonged to the Borgian collection at Velletri, and has been described already among the Greek MSS., p. 141 sq. It is ascribed to the fourth or fifth century. [pg 129] In the same year, 1789, additional fragments of this version from other Borgian MSS. were published by F. C. C. H. Münter in a volume bearing the title, “Commentatio de Indole Versionis Novi Testamenti Sahidicae. Accedunt Fragmenta Epistolarum Pauli ad Timotheum ex membranis Sahidicis Musei Borgiani Velitris. Hafniae.” The fragments referred to are 1 Tim. i. 14-iii. 16; vi. 4-21; 2 Tim. i. 1-16. Münter gives also some various readings of this version in different parts of the four Gospels, taken likewise from the Borgian MSS.

Lastly; in 1790 Mingarelli published a third fasciculus of his work on the Egyptian MSS. in the Nanian Library, and in it he printed another important fragment of this version, Mark xi. 29-xv. 32. This third part is very rarely met with, and I have not seen a copy.

Meanwhile Woide was busily engaged on his edition, and had already advanced far when his labours were interrupted by death in May, 1790. His papers were placed in the hands of H. Ford, Professor of Arabic at Oxford, who after several years completed the work. It was published with the title, “Appendix ad Editionem Novi Testamenti Graeci e Codice MS. Alexandrino a C. G. Woide descripti, in qua continentur Fragmenta Novi Testamenti juxta interpretationem Dialecti Superioris Aegypti quae Thebaidica vel Sahidica appellator, &c. Oxoniae, 1799.” Woide's materials were:

1. Several MSS. of the Huntington collection in the Bodleian. These consist of (a) Two folio lectionaries on paper (Hunt. 3, Hunt. 5); (b) A folio likewise on paper, containing fragments of St. John's Gospel (Hunt. 4); (c) An 8vo, containing fragments of the Acts and Catholic Epistles (Hunt. 394). Woide gives as the date A. Mart. 1041, and a.d. 1315, “si recte conjicio,” but the two are not reconcileable; (d) A 4to on paper (Hunt. 393), written A. Mart. 1109 (i.e. a.d. 1393) and containing “De Mysterio literarum Graecarum Discursus Gnostici,” the work of one Seba an anchorite (see Ford's “Praef.,” p. vi. sq., and p. 21, note a).

2. A very ancient papyrus belonging to the famous traveller Bruce, who had brought it from Upper Egypt. It contains two Gnostic works, in which are quoted passages from the Old and New Testaments. It is now in the Bodleian112.

3. An ancient vellum MS. containing the Gnostic treatise “Pistis Sophia,” then belonging to Askew and now in the British Museum. It quotes some passages of the Old and New Testaments. The “Pistis Sophia” has been since transcribed by Schwartze, and published from his papers by Petermann after his death (1853).

4. Several fragments belonging to Woide himself, having been transmitted to him from Upper Egypt while he was employed on the work. Some are Sahidic; others Graeco-Sahidic. These formed a highly important accession to his materials. They now belong to the Clarendon Press at Oxford, and are deposited in the Bodleian.

One of these, a Graeco-Sahidic MS., said to belong to the fourth or fifth century, has been already described (Evan. T). But I am unable to assent to the opinion which is maintained by Tregelles and Tischendorf, and in which Dr. Scrivener there acquiesces, that these Woidian fragments (Ts or Twoi) were originally part of the same MS. with the Borgian Graeco-Sahidic fragments (T) published by Giorgi. And this for two reasons. (1) The paging of the two sets of fragments is quite inconsistent. The Woidian fragments, Luke xii. 5 (Sahid. Gr. 15)-xiii. 23 (Sahid. Gr. 32) and John viii. 22-32, are paged ⲩⲛⲑ-ⲩⲡⲇ (459-484) and ⲭⲛⲍ, ⲭⲛⲏ (657, 658) respectively (see Ford's “Praef.,” p. 24). On the other hand the pages of the Borgian fragments, Luke xxii. 12-xxiii. 11; John vi. 21-58; vi. 68-viii. 23, are numbered ⲥⲗⲑ-ⲥⲛⲇ (239-254), ⲧⲗⲇ-ⲧⲙⲅ, ⲧⲙⲝ-ⲧⲝⲁ (334-343, 346-361) respectively (see Zoega, p. 184; Georgius, p. 11 sq.). (2) Though the last Woidian fragment begins somewhere about where the last Borgian fragment ends, it does not begin at exactly the same place. The Borgian fragment ends ⲁⲛⲅ ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ⲟⲩ ⲉⲃⲟⲗϩⲛ ⲧⲡⲉ ⲛⲧⲱⲧⲛ ⲛⲧⲉ (ἐγὼ ἐκ τῶν ἄνω εἰμί; ὑμεῖς), viii. 23; the Woidian fragment begins ⲉ ϯⲛⲁⲃⲱⲕ ⲉⲣⲟϥ (ὅπου ἐγὼ ὑπάγω), viii. 22. Thus the two have several lines in common. For these reasons the later judgement of Tregelles, who pronounces them to be “certainly parts of the same MS.” (Introductory notice to his G. T.), must be abandoned; and we must revert to his earlier and more cautious opinion in which he describes the Woidian fragment as “a portion of a MS. almost a counterpart of T” (Horne's “Introduction,” p. 180).

5. A Sahidic vocabulary in the Royal Library at Paris (Copt. 44), containing several passages from the Sahidic Bible.

6. A few fragments communicated by Adler from the collection of Card. Borgia at Velletri. Besides these Woide incorporated the fragments published by Mingarelli in his first two fasciculi. The works of Giorgi and Münter, however, and the third fasciculus of Mingarelli, were overlooked by him or by his successor Ford.

Besides elaborate prefaces by Ford and Woide this work gives a Latin translation in parallel columns with the Sahidic. It would not be difficult to point out numerous errors in the execution of this volume; but all allowance must be made for a posthumous work completed by a second editor who had to educate himself for the task, and the heavy obligation under which Woide and Ford have laid Biblical scholars may well silence ill-natured criticism113.

Some years later appeared a highly important contribution to Sahidic literature in G. Zoega's “Catalogus Codicum Copticorum manuscriptorum qui in Museo Borgiano Velitris adservantur, Romae, 1810,” a posthumous work. The compiler of this catalogue prints at length Eph. v. 21-33; Apoc. xix. 7-18; xx. 7-xxi. 3, and gives besides (p. 200) a full list of the fragments of the Sahidic version, which are found in this rich collection of Egyptian MSS. These would go far towards filling up the gaps in Woide's edition. Thus, for instance, they contain about three-quarters of St. Mark's Gospel, the whole of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the whole of the Epistle to the Philippians with the exception of five or six verses at the beginning.

In the following year (1811) appeared Engelbreth's work on the Bashmuric version, which has been mentioned above (p. 102). In it he printed, for the sake of comparison with the Bashmuric, the following passages of the Sahidic version: 1 Cor. i. 1-16; xv. 5-33; Phil. i. 7-23; 1 Thess. i. 4-iii. 5; Heb. vii. 11-13; 16-21; ix. 2-10; 24-28; x. 5-10. These were derived wholly [pg 132] from the Borgian MSS., with the exception of a few verses taken from Woide's book. Beyond this meagre contribution of Engelbreth's, nothing has been done during more than sixty years which have elapsed since the appearance of Zoega's work towards the publication of these valuable remains, important alike for the knowledge of the Egyptian language and for purposes of Biblical criticism. A complete collection of all the fragments of the Sahidic New Testament is now the most pressing want in the province of textual criticism.

The materials for such an edition are the following:

1. The MSS. used by Woide and Ford, which however will require collating afresh.

2. The Nanian fragments published by Mingarelli. The MSS. which he used are said to have disappeared.

3. The MSS. of the Borgian collection, as indicated in the catalogue of Zoega. After the dispersion of the museum at Velletri the Biblical MSS. found their way to the Library of the Propaganda at Rome, where they now are.

4. The quotations in Tuki, though for reasons already stated these must be used with caution. They should be traced, if possible, to their sources.

To these known materials the following, which (so far as I am aware), have never been publicly noticed, must be added:

1. *British Museum, Papyrus xiii, four leaves or eight pages numbered ⲋⲙⲁ-ⲋⲙⲏ, containing John xx. 1-29 mutilated. It does not differ in any important respects from the text printed by Woide, but I noticed the following variations: ver. 3, Σίμων Πέτρος; ver. 8, add οὖν after τότε; ver. 10, om. οἰ μαθηταί; ver. 12, ins. καὶ before θεωρεῖ; ver. 17, om. δὲ after πορεύου; ver. 18, om. δέ after ἔρχεται; ver. 21, εἶπεν οὖν for εἶπεν δέ; ib. add [ὁ] Ἰησοῦς after αὐτοῖς; ver. 28, add αὐτῷ after ἀπεκρίθη.

2. *Paris, Copt. 102. Thebaic fragments of various ages, some very old. Those from the New Testament are (a) Luke iii. 21-iv. 9; (b) John xvii. 17-26, Theb. Arab., paper; (c) Acts vii. 51-viii. 3, vellum; (d) Apoc. i. 13-ii. 2, vellum. The pages of this last fragment are marked ⲉ-ⲏ.

