How the Books of the New Testament Were Written

Chapter 3-How The Books of the New Testament Were Written
To understand how the books of the New Testament have come to us, we must know how books were written in the first Christian century. At that time, and during the previous three centuries when the Old Testament was being translated into Greek, books were very different from what they are today. Throughout the GraecoRoman world, which included Palestine and Syria, books were written on papyrus, a material made out of the pith of the stems of the papyrus plant, which they grew plentifully in the Nile. This pith was cut into thin strips, which were joined by glue, water and pressure into sheets, which again were fastened together, side by side, so as to form long rolls, on which the writing was inscribed in columns. It is only within our own time that we have come to know much about papyrus books; and this is entirely due to the discoveries that have been made in Egypt. Papyrus, though it must have been fairly strong when new, is a delicate material. It is easily destroyed by damp, and when dry tends to become very brittle. Consequently, with the exception of some charred rolls found in the ruins of Herculaneum, which was buried by the great eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, no papyrus books have survived save in Egypt, where the soil is so dry that even fragile objects, when once buried in the sands, may be preserved for centuries.1 [1-Quite recently it has been announced that some papyri have found in the desert to the south of Palestine, where the conditions similar.] It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings on papyrus have been restored to us in great numbers. Papyrus rolls in the Egyptian language, written in hieroglyphs or in later forms of writing, have been found which date back to about 2000 B.C.; and rolls written in Greek dating from about 300 B.C., when, after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, Greeks settled in the country in considerable numbers.

The first Greek papyrus to be discovered in Egypt came to light in 1778. It was a non-literary document of no great importance, the only one left of a packet of about fifty, the others having been burnt by the natives (as they said) for the sake of their smell. Other finds were made sporadically in the course of the next century, including some rolls of Homer, and (a welcome foretaste of what was to come) four of the lost speeches of the great Athenian orator Hyperides. But the real period of papyrus discovery began in 1877, when a great number of documents were unearthed in the Fayum, a province lying to the west of the Nile, where, as we now know, there were many Greek settlements. Most of these were not literary, but in 1890 the British Museum acquired a most valuable group of literary papyri, including the lost history of the Constitution of Athens by Aristotle, and the ;previously unknown Mimes (or short dramatic sketches) of Herodas. In 1894 began the great series of discoveries papyri, chiefly from excavations on the site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, made by Grenfell and Hunt. From this time forward the search for papyri in Egypt has gone on without a break, and a constant stream of texts has flowered into the libraries of Europe and America, so that we now have many thousands of non-literary documents and several hundreds of literary texts-most of them, it is true, only small fragments from rubbish-heaps, but including a substantial number of rolls of some length, which have given us an assured knowledge of the methods of book production from about 300 B.C. to the Arab conquest of Egypt in A.D. 640. Latest among these, and most important for our present purpose, is the recent discovery of the group of Biblical texts known as the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, of which much more will have to be said.

We now know that the normal form of book, from the great days of the classical literature of Greece to the beginning of the fourth century after Christ, was the papyrus roll. The roll might be of various dimensions, according to need, but practical convenience dictated that it should not be more than 30 to 35 feet long - a length which was sufficient for a single book of Thucydides or a single Gospel. The height might vary from about 5 inches for a pocket volume of poetry to 15 inches for a register of taxes; but a normal height for a work of literature was about 10 inches. The writing was arranged in columns, which for poetry would be regulated by the length of a line of verse, but for prose were generally between 2.5 and 3.5 inches wide. There would be narrow intervals (usually about half an inch) between the columns, and wider margins at top and bottom, where words accidentally omitted would sometimes be inserted. There was normally no ornamentation, no separation of words, and very little punctuation. It is very odd that this should have been so, since it must have added to the difficulty of reading quickly, and increased the probability of misunderstanding through a wrong division of words. Also it must have occasioned a good deal of difficulty in the verifying of quotations, and encouraged a writer to quote from memory rather than take the trouble to look up a passage in a roll. Yet this habit continued throughout the classical period, and it is a fact that with practice the non-separation of words does not occasion great difficulty, but only occasional hesitation. Certain it is that the separation of words only came in gradually during the Middle Ages, first for Latin and later for Greek; and that punctuation continued to be casual and incomplete until after the invention of printing.

Until quite recently it has been supposed that the papyrus roll continued in general use for books until the early part of the fourth century, when it was superseded by the vellum codex, or modern book form of sheets and pages. Vellum, a material prepared from the skins of calves, sheep, and other animals, was adopted as a writing material about the beginning of the second century B.C., by King Eumenes of Pergamum in Asia Minor, who was ambitious of forming a library, but was unable to obtain papyrus because his rival, Ptolemy of Egypt, refused to allow the export of it. From Pergamum the new material received the name of pergamene, which is the origin of our word parchment. Apart, however, from this particular occasion (and we do not know how long embargo on the export of papyrus lasted, nor how effective it could have been, since it was still exported to Rome and elsewhere), the papyrus roll continued to be predominant, and vellum was in general only used for note-books and cheap copies until the end of the third century after Christ. Then its superior advantages seem to have been suddenly realized. It was more durable (while, as said above, all papyrus manuscripts have perished except in Egypt, thousands and thousands 0f vellum manuscripts have survived) ; it provided a beautiful surface for writing; and, arranged in sheets and pages, it could contain in a single volume a far greater quantity of matter than the papyrus roll. It became possible to have the whole 0f Homer or Virgil or of the Bible in a single volume, instead of in a number of distinct rolls, which might easily become disarranged or separated. From this point the vellum codex definitely superseded the papyrus roll, and so continued until the invention 0f paper and printing, at the end 0f the Middle Ages.

Now this event is of great importance for the history of the Bible, because it happened just at the time when the Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity as the official religion 0f the Roman Empire (about A.D. 313-25). Only a few years before, Christianity had been an unrecognized and often a persecuted religion; and we know that in the great persecutions 0f Decius (A.D. 2L9-51) and Diocletian (A.D. 303-5) many copies of the Christian books were destroyed. Now it was officially recognized, and we know that one of Constantine's first acts was to order fifty copies of the Greek Bible to be written on vellum for his capital, Constantinople. All through the empire there must have been a similar demand for copies of the Scriptures, and a great stimulus must have been given to their production. It is just to this period that the treat codices which we still possess, the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus, belong; and from that time we have quantities of vellum manuscripts which carry us through the Middle Ages, down to the invention of printing.

In papyrus manuscripts the writing is generally in rather small letters, for the most part separately formed, but with occasional links between them. On vellum it is in large capitals, quite distinct, a type of writing known as uncial. This is a very handsome form, and the early uncials, such as the Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, are among the finest books in existence; but it involved the use of very large volumes. The Sinaiticus, when complete, must have consisted 0f about 720 leaves, 0r 1,440 pages, measuring 15 by 13.5 inches; the Vaticanus of about 820 of 12.5 by 10.5 inches; the Alexandrinus, 0f about 820 of 12.5 by 10.5 inches. These would serve well for reading in church or for study in a library, but were not handy for personal use; so in the ninth century a new form of writing was developed out of the handwriting in common use, with small letters linked together, and hence called minuscule or cursive. This quickly superseded the more cumbrous uncial, and from the tenth century to the fifteenth century practically all manuscripts were so written. It is to this class that the great majority of the surviving manuscripts of the Greek Bible belong. While there are about 200 uncial manuscripts of the New Testament known, of which all but some sixty are mere fragments, the minuscules are over 4,000 in number.