3. Crawford and Balcarres collection. Several very important Sahidic fragments which formerly belonged to Archdeacon Tattam. These are:

*i. Mark ix. 18-xiv. 26, vellum, six leaves, the pages numbered ⲓⲑ-ⲗ, two columns in a page, and thirty-nine or forty lines in a column. I observed the following readings: ix. 24, om. μετὰ δακρύων; 44, 46, om. ὅπου ὁ σκώληξ κ.τ.λ.; 50, om. καὶ πᾶσα θυσία ἁλὶ ἁλισθήσεται; xi. 26, omitted; xiii. 14, om. τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου; xiv. 22, om. φάγετε; 24 has καινῆς.

*ii. Luke iii. 8-vi. 37, vellum, two columns in a page, thirty-five lines in a column. A very beautiful MS. The Ammonian Sections and Eusebian Canons are given, and also the τίτλοι. There is occasionally a rough concordance in the margin; e.g. on Luke v. 18, ⲓⲅ ⲉⲧⲃⲉⲡⲉⲧⲥⲏⲋ. ⲓⲱ ⲍ. ⲙⲑ ⲓⲅ. ⲙⲣ. ⲉ, where St. John stands first. I noted down the following readings: iii. 19, om. Φιλίππου; 27, Ἰωανάν; 30, Ἰωανάμ; 32, Ἰωβήδ; 32, ⲥⲁⲗⲁ for Σαλμών, just as in ver. 35; iv. 26, Σιδωνίας; 41, om. ὁ Χριστός; ver. 38, om. καὶ ἀμφότεροι συντηροῦνται. In vi. 16 Ἰούδαν Ἰακώβου is translated “Judas the son of James.”

*iii. Luke xvii. 18-xix. 30, vellum, two columns in a page, twenty-seven lines in a column, five leaves, paged ⲣⲁ to ⲣⲓ (sic). No sections are marked. It has these readings: xvii. 24, om. ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ αὐτοῦ; xviii. 28, τὰ ἴδια; xix. 5, om. εἶδεν αὐτὸν καί.

*iv. Gal. i. 14-vi. 16, fol., vellum, eight leaves, two columns in a page, twenty-nine lines in a column, the pages marked ρπθ onward. It has these readings: i. 15, ὁ θεός; ii. 5, οἷς οὐδέ; ii. 20, τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ; iii. 1, om. τῇ ἀληθείᾳ μὴ πείθεσθαι; iii. 17, om. εἰς χριστόν; iv. 7, κληρονόμος διὰ [τοῦ] χριστοῦ; iv. 14, τὸν πειρασμόν μου τὸν ἐν κ.τ.λ.; 15, ποῦ; v. 1, στήκετε οὖν.

Of these four fragments ii and iv are the most ancient; while i and iii are much later, but still old. Beyond this I do not venture to hazard an opinion as to their date, remembering that Zoega with all his knowledge and experience declines to pronounce on the age of undated Egyptian MSS.114

4*. A fragment (a single leaf) of a Graeco-Sahidic lectionary in double columns, belonging to the Rev. G. Horner, who brought it from Upper Egypt in 1873 [ix], 12-1/4 × 11. The Greek and Sahidic are not in opposite columns, but the Greek is followed by the Sahidic. The Greek is Matt. iv. 2-11 τεσσεράκοντα καὶ τεσσεράκοντα νύκτας ... διηκόνουν αὐτῷ; the Sahidic is iv. 1-6 Τότε ... ἐπὶ χειρῶν ἀροῦσί σε. The Coptic character resembles classes v and vi in Zoega. The Greek text has been already numbered as Evst. 299. This has now been presented to the Bodleian by Mr. Horner, MS. Gr. Lit. c. 1.

[Since the above was written, very considerable additions have been made to our knowledge of the Sahidic version.

1. The Biblical MSS. of the Borgian collection preserved in the Library of the Propaganda have been published by M. Amélineau. The Old Testament in the Recueil des Travaux, the New Testament in the “Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache,” 24 (1886), pp. 41, 103; 25 (1887), pp. 47, 100, 125; 26 (1888), p. 96. This publication was made under [pg 134] considerable disadvantages. M. Amélineau had not the opportunity of seeing the MSS. himself, and merely published a transcript supplied him by the Coptic Archbishop Bschai, then resident in Rome. Moreover he gives no critical notes on various readings in cases where there is more than one copy extant of any passage. Nor again does he edit the fragments completely, but only such portions of the New Testament as were not previously known. His edition therefore is not without inaccuracies, which have been noticed by Ciasca, vol. ii. pp. lix-lxxvii. These defects are, however, being remedied by an edition of all these fragments by Father Ciasca (known as the editor of the Arabic Diatessaron), which is very complete. The first two volumes, containing the Old Testament with many facsimiles, have appeared: the New Testament portion is to follow. (Sacrorum Bibliorum Fragmenta Copto-Sahidica Musei Borgiani iussu et sumptibus S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Studio P. Augustini Ciasca. Romae. Typis eiusdem S. Congregationis. Vol. i. 1885; Vol. ii. 1889.)

2. The Crawford and Balcarres fragments mentioned above have also been edited by M. Amélineau in the Recueil des Travaux, v. (1883), p. 105.

3. To O. von Lemm we owe a considerable number of fragments. Bruchstücke der Sahidischen Bibelübersetzung nach Handschriften der kaiserlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek zu St. Petersburg. Leipzig, 1885. And Sieben Sahidische Bibel-Fragmente. Z. A. S. 23 (1885), p. 19.

4. Fragments, mostly smaller in extent, have been edited by the following:

Ceugney Recueil, ii. 94.

Krall Mittheilungen, ii. 68.

5. But most important of all are the newly acquired fragments of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. In 1883 that Library had the good fortune to obtain (largely through the influence of M. Amélineau) from the famous White Monastery or Deir Amba Shenoudah of Upper Egypt a large collection of Sahidic fragments. The publication of these has been begun. Considerable sections of the Old Testament have been published by Maspero (Mémoires, vol. vi), and of documents relating to Early Church History by Bouriant (ib. vol. viii). The New Testament fragments have not yet been published, but M. Amélineau, who is entrusted with them, has kindly put at my disposal the following list of contents. I have omitted smaller Fragments:

Matthew (167 leaves): i. 1-20; i. 17-ii. 4; i. 1-22; ii. 4, 5, 8, 11, 14, 15; iii. 1-11; 1-15; iii. 10-iv. 13; iii. 22-iv. 11; iv. 3-19; 21-v. 15; iv. 15-v. 17; v. 17-32; 9-28; v. 25-vi. 3; vii. 6-viii. 4; vii. 8-27; x. 9-28; viii. 1-17; 2-20; ix. 13-33; ix. 25-x. 15; [pg 135] ix. 33-x. 15; ix. 33-x. 19; ix. 26-x. 19; x. 39-xxviii. 54 (36 leaves); x. 20-xii. 3; xi. 3-10; xi. 15-xii. 16; xi. 16-xii. 4; xii. 6-xiv. 31; xii. 19-40; xiii. 19-xiv. 6; xiii. 22-25; xiii. 35-50; xiii. 41-xiv. 2; xiv. 8-xv. 4; xiv. 8-xv. 4; xiv. 17-35; xiv. 18-xv. 19; xiv. 20-35; xiv. 21-xv. 19; xiv. 24-xv. 11; xiv. 27-xv. 1; xiv. 31-54; xiv. 31-xv. 20; xv. 17-xvi. 19; xviii. 11-35; 15-21; xviii. 26-xix. 1; xix. 7-22; xix. 13-xx. 16; xix. 24-xx. 16; xx. 9-32; xxi. 8-12; 19-21; 12-37; 9-25; 22-33; xxi. 31-xxii. 5; xxi. 32-41; xxi. 38-xxii. 12; xxii. 22-xxiii. 12; xxiv. 7-xxvi. 64; xxiv. 2-42; xxiv. 35-xxv. 36; xxiv. 47-xxvi. 47; xxvi. 41-60; xxvi. 69-xxvii. 5; xxvi. 75-xxviii. 23; xxvii. 26-56; xxvii. 49-xxviii. 4; xxvii. 54-xxviii. 8. Also a fragment containing the last few verses and the beginning of St. Mark.

Mark (43 leaves): i. 1-17; 4-5; i. 30-ii. 1; iv. 1-8; iv. 32-v. 11; v. 30-vii. 36; v. 13-38; vi. 4-viii. 12; vii. 36-viii. 1; viii. 12-31; 23-38; x. 42-xi. 15; xi. 3-27; xi. 11-xiii. 14; xii. 12-35; xii. 31-xiii. 19; xiv. 6-xv. 2; xiv. 12-xv. 21; xiv. 20-40.