Until quite lately it was supposed that there was no intermediate stage between the papyrus roll and the vellum codex; but the discovery of the Chester Beatty papyri has proved, what was beginning to be suspected before, that such an intermediate stage did exist, when the papyrus material was combined with the codex form, and that this stage was of particular importance for the Christian Scriptures. The first inkling of this was given by a fragment found at Oxyrhynchus and published in 1899, which contained on one sheet portions of the first and last chapters of St. John, showing that they were the outer leaves of a quire which must have contained between them all the rest of the Gospel. Calculation showed that this implied that the whole Gospel was written in a single quire of 50 leaves or 100 pages - a rather inconvenient form of book, one would think, but of which other examples came to light from time to time. As these discoveries of papyrus codices multiplied, it was observed that the majority of them were of Christian literature. It became clear that in the third century, while the papyrus roll was still the dominant form of book for pagan literature, most of the Christian literature was written in codices. Sometimes these were single-quire volumes, like the St. John just mentioned, while some were formed of a number of quires of 8 or 10 or 12 leaves, more like a modern book. The final proof was given by the Chester Beatty papyri, which are a group of papyrus codices of various books of the Bible, mostly of the third century, but in at least one instance going back to the second century, and even to the first half of it. It now seems clear that the Christian community, realizing the advantage of a form of book which could contain more than a single Gospel, adopted (if they did not actually invent) the codex form, in which several books could be combined. Thus one of the Chester Beatty papyri, of the first half Of the third century, contained when complete all four Gospels and the Acts; another, which is at least as early and may be the end of the second century, contained all the epistles of St. Paul; another contained the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Esther. Some of these codices are formed of single quires, running to as many as 118 leaves, formed of 59 sheets of papyrus laid one upon another and folded in the middle; one (the Gospels and Acts) goes to the other extreme, being composed of a succession of quires of only two leaves; others have quires of 10 or 12 leaves. On the whole it seems probable that the earliest experiments in the use of the codex took the form of single-quire volumes or of quires of two leaves, but that it came to be realized that quires of 8-I2 leaves were more convenient, and they were used in the later papyrus codices, as they were in the vellum codices and eventually in our modern paper printed books.

We are now in a position to picture to ourselves how the books of the New Testament were first written and circulated. The shorter Epistles, such as the second and third of St. John, or St. Paul's letter to Philemon, would have been written on a single sheet of papyrus, like the ordinary private letters of which many examples have been found. They would have been folded up, fastened with a thread secured by a clay seal, and sent by hand to their destination. The longer Epistles would have occupied rolls of various lengths, from about 3 to 4 feet for Philippians or Colossians to about 15 feet in the case of Romans. The longest books, Matthew, Luke and Acts,would each have required a roll of from 30 to 35 feet,and the shorter ones, Mark, John, and Revelation, proportionately less. Each book and each Epistle originally circulated separately. Copies would be made and sent to other churches, as Paul asked that the Epistle to the Colossians should be sent to the church at Laodicea. It would be only gradually, if at all, that any one church would secure a complete set of all the books. Some Gospels would be more popular than others; there is reason to believe that Mark, which is shorter and contains less of our Lord's teaching, circulated less than Matthew and Luke. The book of Revelation was not accepted by all churches, and the authenticity of 2 Peter was questioned by some. On the other hand, some books which did not eventually secure acceptance in the authoritative Canon of Scripture were at first regarded with almost equal respect, and were even included in the great fourth century codices. Thus the Codex Sinaiticus includes the 4th book of Maccabees, the Epistle of Barnabas and the `Shepherd' of Hernias. The Alexandrinus has 3 and 4 Maccabees at the end of the Old Testament, and the two Epistles of Clement, and originally also the Psalms of Solomon, at the end of the New. The church to which the Chester Beatty collection belonged had a copy of the Book of Enoch. A group of churches in Syria in the second century for some time read a Gospel which passed under the name of St. Peter, until a bishop perceived that it was not authentic; part of it was discovered in 1892 in a vellum codex, probably of the sixth century, dug up in Egypt, which contained also parts of Enoch and of the Apocalypse of Peter. In Syria also the four Gospels were to a considerable extent replaced by a Harmony of the Four Gospels (known as the Diatessaron),compiled by Tatian about A.D. 170; of this, which was supposed to survive only in Arabic and Armenian translations, a small Greek fragment was found a few years as far away as the ruins of a Roman fort on the Euphrates, and has lately been published.1 [1-By C.Kraeling,in K.and S.Lake's Studies and Documents, No.III- London,1935] A fuller account is given of this later.