Luke (163 leaves): i. 1-26; 1-5; 26-61; 19-35; ii. 10-33; iii. 4-v. 8; iii. 29-iv. 20; iii. 36-iv. 47; iv. 22-viii. 14; iv. 43-v. 29; v. 10-viii. 7; vi. 35-ix. 16; vii. 1-ix. 5; vii. 7-15; vii. 37, 38; 41-45; viii. 2-12; 6-15; 4-37; 7-26; viii. 14-ix. 8; viii. 32-44; ix. 3-22; 9-21; ix. 51-x. 18; x. 39-xii. 37; xi. 23-34; 24-56, xii. 1-8, 36-48; xi. 28-44; xii. 3-12; 37-51; xii. 48-xiii. 10; xii. 53-xiii. 9; xiii. 1-16; xiii. 11-31; xiii. 15-xiv. 15; xiv. 2-20; xiv. 3-xv. 2; xiv. 21-32; xv. 17-xvii. 19; xvi. 18-xvii. 16; xvii. 10-24; xviii. 4-xix. 42; xviii. 21-xix. 22; xix. 3-28; xix. 28-xxi. 22; xix. 49-xx. 6; xxi. 22-xxii. 1; xxii. 11-27; xxii. 8-xxiv. 10; xxiii. 1-39; xxiv. 27-53.

Also the following bilingual (Greek and Sahidic) texts:

iii. 15, 16; x. 11-21; xi. 16-32; xvii. 29-xviii. 1; xviii. 32-42; xxi. 25-31; xxii. 66-xxiii. 17; and two leaves in Greek.

John (207 leaves). One MS. of 48 leaves, Luke iv. 38-v. 1; viii. 10-29; ix. 9-62; John i. 23-vii. 40; ix. 6-27; xix. 13-33; xx. 31-xxi. 17. i. 25-45; 25-36, ii. 7-18; i. 42-iii. 4; i. 43-ii. 11; i. 45-iv. 19; i. 67-ii. 24; ii. 11-iii. 25; ii. 24-iv. 22; iii. 4-10; 13-16; iii. 24-iv. 8; iv. 27-51; iv. 50-vii. 20; v. 24-vi. 5; vi. 12-35; 26-45; 30-41; vi. 62-vii. 17; vi. 65-vii. 10; vii. 20-39; vii. 31-x. 12; vii. 41-viii. 23; vii. 44-viii. 20; viii. 25-44; viii. 22-ix. 28; viii. 36-49; ix. 7-xi. 22; ix. 20-40; 27-39; xii. 4-18; x. 13-19; xi. 27-47; 34-48; 34-45; xi. 44-xii. 2; xii. 25-34; xiii. 7-27; 18-31; xiii. 19-xiv. 1; xiv. 21-xviii. 15; xv. 3-xvi. 15; xv. 6-26; xv. 22-xvi. 16; xvi. 1-23; xvi. 6-26; xvi. 22-xxii. 8; xvii. 14-23; xviii. 3-26; xviii. 5-xix. 40; xviii. 23-xix. 2; xviii. 33-xix. 19; xix. 18-26; xx. 8-18; 19-27; xxi. 2-14.

Also the following bilingual:

i. 19-23; ii. 2-9; iv. 5-13; 15-52; v. 12-21; xii. 36-46.

Acts: ii. 2-17; 18-40; ii. 34-iv. 6; viii. 32-ix. 15; viii. 35-ix. 22; ix. 27-40; x. 3-4; xii. 7-xiii. 5; xii. 23-xiii. 8; xiii. [pg 136] 10-xvi. 4; xiv. 4-22; xviii. 21-xix. 6; xxvii. 38-xxviii. 4; xxviii. 9-23.

Romans: i. 26-ii. 25; ii. 28-iii. 13; iii. 20-iv. 4; viii. 35-ix. 22; ix. 12-xi. 11; ix. 15-x. 1; ix. 24-xi. 30; xi. 30-xii. 15; xiv. 4-21; xv. 10-30.

1 Cor.: i. 19-ii. 10; ii. 9-iv. 1; ii. 21-vi. 4; vii. 36-ix. 5; ix. 2-x. 7; ix. 12-25; x. 13-xi. 15; xvii. 41-45; xvii. 16-21.

2 Cor.: xi. 1-20; xii. 21-xiii. 13 (with Heb. i. 14); xi. 33-xii. 14.

Heb.: ii. 14-20; iv. 7-14; v. 12-vi. 10; ix. 2-14; 20-23; x. 9-10; xii. 16-xiii. 9; xiii. 7-21; xiii. 10-25.

Gal.: i. 1-vi. 18 (with Eph. i. 1-10; vi. 12-24; and Phil. i. 1-7); i. 10-24; iii. 2-16; ii. 9-iii. 10.

Eph.: iv. 17-v. 13 (with Phil. iii. 1-iv. 6).

Phil.: i. 23-ii. 6; i. 28-ii. 20.

Col.: i. 1-29; 9-11, 15 (with 1 Thess. ii. 15-iv. 4); i. 29-iii. 1.

1 Tim.: iii. 2-v. 2.

1 Pet.: i. 18-vi. 14 (with 2 Pet. i. 1-iii. 1); ii. 23-iii. 13; iii. 12-iv. 9; iii. 15-iv. 10.

6. The British Museum has recently acquired a considerable number of fragments on vellum, containing—

Matt.: xv. 11-xvi. 12; xxi. 6-22.

John: ix. 7-26; x. 30-42; xi. 1-10; 37-57.

Acts: xxii. 12-30; xxiii. 1-15.

And also a large number of papyrus fragments in the Graf collection.

7. Mr. Petrie also has in his possession a valuable papyrus MS. containing considerable portions of St. John. This will probably shortly be published by Mr. Crum.

From the above account it becomes clear that we have now already published, or preserved in European libraries, enough material to produce a complete or almost a complete edition of the Sahidic New Testament. But not only this. We have also a considerable number of fragments written on papyrus, which are much older than any of the MSS. previously known, and will enable us to write a history of the version from an early date. May we express a hope that M. Amélineau, who has made large collections for the purpose, would first of all give us an edition of the Paris fragments as accurate as that of Ciasca, and then of the Sahidic New Testament as a whole? Much more than when Bishop Lightfoot wrote is the publication of it the pressing need of Biblical criticism.]

The order of the books in the Sahidic New Testament, so far as regards the great groups, appears to have been the same as in the Bohairic, i.e. (1) The Four Gospels, (2) The Pauline Epistles, (3) The Catholic Epistles and Acts (see above, p. 124). This may be inferred from the order of quotations in the Sahidic vocabulary described by Woide, Praef., p. 18; for the Sahidic MSS. are so fragmentary that no inference on this point can be drawn from them. Like the Bohairic, the original Sahidic Canon seems to have excluded the Apocalypse. In the vocabulary just mentioned it does not appear as part of the New Testament, but liturgical and other matter interposes before it is taken. Moreover in most cases it is evident from the paging of the fragments which remain that the MSS. containing this book formed separate volumes. In the Paris fragment described above this is plainly the case, and it is equally obvious in the Borgian MSS. lxxxviii, lxxxix (Zoega, p. 187). Thus in lxxxviii, pp. 39-44 contain Apoc. xii. 14-xiv. 13; and in lxxxix. pp. 59, 60, 63, 64 contain Apoc. xix. 7-18, xx. 7-xxi. 3. On the other hand in lxxxvii. where Apoc. iii. 20 begins on p. 279, this fragment must have formed part of a much larger volume, which contained (as we may suppose) a considerable portion of the New Testament.

The order of the four Gospels presents a difficulty. In the Sahidic vocabulary already referred to, the sequence is John, Matthew, Mark, Luke; and this order is also observed in the marginal concordance to the Crawford and Balcarres MS. described above. Thus there is reason for supposing that at one time St. John stood first. But the paging of the oldest MSS. does not favour this conclusion. In the Woidian and Borgian fragments of the Graeco-Sahidic Gospels, which belong to the fourth or fifth century, the numbering of the pages (see p. 130) shows that St. Luke stood before St. John. It is possible indeed that in the MSS. the transcriber was guided by the usual Greek arrangement. But in other MSS. also the synoptic evangelists precede St. John, e.g. Borg. xlvi, l, lxiv; while in other fragments again (Borg. lxx, lxxiv) the high numbers of the pages of St. John show that the Evangelist cannot have stood first in the volume, and this seems further supported by the Paris fragments, in which we find St. John following St. Luke in the same MS.

In this version, as in the Bohairic, the Epistle to the [pg 138] Hebrews was treated as the work of St. Paul; but instead of being placed, as there, after 2 Thessalonians and before 1 Timothy, it stood between 2 Corinthians and Galatians115. It clearly occupies this position in the Borgian MS. lxxx (Zoega, p. 186): and by calculating the pages I have ascertained that this must also have been its place in all the other MSS. of the Pauline Epistles of which fragments after 2 Corinthians are preserved. These are the Borgian fragments lxxxii, lxxxv, lxxxvi, (Zoega, p. 186 sq.), and the Crawford and Balcarres fragment (iv) described above (p. 132); all of which happily are paged.