There was thus, for the first century or so after the earliest Christian books were written, much irregularity in the way they circulated, and some uncertainty as to which were to be regarded as authoritative. But in the course of the second century after Christ the four Gospels which we know singled themselves out above all the other narratives which St. Luke in the preface to his Gospel tells us were in existence in his time, and were accepted as the pre-eminently authentic records of our Lord's life. By the end of that century we find Irenaeus asserting that four was the obviously right number of Gospels, analogous of the four winds or the four quarters of the world or the four cherubim. It now seems possible (what was formerly regarded as impossible) that he may have been accustomed to see the four Gospels united in a single codex. The Chester Beatty papyri have given us an actual example of such a codex from the early part of the third century; and as they also include a codex of the early second century (of the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy), it is quite possible that the Gospels also circulated in this form before his time. This would make it easier for them to be marked out as separate from, and superior to, all other narratives.

What was happening to the text of the books during this period, and how far they were being copied accurately, is another question, to which we shall return; but meanwhile it may be useful to point out how immensely greater is our evidence for the text of the New Testament books than for any other ancient book. We have already explained that the lack of durability of the material on which they were written (papyrus) accounts for the total disappearance, apart from such fragments on papyrus have recently been discovered in Egypt, of all manuscripts earlier than the fourth century. For all the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written long after their original composition. The author who is in best case in this respect is Virgil: yet If earliest manuscript of Virgil that we now possess was written some 350 years after his death. For all other classical writers, the interval between the date of the author and the earliest extant manuscript of his works much greater. For Livy it is about 500 years, for Horace 900, for most of Plato 1,300, for Euripides I,600. On the other hand, the great vellum uncials of the New Testament were written perhaps some 250 years after the date when the Gospels were actually composed, while we now have papyrus manuscripts which reduce the interval by hundred years. And while the manuscripts of any classic author amount at most to a few score, and in some cases only to a few units, the manuscripts of the Bible are reckoned by thousands. Their very quantity adds to the difficulties of an editor, since the more the manuscripts the greater the number of various readings ; but they make the authenticity of the works themselves overwhelmingly certain.

There is also another kind of evidence, the importance of which will appear later, but which must be briefly mentioned here, because it belongs to the period with which we are now dealing. During these early centuries, before Christianity was recognized by Constantine, the Christian Scriptures were not only being copied in their original Greek; they were also being translated into other tongues. As Christianity spread outwards from Palestine, through Syria, through Asia Minor, Italy, Roman Africa and Egypt, and converts were made not only among Greek-speaking Jews but among communities to whom Greek was less familiar, a demand grew up for the Scriptures in other languages. The three earliest, and therefore the most important for our purpose, were in the principal languages of the adjoining peoples - Syrian, Latin and Coptic (the language of the natives of Egypt). It is only lately that we have learnt much about the first versions in these tongues; for in each case the early version was eventually superseded by another, which became the accepted Bible of that people, and of the earlier translations relatively few manuscripts have survived, and most of these are only fragments. But it now seems certain that the books of the New Testament were translated into all these languages before the end of the third century, while the Syriac and Latin almost certainly go bank to the second. The original translators must have used Greek manuscripts then existing; so that, so far as we can ascertain the original form of these various versions (itself not an easy task), we have the evidence of Greek manuscripts earlier than any which have come down to us. Further, these translations show us what kind of text was in use in the countries in which they were produced.

If therefore we look back over the earliest generations of Christianity, from the time of our Lord to the date (somewhere about A.D. 325) when Christianity became the accepted religion of the Roman Empire, we see first of all a period of some forty years when the narrative of our Lord's life and teaching circulated orally, in the preaching of His disciples, or in written records which have not come down to us; and when St. Paul was writing his letters to various Christian churches which he and his companions had founded. Then, about the years 65 to 75, we have the composition of what are known as the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Luke and Matthew, Mark's being the earliest, and Matthew and Luke using him and also other narratives and collections of sayings. The Book of Acts belongs to the same period, being the second part of Luke's history. Revelation is now generally assigned to the time of the persecution of Domitian, about A.D. 95; and St. John's Gospel also must be late in the century. Then we have a period of rather over two hundred years, when the various books circulated, either singly in separate papyrus rolls or combined into small groups in papyrus codices, with no central control to ensure a uniform text, but rather exposed to indefinite variation at the hands of local scribes, and perhaps assuming a somewhat different character in different parts of the world. During this period also translations were made into Syriac, Latin and Coptic. Meanwhile Christianity was from time to time exposed to persecutions by the Roman Emperors and governors, when copies of the Scriptures were a special object of search and destruction, which increased the difficulty of securing an accurate transmission of the text. Many churches must have been dependent on copies locally made by inexperienced scribes; and though scholars or bishops may from time to time have tried to secure and circulate more correct copies, their efforts would probably have effect only in their own neighbourhood. It is a period of confusion, when people were thinking only of the substance of the Christian teaching, and caring little for the verbal accuracy of the text; and when there were no great libraries, as there were for pagan literature, in which the books could be carefully copied and revised by skilled scholars. It is by realizing the conditions in which Christians lived in these earliest centuries that we can best understand the problems presented to us with regard to the text of the Greek Bible.

Chapter 2 Table of Contents Chapter 4
Chapter 4-From Manuscript to Print
From the description given in the last chapter of the conditions of the earliest Christian generations, it will be easy to understand what a change was produced by the acceptance of Christianity by Constantine, and the simultaneous adoption of the vellum codex as the standard form of book. The peril of the destruction of the sacred books by persecutors was over. A great demand arose for copies to be placed in Churches throughout the Empire. It was possible for scholars to set themselves to compare the many divergent manuscripts, to settle what seemed to them the most correct from of text, and to have it multiplied and circulated. The new writing material made it possible to include all the accepted hooks of both Testaments in a single volume. The very conception of a New Testament, to set beside the Old Testament of the Jewish Scriptures, only finally took form now. From this time forward there was no danger of any serious corruption of the Scriptures. All that took place was a certain progressive editing of them, involving slight verbal variations for the sake of greater clearness, or harmonizing different versions of the same narrative, or substituting conventional phrases for those less familiar. In this way an accepted text gradually came into being, which spread over the whole Greek-speaking world. We cannot assign a precise date to it. There is no record of any authoritative revision of the text at any given moment,comparable to the work of the committees who produced our Authorized and Revised Versions. All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the forth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of these only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created. This Standard ecclesiastical text is generally known as the Byzantine text (from the ancient name of Constantinople, the capital of the Greek-speaking world), or, more commonly, as the Received Text. It does not differ in subtance from the earlier types; no Christian truth or doctrine is affected by the differences; but the verbal differences are numerous. They are the result of gradual editorial revision of earlier manuscripts; and it is the task of scholarship to try to get behind it to the earlier texts, and as near as may be to the words which the original writers used.

We can now therefore proceed more quickly with the story of how the Bible text was transmitted to us, and by what means and by what discoveries we have been able to recover, at any rate in great measure, the text which the lapse of time had obscured. From the fourth century to the ninth, the Bible circulated in manuscripts in the Large uncial writing which we have described above; but when the more convenient minuscule writing came into use, the cumbrous old volumes were set aside and disappeared. Only a few score of them survived at all, and most of these were hidden from public view, and have only come to light as the result of zealous search, which will be described later, in quite modern times. Meanwhile, in other parts of the Christian world, the Scriptures were similarly being handed down in translations. The early versions of which we have already spoken were superseded by revisions or new translations: the old Latin by the Vulgate of St. Jerome (A.D. 382-404), which was the Bible of the Western world throughout the Middle Ages and is still the Bible of the Roman Church; the old Syriac by the Peshitta of Bishop Rabbula (about A.D. 411) ; and the old Coptic version of Upper Egypt (Sahidic) by a version in the Bohairic dialect of Lower Egypt. Other translations were made into Ethiopic,Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Gothic, with which we need not concern ourselves, though scholars make some use of their evidence.