The Oxford MS. Hunt. 394 is a proof that the Acts followed the Catholic Epistles in the Sahidic New Testament, as is the case also in the Memphitic. Woide indeed (Praef., p. 22), when describing this MS., says, “exorditur ab Actis Apostolicis”; but, even if this be so, his own account of the paging shows that the leaves have been displaced in binding, and that the Catholic Epistles originally stood first. The vocabulary also places them before the Acts.

The Sahidic version appears to be in one respect less faithful to the original than the Bohairic. So far as I am able to judge, it pays more respect to the Egyptian idiom, frequently omitting the conjunction and leaving the sentences disconnected. As regards the vocabulary, it adopts Greek words with as great facility as the Bohairic, or even greater. This we should hardly anticipate in Upper Egypt, which must have been comparatively free from Greek influence. Altogether it is a rougher and less polished version than the Bohairic.

The real textual value of the Sahidic cannot under present circumstances be assigned with any certainty. What would be received by one school of critics would not be admitted by another. But the Editor readily records the verdict of Bishop Lightfoot that the text of it, though very ancient, is inferior to the Bohairic, and less pure; that it exhibits a certain infusion of readings which were widely spread in the second century, and may very probably have had, to a considerable extent, a Western origin; that it differs very largely from the Traditional text; and that both in text and in interpretation it is entirely independent of the Bohairic. The coincidences are not greater than must have been exhibited by two separate translations in allied dialects from independent [pg 139] texts of the same original. Of any mutual influence of the versions of Upper and Lower Egypt on each other no traces are discernible.

The following passage from Acts xvii. 12-16 will serve to illustrate the independence of these two versions.

[(4) The Fayoum Version.]

[The history of the discovery of the third Egyptian version, and the reasons that have caused it to be assigned to the district of the Fayoum, have been given above.

The Fayoum (ⲫⲓⲟⲙ: ⲡⲓⲟⲙ: ⲡⲓⲁⲙ) is a district of Egypt situated to the west of the Nile valley, from which it is separated by a narrow strip of desert, and lying about eighty miles to the south of the apex of the Delta. It is a large depression in the desert, which has been reclaimed and fertilized by an offshoot of the Nile, now called the Bahr-il-Yousouf, and is distinguished at the present day for its extreme fertility. It appears to have been particularly prosperous and thickly populated in Ptolemaic and Roman times; and in the desert surrounding the cultivated land are the remains of several Greek cities, and of large Coptic monasteries; and it is from here that the chief part of the collection of papyrus fragments now in Berlin and Vienna have been obtained.

The dialect of this district, both in the fragments of the Scriptures preserved in it, and in the other documents more recently discovered (Z. A. S. 23, 1885, p. 26), presents very marked peculiarities. As regards vowels it shows the following amongst other variations as compared with Sahidic. It substitutes ⲁ for ⲉ: ⲛⲉⲕ for ⲛⲁⲕ; ⲗⲉⲛ for ⲣⲁⲛ; ⲕⲉⲉⲃ for ⲭⲁϥ : ⲕⲁⲁϥ; ⲏ for ⲉ: ⲥⲏⲛⲧⲓ for ⲥⲉⲛϯ : ⲥⲛⲧⲉ; ⲏⲙⲓ for ⲉⲙⲓ : ⲉⲓⲙⲉ; ⲁ for ⲟ: ⲃⲁⲗ for ⲉⲃⲟⲗ; ⲗⲁⲃ for ⲉⲣⲟϥ; ⲟ for ⲱ: ϩⲟⲃ for ϩⲱⲃ; ⲗⲟⲙⲓ for ⲗⲱⲙⲓ (= ⲡⲱⲙⲓ : ⲣⲱⲙⲉ). In consonants it has two very marked features, the substitution of ⲗ for ⲣ, as ⲉⲗ, ⲉⲗⲉ, ⲗⲉⲡ; ϣⲏⲗⲓ for ⲉⲣ, ⲉⲣⲉ, &c., and of ⲃ for final ϥ, as ⲛⲧⲁⲃ for ⲛⲧⲟϥ.

A considerable amount of this version still probably remains unpublished, but specimens may be discovered in the following:

On this version Bishop Lightfoot wrote: “As the Bashmuric is a secondary version, it has no independent value, and is only useful in passages where the Sahidic is wanting.” This opinion would hardly represent the present position. That the Sahidic and Fayoum versions are not independent is quite true, but the relation of them to one another is much more that they are different forms of the same version, of which on the whole perhaps the Fayoum represents the older and more primitive text.]

[(5) The Middle Egyptian116 or Lower Sahidic Version.]

[It has already been explained that documents found on the site of Memphis exhibit a dialect different in some respects from any of those that we have yet considered. In this also fragments have been found of a translation of the New Testament.

The dialect shows a combination of Sahidic and Bohairic forms. It has ⲓⲱⲧ for Sah. ⲉⲓⲱⲧ; ⲙⲉⲧⲓⲱⲧ for ⲙⲛⲧⲉⲓⲱⲧ; ⲓⲱⲁⲛⲏⲥ for ⲓⲱϩⲁⲛⲛⲏⲥ; ⲛⲧⲟⲧⲕ for ⲛⲧⲟⲟⲧⲕ; ϣⲧⲱⲣⲓ for ϣⲧⲱⲣⲉ. It agrees again with the Fayoum dialect (which is generally considered a variety of it) in its affection for ⲁ, as ⲛⲧⲁⲕ for ⲛⲧⲟⲕ, and apparently in using ⲗ for ⲣ, but only occasionally.

The following specimen from Rom. xi. 31-36 will exhibit the character of the dialect and the version: the Sahidic is taken from the Borgian fragment published by Amélineau, Z. A. S. 25, 1887, p. 49; the Middle Egyptian from “Mittheilungen,” ii. p. 69.

Specimens of this version may be found in—

The lines between this dialect and version and that of the [pg 143] Fayoum are not, however, clearly defined, and further research may make it necessary to rearrange the different specimens mentioned in this and the preceding sections.

Textually the version is of equal value with that of the Fayoum, that is, it represents another tradition of the version of Upper Egypt, of which Sahidic was the most important representative.]

[(6) The Akhmîm Dialect.]

[It would have probably been more scientific to have begun our discussion of the versions of Upper Egypt with a description of the Akhmîm dialect. It certainly represents the language in an older form than any other dialect we have examined; unfortunately such a very small fragment of the New Testament version exists that its importance at present can hardly be estimated.

The Akhmîm dialect is known to us by a series of Apocryphal and Biblical fragments published by M. Bouriant (Mémoires, i. p. 243), and has the following characteristics. In its vowels its affinities are nearest to the Middle Egyptian; it has ⲁ for ⲟ, ⲁⲩ for ⲟⲟⲩ, and ⲉ for ⲁ. It does not use ⲗ for ⲣ. Like the Sahidic it has double vowel-endings, and the weak final ⲉ, but not ⲫ, ⲑ, ⲭ for ⲡϩ, ⲧϩ, ⲕϩ. It also has some Bohairic forms, such as ⲛⲟⲩ, ⲁⲣⲉ, ⲁϥ. In the vowels it has the following peculiarities: ⲁ for ⲉ (Sah.), ⲁϩⲟⲩⲛ, ⲁϩⲣⲏⲓ, ⲁⲣⲁⲕ, ⲁⲃⲁⲗ; ⲓ or ⲉⲓ for ⲏ, ⲡⲓ (sun), ⲥⲙⲉⲓ, ⲧϩⲉⲓ; ⲟⲩ for ⲱ, ⲕⲟⲩ, ϫⲟⲩ, ⲥⲃⲟⲩ; ⲟ for ⲁⲩ, ⲛⲟ, ⲥⲛⲟ.

But its most distinguishing feature is an entirely new letter, [Symbol: Coptic “hori” glyph with additional stroke to lower left]: this may represent ϣ of other dialects; [Symbol: the new glyph] for ⲉϣ (to know), ⲉϩ [with the new glyph] for ⲁϣ; or ϫ as ⲧϩⲡⲟ [with the new glyph] for ϫⲡⲟ; or ϧ : ϩ, as ⲱⲛϩ [with the new glyph] for ⲱⲛϧ; ⲥϩⲉⲓ [with the new glyph] for ⲥϧⲁⲓ.

The textual affinities can hardly be worked out with the small amount of material we possess, but there seems to be little doubt that it represents in a very early form the same version that we are acquainted with in Sahidic. Further discoveries in this dialect may do much to make us acquainted with the early history of the version of Upper Egypt.

Only two short fragments of this version are known, which have been edited by Mr. W. E. Crum in his edition of the Coptic [pg 144] MSS. brought from the Fayoum by W. M. Flinders Petrie (p. 2). They are contained in a parchment MS. of very great antiquity (Mr. Crum suggests the fourth century, but this is certainly too early), and contain St. James iv. 12-13, St. Jude 17-20. The following comparison of it with the Sahidic will show both the similarity of the versions and the differences of the dialect.

It has only been possible in the above account to give a rough outline of more recent discovery. Further investigation is necessary, and the lines which divide the different dialects, especially those between Fayoumic and Middle Egyptian, require to be more accurately defined. Much may be hoped also from the results of future discovery. The rubbish heaps of the monasteries, the concealed libraries, the graves, have yielded up some of their treasures, but all has not yet been brought to light. Enough has been written to suggest that discoveries of great interest for the life and character of early Egyptian Christianity have been made, and that much still remains to be found, which may indirectly throw a flood of light on the early history of Christianity as a whole117.]

(1) The Gothic Version (Goth.).

The history of the Goths, who from the wilds of Scandinavia overran the fairest regions of Europe, has been traced by the master-hand of Gibbon (Decline and Fall, Chapters x, xxvi, xxxi, &c.), and needs not here be repeated. While the nation was yet seated in Moesia, Ulphilas or Wulfilas [318-388], [pg 146] a Cappadocian, who succeeded their first Bishop Theophilus in a.d. 348, though himself an Arian and a teacher of that subtil heresy to his adopted countrymen, became their benefactor, by translating both the Old118 and New Testament into the Gothic, a dialect of the great Teutonic stock of languages, having previously invented or adapted an alphabet expressly for their use. There can be no question, from internal evidence, that the Old Testament was rendered from the Septuagint, the New from the Greek original119: but the existing manuscripts testify to some corruption from Latin sources, very naturally arising during the occupation of Italy by the Goths in the fifth century. These venerable documents are principally three, or rather may be treated under two MSS. and one group.

These fragments (for such they still must be called)122, in spite of the influence of the Latin, approach nearer to the received text, in respect of their readings, than the Egyptian or one or two other versions of about the same age; and from their similarity in language to the Teutonic have been much studied in Germany. The fullest and best edition of the whole collected, with a grammar and lexicon, is by H. C. von der Gabelentz and J. Loebe (Ulfilas Vet. et N. Testamenti versionis Gothicae fragmenta quae supersunt, Leipsic, 1836-46, viz. vol. i. Text, 1836; Pars ii. Glossarium, 1843; Pars ii. Grammatik, 1846), and of the Codex Argenteus singly that of And. Uppstrom (with a good facsimile), Upsal, 1854. This scholar published separately in 1857 ten leaves of the manuscript which had been stolen between 1821 and 1834, and were restored through him by the penitent thief on his death-bed. The Gothic Gospels, however, had been cited as early as 1675 in Fell's N. T., and more fully in Mill's, through Francis Junius' edition (with Marshall's critical notes), which was printed at Dort in 1665, from Derrer's accurate [pg 148] transcript of the Upsal manuscript, made in or about 1655, when it was in Isaac Vossius' possession. Other editions of the Codex Argenteus were published by G. Stiernhielm in 1671 for the College of Antiquaries at Stockholm; by E. Lye at the Clarendon Press in 1750 from the revision of Eric Benzel, Archbishop of Upsal; and (with the addition of the fragments in the Codex Carolinus) by Jo. Ihre in 1763, and by J. C. Zahn in 1805. And also the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in parallel columns with the Versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale, London, 1865, and Ulfila, oder die Gotische Bibel (N. T.), E. Bernhardt, Halle, 1875, and St. Mark with a grammatical commentary, R. Müller and H. Hoeppe, 1881, and Skeat, Gospel of St. Mark in Gothic, Clarendon Press, 1882.

(2) The Armenian Version.

The existing Armenian version is a recension made shortly after the Council of Ephesus of a still earlier version, which was based in part upon a Syriac, in part upon a Greek original. This latest recension was made according to “accurate and reliable copies” of the Greek Bible, which, along with the Canons of the Council of Ephesus, were brought from Constantinople about the year 433. One would naturally wish for more details than the above brief statement contains; yet it is all that one can definitely infer from the history of the version as related by three nearly contemporary writers, whose accounts we now subjoin, namely, Koriun, Lazar of Pharpi, and Moses Khorenatzi.

Koriun123 in his life of St. Mesrop (written between 441 and 452 a.d.) relates as follows:—

In the fifth year of the reign of Vramshapho [i.e. about 397 a.d.], St. Mesrop was first in Edessa, then in Amid, lastly in Samosata, busy all the time about his discovery of the Armenian characters124. In Samosata, where he was received with great respect by the clergy and bishop, Mesrop met with a Greek scribe, Hrofanos (? Rufinus), in conjunction with whom, and [pg 149] with the help of two pupils named John and Joseph, he undertook a translation of the Bible. They began—and this is noteworthy—with the book of the Proverbs of Solomon; Hrofanos or Rufinus writing down the translation with his own hand. Mesrop next visited the Bishop of the Syrians, who congratulated him on his work. He then returned to Nor Chalach, or new city, as Valarshapat was called by the Romans, in the sixth year of Vramshapho's reign, a.d. 398. At a later time, Koriun, the writer, was himself sent with Eznik to Constantinople, apparently in quest of books to translate; for they returned with a sure copy of the Scriptures, with works of the Fathers, and with the canons of the Councils of Nice and Ephesus. “Now St. Sahak had long before translated the collection of Church books from Greek into Armenian, as well as much true wisdom of the holy Patriarchs. But he now resumed, and taking with the help of Eznik the former translations made hurriedly and offhand, he confirmed them by the help of the true copies now brought, and they translated much commentary on the books.” The above is the gist of what Koriun has to tell us, though he mentions that scholars were sent to Edessa to translate and bring back the works of the Fathers. Why Mesrop began with the Book of Proverbs, whether he translated more than that, and from which language, we do not learn from Koriun. Lazar of Pharpi125, who wrote in the last half of the sixth century, is our next authority. He states that up to the last decade of the fourth century, the offices of religion were still read in Greater Armenia in Syriac, a language which the people did not understand. The edicts of the kings of Armenia were also written out in Syriac or Greek characters. But as soon as the Armenian alphabet was discovered, St. Sahak—who was patriarch 390-428 a.d. and an expert in Greek—set himself, in response to the patriotic exhortations of St. Mesrop, of Vramshapho the king, and of the clergy and nobles, to translate the Holy Scriptures. He states that St. Sahak's version comprised the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and was made from Greek.

Moses of Chorene, bk. iii. ch. 36 ff., copies, confuses, and adds to Koriun's account. A little before 370 a.d. the Persians [pg 150] overran Armenia, and Meroujah, their leader, burned all the books he could find in the country, proscribed the study of the Greek language, and enacted penalties against any who should speak it or translate from it. At that time, adds Moses, the offices of the church were performed in Greek, because the Armenian alphabet did not yet exist. On the death of Theodosius (Jan. 395 a.d.) there was a partition of Armenia between his successor Arcadius and the king of Persia, by which the latter took undisputed possession of the eastern provinces, including the basin of Ararat, in which lay the new religious centre Valarshapat or Edschmiadzin, the νέα πόλις of the Romans. The new Mesropic alphabet was at first used only in Persian Armenia; for, says Moses, in the parts dependent on the Greeks, all writing had to be in Greek characters, Syriac being forbidden. As soon as Mesrop had elaborated his alphabet with the aid of Hrophanos, he betook himself to the work of translation; and with the aid of his pupils John and Joseph, translated the entire twenty-two authentic books along with the New Testament, taking care to begin with the Book of Proverbs. About the year 406 he returned to Armenia, and found St. Sahak engaged in translating the Syriac Bible. He hints that Sahak would have preferred a Greek original, if Meroujah had not burned all the Greek books nearly thirty years before. This perhaps implies that the version, on which Mesrop had been engaged in Samosata, was made from Greek. Nor is that unlikely; for Rufinus, who helped him, was a Greek, and we learn from Koriun that there were Armenians in Edessa studying both Greek and Syriac. We read in bk. iii. ch. 60 of the History of Moses, about missions sent to Edessa and Byzantium in order to the translation of the works of the Fathers, but we hear nothing more expressly touching the Version of the Bible, save this, that after the Council of Ephesus, Sahak and Mesrop, then in Ashtishat in Taron, received from Byzantium, as aforesaid, the canons of the council recently held, along with accurate copies of the Greek Bible. On receipt of these, Sahak and Mesrop translated afresh what had already been translated, and were zealous in recasting the text. But they were not, it seems, after all, satisfied with their work, and sent Moses to Alexandria to learn the “beautiful tongue” (i.e. Greek), with a view to a more accurate articulation and division (of the Armenian scriptures).

The above summary exhausts the evidence of Moses of Khorene126. It would appear therefrom that the Bible was translated twice into Armenian before the end of the fourth century; by Mesrop from Greek, and by Sahak from Syriac. The circumstance that Mesrop in Samosata began with the Proverbs of Solomon raises a suspicion that the earlier books had already been rendered, when and by whom is unknown. Certainly the reasons given by Koriun and by Moses for Mesrop beginning with Proverbs are insufficient. Moses again in stating that Sahak rendered the entire Bible from Syriac contradicts both Koriun and Lazar. Are we to infer that Sahak and Mesrop after 430 a.d. retranslated according to the Constantinople Bibles what they had already translated from Syriac, and also it would seem from a presumably less perfect Greek text? Anyhow it is unlikely that they would wholly sacrifice their own work, and we should therefore expect to find in the Armenian version a mixture of texts, namely of some old Syriac text, which must have been in vogue as late as 380, of some older Greek text supplied in Edessa or Samosata, and of the Constantinopolitan texts; which last may well have been among the fifty splendid copies which had been prepared under the order of Constantine by Eusebius a century before. If, and how far, these different elements enter into the Version can only be determined by a careful analysis of its readings. It may be that in some MSS. there lurks more of the unrevised text than in others127. The entire history is an apt illustration of that political see-saw between the Roman and the Persian powers which went on in Armenia during the fourth and fifth centuries, and out of which the patriotic vigour and devotion of St. Mesrop and St. Sahak carved at last a truly national Armenian Church, with an independent life and literature of its own.