From the ninth century to the fifteenth the same process goes on, the Scriptures still being multiplied in thousands of copies by hand, and the older copies tending to be worn out, damaged or lost, and each generation producing its own fresh crop, but now in the smaller miniscule hand (whether Greek or Latin) and in volumes of more portable size. And so we come to the moment when, in the middle of the fifteenth century, everything was revolutionized by the invention of printing. Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in consecutive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the Western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz. The former made the more sensation at the time, and its consequences affect us still; but the latter had the more revolutionary results for the human race, and, among other things, for the history of the Bible.

Printing first made its appearance in Europe in single-sheet indulgences, issued nominally as a means of raising money for the war against the Turks; but the first complete printed book was, appropriately enough, the Bible. Not, however, a Greek Bible, but the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible as generally known to the western world. It is a stately folio volume, commonly known (from the fact that the copy which first attracted the attention of scholars was in the library of Cardinal Mazarin at Paris) as the Mazarin Bible. King George III's copy of it may be seen any day in the King's library at the British Museum. It was printed by the German printers, Gutenberg and Fust, at Mainz, and it known to have been in circulation by August, 1456. It was a wonderful achievement of the infant art, and copies of it are highly prized. About forty copies are known to exist, all now in public libraries. The last to come into the market was bought a few years ago by the Congress of the United States for the national library at Washington for about £60,000, If that was a fair market price for a printed Bible, of which many other copies existed, and of no textual importance, the £100,000 laid for the unique Codex Sinaiticus, more than 1,100 years older and one of the most valuable witnesses to the text of the Bible, seems a very good bargain.

It was sixty years later that the first Greek Bible made its appearance. The credit for producing it ought to have fallen to Cardinal Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo. As early as 1502 he began to prepare an edition of the entire Greek Bible in the University of Alcala, and not of the Greek text alone, but accompanied by the Hebrew in the Old Testament and the Latin throughout. Such a large undertaking necessarily progressed slowly. The New Testament, which was the first to be printed, was ready by the beginning of 1514, but it was held back from publication until the Old Testament should be completed. This was not until the middle of 1517, and even then publication was delayed for some unknown reason; so that it was not until 1522 that the Complutension Polyglot (so called from Complutum, the Latin name of Alcala, where the work was done) was actually given to the world. Meanwhile a publisher at Basle, Froben by name, had heard of the work in progress, and determined to anticipate it. Accordingly he commissioned Erasmus, the foremost scholar of the Reformation, to prepare an edition of the Greek New Testament, and urged on him the utmost speed. Erasmus, who had for some time been anxious to undertake an edition of the Greek New Testament, readily accepted the commission.Using such manuscripts as happened to be available at Basle (two of them lent by Dean Colet, from the library of St. Paul's), he set to work in September, 1515, and in March, 1516, his edition was published, thus reaching the world six years earlier than the work of Ximenes,and in a much handier and cheaper form.

It was a great service to scholarship and religion to make the New Testament known in its original language;but Erasmus's hurried work was far from being satisfactory, even with regard to the materials then available, and still less from the point of view of modern scholarship with its vastly increased resources. He had consulted only a handful of manuscripts, most of quite late date. For the Gospels he used mainly a single manuscript of the fifteenth century. For Revelation the one manuscript he used was defective at the end, and Erasmus supplied the last six verses by a translation from the Latin into his own imperfect Greek. Nevertheless his edition became the basis of the Greek text in universal use down to our own clay. It was from the text of Erasmus that the first English version of the Greek was translated, as will be described shortly; and the continental printers who produced ether editions of the Greek New Testament all took Erasmus as their foundation. Erasmus himself produced five more editions, and in that of 1527, which was his definitive edition, he made some use of the Complutensian; but the general inadequacy of the foundation of the work remained unaffected.