The Armenian Version was collated for Robert Holmes' edition of the Septuagint, though not with desirable accuracy nor from the oldest MSS. For example, the Codex Arm. 3 of the Pentateuch, which Holmes declares, teste Adlero, to be of the year 1063, [pg 152] is but an eighteenth century codex. The collation of the New Testament in the eighth edition of Tischendorf's N. T. is accurate so far as it goes, but is far from being exhaustive or based on a consensus of the oldest MSS. Old codices of the Armenian Gospels are very common, and the present writer knows of as many as eight, none of them later than the year a.d. 1000; of four of these he has complete collations. The rest of the N. T. is only found in codices of the whole Bible, which are rare and always written in minuscules, never in uncials as are the Gospels. He knows of no copies of the whole Bible older than the twelfth century.

Two further questions call for brief answer:—1. Have we the Armenian version as it left the hands of the fifth century translators 2. Did the fifth century version comprise the whole of the Old and New Testament?

In regard to the first question, it must be admitted as probable that changes were subsequently made, at least in the New Testament, in the way both of omission and addition; e.g. in St. Luke xxii. 44, out of four very early uncial codices collated by the writer, the words: ἐγένετο δὲ ὁ ἱδρῶς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ θρόμβοι αἵματος καταβαίνοντες ἐπι τὴν γῆν, are found only in one, and that one the earliest, being dated 902 a.d. The words which precede ὤφθη δ—ὲπροσηύχετο are omitted in all four of them. We may infer that ver. 44 was in the original version, and was omitted from the three codices for doctrinal reasons. The additions made to the text after the fifth century are easier to detect; because they only come in some MSS. and not in others, and also because there is so much discrepancy of readings between those codices which add them, that they are at once seen to be lacunas supplied by different hands. This is the case, for example, with the end of St. Mark's Gospel, which only comes in one of the four codices mentioned, namely in the oldest Edschmiadzin Codex, under the heading “of the Elder Ariston,” which may refer to Aristion, teacher of Papias, or to Ariston of Pella. The case is the same with the episode of the woman taken in adultery. For the settlement of such points there is wanted a careful collation of the oldest codices.

In answer to the other question we may state, without entering into the proof of it, that the fifth century version included all the books of the Old and New Testament save the third book [pg 153] of Ezra, Esther, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, and perhaps the Maccabees. For as we read in Elisaeus that Vartan Mamikonean in the middle of the fifth century inspired his troops to deeds of valour against the Persians by reading to them the Book of Maccabees, we may fairly infer that that also was already then rendered. It may be added that the Psalms were rendered for church use prior to the rest of the Bible, and were translated afresh by Mesrop and his disciples; also that the Book of Revelations was translated twice. The double translation of both these books is a fact which can be traced in various MSS.

One other point must be noticed. From the history of Moses of Chorene, it is not clear what were the imperfections of the Armenian version, to remedy which Moses was sent to Alexandria. We cannot suppose that Mesrop and Sahak and Eznik, and the other doctors who had already translated the Greek codices brought from Byzantium, were incompetent Greek scholars. The object therefore of Moses' voyage to Alexandria was probably that he might add to the Armenian text the Sections of Ammonius, and also the asterisks and obeli of Origen's Hexaplaric copy128. The Ammonian Sections are found in all Armenian New Testaments, and in some copies of the Bible the Origenian marks as well; for instance, in Codex 3270 of the Bibliotheca Vindobonensis. There is no evidence that the Armenians ever used a version of Tatian's Diatessaron.

The following is a list—not exhaustive—of the oldest known codices of the Armenian Gospels, or “Avetaran”:—

(3) The Ethiopic Version (Eth.).

The Ethiopic translation of the Bible is assigned by Guidi to the end of the fifth, or beginning of the sixth century, the time at which Christianity became the dominant religion in Abyssinia. That religion after a period of decadence began to flourish again in the twelfth century, but in dependence on the Patriarchate of Alexandria. The two principal classes of Ethiopic Biblical MSS. are connected with these periods respectively; the first class being derived from the Greek text before, and the latter after the Alexandrian recension. The corrections, however, vary in different copies, and appear to be the result of desultory rather [pg 155] than of systematic alteration. The MSS. of the Ethiopic N. T. are rarely complete; ordinarily the Gospels, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the Catholic Epistles with the Acts and the Apocalypse constitute separate volumes. The oldest copy of the Gospels would seem to be no. 32 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, written in the reign of Yekūnō Amlāk; whereas MS. 33 of the same collection represents the later text. Examples of the different recensions are given by Guidi, Atti della R. Academia dei Lincei: Classe di scienze morali &c., iv. 1888, from whom most of the above statements are taken.

Copies of the N. T., especially of the Gospels, are to be found in most collections of Ethiopic MSS.; see especially Wright, Ethiopic MSS. of the British Museum, pp. 23-39, and Zotenberg, Catalogue des MSS. Éthiopiens de la Bibliothèque Nationale (nos. 32-48; in the preface to this latter work a list of other collections are given); also Dillmann, Abessinische Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (no. 20, the four Gospels; 21, the Gospel of St. John); D'Abbadie, Catalogue Raisonné de MSS. Éthiopiens (Paris, 1859; nos. 2, 47, 82, 95, 112, 173, the four Gospels; no. 119, St. Paul's Epistles; no. 164, Catholic Epp., Apoc., and Acts); Dillmann, Catalogus MSS. Aethiop. in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, nos. 10-15; Fr. Müller, Aethiop. Handschriften der K. K. Hofbibliothek in Wien (Z. D. M. G., xvi. p. 554, no. v, the Gospels; no. vi, St. John's Gospel); “Bulletin Scientifique de S. Pétersbourg,” ii. 302 (account of a MS. of the Gospels in the Asiatic Institute at St. Petersburg), iii. 148 (account of a MS. of the four Gospels, bearing the date 78 = 1426 a.d., in the Public Library at St. Petersburg, and another of St. John's Gospel).

The Ethiopic N. T. was first printed in Rome, 1548, cum epistola Pauli ad Hebraeos tantum, cum concordantiis Evangelistarum Eusebii et numeratione omnium verborum eorundem. Quae omnia curavit Fr. Petrus Ethyops auxilio priorum sedente Paulo iii. Pont. Max. et Claudio illius regni imperatore (edition of Tasfā Sion). The remaining thirteen Epistles of St. Paul were printed in 1549. This edition was reproduced in the London Polyglott. Another was issued by T. P. Platt (for the Bible Society) in 1830, reprinted 1844 and 1874. These editions are based on MSS. containing mixed recensions, and are therefore of no critical value.

(4) The Georgian Version (Georg.).

The Church of the Iberians was founded during the reign of Constantine according to tradition; though, if we consider how intimate and frequent had been from a much earlier period their intercourse with the Greeks, we may safely infer that the seeds of Christianity had been long before sown among them. There is no certain evidence of the date at which they translated the Scriptures; but it is probable that their version of the New Testament was made in the fifth and sixth centuries; and that it was made from a Greek text the most perfunctory examination suffices to prove. According to Armenian historians of the fifth century, St. Mesrop, at the same time that he invented the Armenian characters and made the Armenian version for his own countrymen, fulfilled the same service for the Georgians also. In this tradition, however, the Georgians do not concur; and, no doubt, rightly, seeing that their ancient alphabet and their version are alike independent of the Armenian. It is said by some native Georgian scholars that before the tenth century a revision was made of their version, in order to make it more complete.

The present writer knows of no manuscript of the entire Bible in Europe except at Mount Athos, where there is one reputed to be of the tenth century. Others are preserved in the Convents of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem, and of Mount Sinai. In the Vatican Library there is a codex of the New Testament, neatly written on parchment in majuscule, parts of which the present writer has collated with the printed text. This codex is at least as old as the thirteenth century, and in the collations below is referred to as a. Beside this codex the writer has examined in the Georgian Library at Tiflis three very ancient codices of the Gospels, written in uncials on parchment. These books were smaller in size than are, as a rule, the copies of the Gospels used in Eastern Churches.

Of the accompanying collations, nos. i-iv are made from them, and the passages collated were photographed by the present writer. These photographs, which represent the originals on a reduced scale, have been deposited by him in the Bodleian Library for the inspection of the curious. The text referred to as b is probably of the tenth century or earlier; the one referred [pg 157] to as c cannot be much later than the eleventh, while that indicated by d must belong to the twelfth, and is the most beautifully written of them.

The Bible was not printed in Georgian until the year 1743 at Moscow in large folio. It is a rare volume, and has never been reprinted. The character is that called ecclesiastical or priestly majuscule, which differs wholly from the civil characters and can, as a rule, be read by the priests only. The New Testament and Psalms have been reprinted at various times from this original edition, both in priestly and civil characters, and of the latter kind very good and cheap copies can be obtained at the British and Foreign Bible Society, printed, however, at Tiflis. It is said that the edition of 1743 was conformed to the Slavonic version of the Bible; and if this were true, it would, of course, impair its value for critical purposes. Of this statement, however, the writer's collations, so far as they go, afford no proof. Such variations as there are between the printed edition and the manuscript texts are notified in these collations. The point, however, could easily be settled by a thorough comparison of the printed text with the Slavonic.

The MSS. of Tiflis include the last verses of Mark, and the Vatican MS. contains the narrative of the woman taken in adultery, but places it after ver. 44, instead of after ver. 52 of the seventh chapter of John. The printed edition places it after ver. 52, and this uncertainty as to where to insert the narrative, in itself indicates that it is a later interpolation. The printed text also contains the text about the three witnesses; but it is pieced into the context in an awkward and ungrammatical way; and whether it is in any MS. the writer cannot say. The following all too brief collations prove that the printed text fairly represents the MSS.; from which, indeed, it differs very little except in its more modern orthography. It is certain, however, that the most ancient MSS. of this version must be collated and a critical text of it prepared, before it can be quite reliably used as an early witness to the Greek text in regard to any particular points. Where the earliest Greek authorities waver as to the particles by which the parts of the narrative shall be connected—some, e.g. giving καί, others δέ, others οὖν—the Georgian constantly passes abruptly to the new matter without any connecting particle at all—and this, although as a language [pg 158] Georgian is richer in such connecting particles than is Greek. This peculiarity of the version, which is also shared by the old Armenian version, seems to prove that it was made from a primitive text, in which editors had not yet begun to smooth away the sudden transitions.

(5) The Slavonic Version (Slav.129).

This version of the Bible is ascribed to Cyril and Methodius, who lived at the end of the ninth century. It is uncertain, however, how much of the New Testament was translated at that date, and how much was the work of a later time. The manuscripts of the version exist in two characters called Glagolitic and Cyrillic: of these it is now generally agreed that the former is the earlier. In considering the version from the point of view of the textual criticism of the New Testament, we need not deal with its later history except in so far as that throws light on its original form. The chief points to which reference will be made will be (i) the different Manuscripts in which the version exists, with their distinctive characteristics, and the evidence they afford as to the earliest form—the Urtext—of the version, and (ii) the Greek text presupposed by the version in the form in which we have it.

It will be convenient to divide the New Testament into three component parts, (i) the Gospels, (ii) the Acts and Epistles, or the Apostol as it is called in Slavonic, (iii) the Apocalypse. There can be little doubt that the Gospels were the earliest part to be translated or that this translation was made for liturgical purposes. This last point explains the great preponderance of [pg 159] MSS. of the version in which the Gospels are arranged in the form of a lectionary130.

Amongst the earliest manuscripts of the Gospels are the Codex Zographensis, Codex Marianus, and the Codex Assemanicus. The two first Jagić ascribes to the tenth or eleventh century. All these are written for the most part in the Glagolitic character. Besides these, mention must be made of the Ostromir Codex, written in Cyrillic characters, by Gregory, a deacon at Novgorod, and dating from the year 1056-7. In considering the distinctive characteristics of these manuscripts of the version, the first point to notice is that they each preserve certain dialectical forms and expressions by which their place of origin and to some extent their date can be determined. Thus Miklosich regards the Codex Zographensis and Codex Assemanicus as preserving Bulgarico-Slovenish forms, the Ostromir Codex as representative of Russo-Slovenish, and so on. It is mainly in these particulars that the manuscripts differ, though there are also other differences by means of which it has been determined that some Codices, especially those in the Glagolitic character, preserve the version in a more original form than others, as for example the Ostromir Codex. These differences consist131, (i) in orthography, (ii) in the fact that the later forms of the version translate Greek words left untranslated in the older forms, (iii) in the substitution of later and easier words for archaisms. It may also be noted that alterations are more numerous, as might be expected, in copies of the Gospels made for liturgical purposes than in other copies.

The same remarks would be true of the second part of the Bible, the Apostol. This is pointed out by Voskresenski in the book to which reference has been made, but which is known to the writer of these lines only from a review. A very careful examination of the text of the “Apostol,” based on the manuscripts of the Synodal Library, is made by Gorski and Nevostruiev in the work referred to above, pp. 292 ff.

Oblak has examined the Slavonic version of the Apocalypse, of which the manuscripts are fewer and later. The earliest [pg 160] manuscript is ascribed to the thirteenth century, but the textual corruption which it exhibits in comparison with other manuscripts requires that the version which it embodies should be referred at least to the twelfth century. We do indeed find a quotation of the Apocalypse (ix. 14) as early as the Isbornik of Sviatoslav of the year 1073, but in a form so different from the MSS. of the version now extant, that we must regard it as a quotation from memory. The MSS. have many small variations, sometimes merely dialectical, sometimes based on a different Greek text. They also show marks in places of having been corrected with the help of the Latin. But in spite of all their variations Oblak believes that all the manuscripts are to be referred to one common translation made from a Greek text of the Constantinopolitan type, which has been here and there corrupted by Western influence.

It may be noted in conclusion that the earliest dated complete manuscript of the Gospels is dated 1144, the earliest manuscript of the whole Bible, a.d. 1499, and that the earliest printed edition is the famous Ostrog Bible of 1581.

It remains to say something of the Greek text underlying the Slavonic version, for this is the special point of view from which the versions are being here considered. The instances will all be taken from the Gospels, though others might have been added from those collected by Gorski. In the first place it is necessary to draw attention to the fact that for critical purposes a modern edition of the version will be found insufficient. The following are cases132 where the edition published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, probably based on the Textus Receptus, is misleading as to the real original reading of the version. In St. Matt. xi. 2 Codd. Assem., Zograph., Ostrom., all imply the reading διά, the modern edition δύο: in St. John i. 28 the MSS. have Bethany, the edition Bethabara; in St. John vii. 39 the MSS. insert, the edition omits, δεδομένον; in St. Matt. xxv. 2 the MSS. put μωραί before φρόνιμοι, the edition inverts the order. The Ostromir Codex presents a later form of the version, and so we find instances where the other two MSS., just referred to, preserve what is probably a better reading. Thus in St. Luke ii. 3 they have οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ, the Ostromir Ἰωσὴφ καὶ ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ; in [pg 161] St. John ix. 8 they have προσαίτης, it has τυφλός; in St. John xix. 14 they have τρίτη, it reads ἕκτη; in St. John xxi. 15 they have ἀρνία, it has πρόβατα. Again there are cases where one MS. of the version stands alone. Thus Codex Zogr. stands alone, as against Assem. and Ostrom., in omitting St. Luke xiv. 24, and inserting δευτεροπρώτῳ in St. Luke vi. 1. Again in the choice of Slavonic words for the same Greek original, Cod. Zogr. will agree with Codex Assem. against Codex Ostrom., though where the Codex Assemanicus is freer in its rendering, the Ostromir Codex and Codex Zographensis agree. Sometimes again the Codex Zographensis is alone in curious readings which seem to be conflations of the texts found in the other two manuscripts, or based on a conflate Greek text.

This version and the various manuscripts which contain it have received most attention from Slavonic philologists engaged in examining the earliest monuments of their language; but the readings which have been given will be enough to show that it does not deserve to be dismissed, as summarily as has been sometimes the case, from the number of those versions which have a value for purposes of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament.

(6) The Arabic Version (Arab.).

Arabic versions (Arab.) are many, though of the slightest possible critical importance; their literary history, therefore, need not be traced with much minuteness. A notice is quoted from Bar-hebraeus (Assemani, Bibl. Or., ii. 335) to the effect that John, Patriarch of the Monophysites from 631-640, translated the “Gospel” from Syriac into Arabic; and some scholars have believed in the existence of a pre-Mohammedan version of parts at least of the New Testament on other grounds; from such a version (written in the “Hebrew” character) in the opinion of Sprenger (Das Leben und die Lehre Muhammads, i. 131) come the verses of St. John's Gospel (xv. 23-27, xvi. 1), cited by Ibn Ishaq (ob. 768) in his “Life of Mohammed” (ed. Wüstenfeld, i. 150)133. These verses are evidently translated from the (Jerusalem?) Syriac; but the translation of the Gospel, from the Syriac [pg 162] into Arabic, existing in a Leipzig MS. brought by Tischendorf from the East and described at length by Gildemeister (De evangeliis in Arabicum e simplici Syriaco translatis, Bonn, 1865) is shown by internal evidence to be posterior to Islam (pp. 30 sq.). The Arabic versions of the Gospel existing in MS. are divided by Guidi (Atti della R. Academia dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali &c., 1888, 1-30) into five sorts: (1) those made directly from the Greek; (2) made directly or corrected from the Peshitto; (3) made directly or corrected from the Coptic; (4) MSS. of two distinct eclectic recensions made in the Alexandrian Patriarchate in the thirteenth century; (5) MSS. (chiefly derived from the Syriac) which are distinguished by their style; being in rhymed prose or elegant Arabic. MSS. of the first sort can all, he says, be traced to the convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, and are preceded by the lives of its founders, St. Eutimius and St. Saba; the version they contain is to be ascribed to the time of the Caliph Mamun (ninth century). Of the MSS. of class 4, one set represents a recension made by Ibn El-Assāl, circ. 1250; while another represents a less elaborate recension made shortly afterwards, in which the passages omitted in the other were restored, while marginal notes recorded their omission in other versions. Versions of the fifth class were made in the tenth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. A list of MSS. containing the different recensions of all these classes is given by Guidi, l. c., pp. 30-33.