Among the numerous editions which followed that of Erasmus in the sixteenth century, only one need be mentioned, namely that produced by the French printer Robert Estienne, or Stephanus, in 1550. This is important, because it is this text which (with very slight alterations) continued to be reprinted for the next three hundred years, and is still to be found in our ordinary Greek Testaments. It is with this that the texts produced by modern scholarship have to be compared, and if the measure of the advance is to be appreciated, it is essential to understand how very slender were the resources at the disposal of the editor of 1550 compared with those at our service today. Stephanus used mainly the text of Erasmus, but revised it to some extent from the Complutensian edition and from fifteen manuscripts to which he had access in Paris. One of these was really old, that Which is now known as the Codex Bezae, but for reasons Which will appear later little use was made of it. The rest were all late manuscripts, from the tenth to the fifteenth century. They represent only the standard Byzantine text; the much earlier witnesses which have since come to light were not available then, and no one thought of Searching for them. It was sufficient for Bible students that they had the Bible in Greek; it did not yet occur to them to ask whether the text was the most correct obtainable.

Chapter 3 TChapter 5-The English Bible
The Reformation produced a great demand for translations of the Bible into the languages of the peoples of Western Europe; for the Reformers found one of their chief weapons for their campaign against Rome in placing the Scriptures in the hands of the common people. We come therefore now to the genesis of our English Bible.

In pre-Reformation days the Bible had been translated into English, at first in separate books from the time that Bede (d.735) onwards, but completely only by Wyclif and his colleagues in 1382-8. These versions, however, were all made from the Latin Vulgate, and have had no influence on our present English Bible. The true father of this was William Tyndale, who on the publication of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus was filled with the resolve to translate it into English, so that, as he said, the boy that drove the plough might know the Scriptures. He had hoped to secure for this the patronage of the Bishop of London, Tunstall, who was a friend of Erasmus;but finding no encouragement there, nor anywhere in England, he migrated in 1524 to Hamburg,and there completed his work. In 1525 he began printing it at Cologne, and being driven thence by enemies of the Reformation, he finished it at Worms, and thence copies reached England early in 1526. It was vigorously condemned by the authorities of Church and State, who attributed to error many novelties which were in fact due to Tyndale's use of the original Greek, whereas they themselves were only acquainted with the Latin; but the public appetite was whetted, and before long, as the Reformation made progress in England, the demand for an English Bible became irresistible.

Tyndale himself, before his martyrdom at the hands of the Imperial authorities in 1536, had revised his New Testament in 1534 and 1535, had published (in 1530) the Pentateuch, translated from the original Hebrew, and had translated, but not published, the historical books of the Old Testament. This work was never accepted by the rulers of the Church in England ; yet before his death a complete English Bible had been published, in which his translation was incorporated. This was the work of his disciple, Miles Coverdale, who had the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, then chief minister of Henry VIII. Utilizing Tyndale's version, and completing it by a translation of his own from German and Latin Bibles, he was able to produce his work by the end of 1535; so that about Christmas in 1935 we commemorated the fourth centenary of the first complete English printed Bible. This edition was dedicated to Henry VIII, who had now quarrelled with the Roman Church; and a second edition in 1537 was definitely licensed by the King. From this moment Englishmen possessed, and were allowed to possess, an English Bible.