The printed texts all represent varieties of the second eclectic recension of class 4, of which five editions are enumerated by Gildemeister(l. c., pp. 42, 3, and iv). 1. Roman edition of the Gospels from the Medicean Press, 1591 (ar.r), edited by J. Baptista Raymundi, some copies having a Latin translation by Antonius Sionita. The MS. on which this edition was based is unknown. 2. Edition of Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), Leyden, 1616, containing the whole New Testament (ar.e). This edition was based on the Leyden MS., Scaliger 217, written in Egypt in the year of the Martyrs 1059 (a.d. 1342-3); two other manuscripts also employed by Erpenius for the Gospels are now in the Cambridge University Library (G. 5. 33, and G. 5. 27, written a.d. 1285). A third MS. employed for this edition was in the Carshunic character. The Acts and Pauline Epistles, the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter 1 and St. John 1 in this edition are translated [pg 163] from the Peshitto; the remaining Catholic Epistles and the Apocalypse are from some other source; the latter shows some remarkable agreement with the Memphitic (Hug, Einleitung in das N. T., pp. 433-5). 3. Edition of the whole N. T. in the Paris Polyglott (ar.p), 1645, reprinted with little alteration in the London Polyglott (1657). Gildemeister, l. c., proves against Lagarde (l. c., xi) that this recension in the Gospels is not an interpolated reprint of the Roman edition, but is based on a MS. similar to Paris Anc. f. 27 (of a.d. 1619) and Coisl. 239 (new Suppl. Ar. 27) described by Scholz, “Bibl. Krit. Reise,” pp. 56, 58. The Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse follow the Greek, but are by another translator. 4. Edition of the whole N. T. in the Carshunic character (Rome, 1703), edited by Faustus Naironus, for the use of the Maronites, from a MS. brought from Cyprus, reprinted Paris, 1827; the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse represent the same version as that of Erpenius, but in a different recension. 5. Edition of the four Gospels from a Vienna MS. (previously described by S. C. Storr, Dissertatio inauguralis critica de evangeliis Arabicis, Tübingen, 1875, p. 17 sq.), by P. de Lagarde (Die vier Evangelien Arabisch, Leipzig, 1864). The MS. contains various readings from the Coptic, Syriac, and Latin (according to Lagarde, Gildemeister more naturally renders rūmī by Greek). The editor has prefixed a table of variants between his text and that of Erpenius, but regards the relation of the former to the original as involving questions too complicated for immediate discussion (p. xxxi).

Extracts from MSS. of Arabic versions in French and Italian libraries are given by J. M. A. Scholz, Biblisch-Kritische Reise, Leipzig and Sorau, 1823; a description of several others, some of great antiquity, is to be found in Tischendorf's “Anecdota Sacra et Profana,” pp. 70-73 (2nd ed.); and Professor Rendel Harris, in “Biblical Fragments from Sinai” (Cambridge, 1890) has published a facsimile of a fragment of an Arabic version from a bilingual MS. of the ninth century; the version whence it is derived agrees with none of those that have been published, and was probably older than any of them.

The repeated revision and correction which these translations have undergone (Gildemeister, l. c., 1-3), while they give evidence of the industry and zeal of the Arabic-speaking Christians, have made scholars despair of employing them for critical purposes; [pg 164] “they rather serve,” says Gildemeister, “to illustrate the history of biblical and Christian studies.”

(7) The Anglo-Saxon Version (Sax.).

There is but one known version of the four Gospels (the only portion of the N. T. that was translated into A.-S.); this version was made, probably in the South-West of England at or near Bath, in the last quarter of the tenth century. It is preserved in four MSS.: (Corp.) Corpus Christi Coll. Camb. MS. 140; (B) Bodleian Lib. MS. 441; (C) Cotton MS. Otho C. I (seriously injured by fire), and (A) Camb. Univ. Lib. MS. Ii. 2. 11. Of these the first three may be dated, in round number, about the year 1000; the fourth (A) belongs to the following half-century. The Bodl. Lib. has also recently acquired a fragment of four leaves of St. John's Gospel, which agrees closely with A. [Published by Napier in “Archiv f. n. Sprachen,” vol. lxxxvii. p. 255 f.]

It may also be mentioned that there are in the Brit. Mus. two additional copies of this version (Bibl. Reg. MS. I. A. xiv, and Hatton MS. 38). These belong to a period after the Conquest and have no critical value, for the first is copied from B, and the second is copied from the first.

This version is based upon a type of the Vulgate MSS. that has not yet been definitely determined. Old Latin readings make it certain that the original MS. was of the mixed type.

Next in importance to this version are the two following Latin MSS. of the four Gospels, with an interlinear Anglo-Saxon gloss. (1) MS. Nero D. 4 (the Lindisfarne MS., also known as the Durham Book). The Latin was written by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne 698-721; the interlinear gloss being about two and a half centuries later, made near Durham about the year 950. (2) The Rushworth MS. (Bodl. Lib. Auct. D. ii. 19). The Latin was written by the scribe Macregol, probably in the eighth century. The gloss, by the scribes Farman and Owun, is referred to the latter half of the tenth century. These two Latin texts differ but slightly; they are also of the Vulgate types.

All the MSS. that have now been mentioned are published in one volume (of four parts) by Professor W. W. Skeat: “The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian [pg 165] Versions, synoptically arranged, with collations exhibiting all the readings of all the MSS.; together with the Early Latin Version as contained in the Lindisfarne MS.; collated with the Latin Version in the Rushworth MS. Cambridge: University Press, 1871-1887.” Dr. James W. Bright has published an edition of St. Luke's Gospel of the A.-S. Version, Oxford, 1892, and has in preparation a critical edition of the entire Version [which has been published recently]. The earlier editions of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels are by Archbishop Parker, 1571; Dr. Marshall (rector of Lincoln College), 1665; Benjamin Thorpe, 1842; Dr. Joseph Bosworth, 1865.

(8) The Frankish Version (Fr.).

A Frankish version of St. Matthew, from a manuscript of the ninth century at St. Gall, in the Frankish dialect of the Teutonic, was published by J. A. Schmeller in 1827. Tischendorf (N. T., Proleg., p. 225) thinks it worthy of examination, but does not state whether it was translated from the Greek or Latin: the latter supposition is the more probable.

(9) Persic Versions (Pers.).

Persic versions of the Gospels only, in print, are two: (1) one in Walton's Polyglott (pers.p) with a Latin version by Samuel Clarke (which C. A. Bode thought it worth his while to reconstruct, Helmstedt, 1750-51, with a learned Preface), obviously made from the Peshitto Syriac, which the Persians had long used (“yet often so paraphrastic as to claim a character of its own,” Malan, ubi supra, p. xi), “interprete Symone F. Joseph Taurinensi,” and taken from a single manuscript belonging to E. Pocock134, probably dated a.d. 1341. This version may prove of some use in restoring the text of the Peshitto. (2) The second, though apparently modern [xiv?] was made from the Greek (pers.w). Its publication was commenced in 1652 by Abraham Wheelocke, Professor of Arabic and Anglo-Saxon and University Librarian at Cambridge, at the expense of Sir Th. Adams, the generous and loyal alderman [pg 166] of London. The basis (as appears from the volume itself) was an Oxford codex (probably Laud. A. 96 of the old notation), which Wheelocke, in his elaborate notes at the end of each chapter, compared with Pocock's and with a third manuscript at Cambridge (Gg. v. 26), dated 1014 of the Hegira (a.d. 1607). On Wheelocke's death in 1653 only 108 pages (to Matt, xviii. 6) were printed, but his whole text and Latin version being found ready for the press, the book was published with a second title-page, dated London, 1657, and a short Preface by an anonymous editor (said to be one Pierson), who in lieu of Wheelocke's notes, which break off after Matt. xvii., appended a simple collation of the Pocock manuscript from that place. The Persians have older versions, parts of both Testaments, still unpublished. There is another copy of the Persian Gospels at Cambridge, which once belonged to Archbishop Bancroft, and was brought from Lambeth in 1646, but was not restored in 1662 with the other books belonging to the Lambeth Library.