There follows a period of some seventy-five years, during which the work of revising and improving the English Bible was almost continually in progress.Throughout, the work of Tyndale formed the foundation, and more than anyone else he established the rhythms and furnished much of the language which is familiar to us in the Authorized Version. In 1537 Cromwell and Cranmer co-operated in the production of a Bible (known as `Matthew's') which silently incorporated Tyndale's unpublished version of the historical books of the Old Testament; but this was superseded in 1539 by a further revision by Coverdale, known as the Great Bible. This was the first Bible to be formally authorized for public use; for an injunction was issued by Cromwell requiring a copy to be set up in every parish church. A contemporary chronicler paints a vivid picture of the crowds that gathered round the six copies which were set up in various parts of St. Paul's, listening to those who read aloud from them even to the disturbance of the regular services. In two years seven editions were called for and though a change in Henry's policy then caused him to discourage Protestantism, the English people had now become definitely Bible-minded. During the reign of Edward VI editions of Tyndale, Coverdale, and the Great Bible poured from the press; and when Mary's accession put an end to this, the work was carried on by the Protestant exiles, who at Geneva produced, first a New Testament (1557) and then a complete Bible (1560),with notes in a strongly Calvinistic tone, and of a popular character. All previous Bibles had been large in form, suitable for use in Churches, and printed in `black letter'; but the Geneva Bible was issued in smaller forms, suitable for personal and domestic use, and for the first time was printed in roman type, and with the division into verses, first made by Stephanus for the Greek New Testament in 1551.1[1-The Hebrew Old Testament was divided into verses by Rabbi Nathan in 1448 (first printed in a Venice edition of 1524). This division was adopted in the Latin Bible of Pagninus in 1528, with a different division in the N.T. The first Bible that has the present verse division in both Testaments is Stephanus's Vulgate of 1555.]With the accession of Elizabeth the Bible in this form rapidly spread from the churches to the homes; and though a new revision was prepared in 1568 by the bishops (whence it is known as the Bishops' Bible), this was mainly for use in churches, and the Geneva Bible remained the Bible of the people until it was superseded by the Authorised Version of 1611. A revision by English Roman Catholic refugees (New Testament at Rheims in 1582, the whole Bible at Douai in 1609) had little effect, though it was utilized by the authors of the Authorized Version.

The Authorized Version may be put down as the best deed ever done by James I. It was he that seized upon the idea when it was put forward by Dr. Reynolds, the Puritan leader, at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604; it was he that suggested that the work of revision should be entrusted to the universities; it was he that insisted that it should not be encumbered or prejudiced by any notes, and so preserved it from having any party colour. The work was divided among six companies, two in London and two each at Oxford and Cambridge. It was taken in hand in 1607, and in two years the companies had completed their first draft. A small committee, composed of two representatives from each company, then revised the draft in nine months, after which it was seen through the press by two editors, Dr. Miles Smith (who wrote the excellent preface) and Bishop Bilson. And so, in 1611, the great English Bible appeared. It was the result of 86 years' gestation, with Tyndale's work, is supplemented by Coverdale, always at the base of it; and the result was final. Though revisions had been so frequent previously, no one proposed to revise the version of 1611 for two hundred and seventy years. Though the Geneva Bible was pre-eminently the Bible of the Puritans, and the Puritans were in ascendancy until 1660, the Authorized Version drove it out of the field by sheer merit. The last Geneva Bible was printed in 1644. It is strange that a version of such outstanding merit and success should be the work of a committee; for committees are not generally happy in drafting literary prose. It may be attributed in part to the strong imprint given by the genius of Tyndale, in part to the good sense of the revisers in avoiding unnecessary and pedantic alterations; and in part to the ingrained aptitude for nobility of phrase characteristic of Tudor and Jacobean England.

The misfortune of the version, for which the revisers were not to blame, was that they had such a defective text to translate from. Tyndale and Coverdale worked on Erasmus's text, aided by German and Latin translations. The Genevans and King James's revisers had the `received text' of 1550. All alike were in fact accepting as the authentic Greek text the form which it had assumed after 1,400 years of transmission by manuscript, and with the deterioration, small in each detail but cumulatively great, due to the errors of scribes and the well-meant efforts of editors. For the moment, however, the work was done, and admirably done. The English people had received a version as good as the scholarship of the day could produce from the available materials, and incomparably superior in literary merit to any translation into any other language. It is the simple truth that, as literature, the English Authorized Version is superior to the original Greek. It was the good fortune of the English nation that its Bible was produced at a time when the genius of the language for noble prose was at its height, and when a natural sense of style was not infected by self-conscious scholarship. The beauty of the language commended the teaching of the sacred books and made them dear to the heart of the people, while it made an indelible and enduring impression alike on literature and on popular speech.

The work of bringing the Bible to the people was now done. It remained for scholars to amend the text upon which the translators had worked, and to restore, as nearly as might be, the Greek text to the form in which it was originally written by its authors. That was to be the task of the next three hundred years, and remains our task today.

Chapter 4 Table of Contents Chapter 6
Chapter 6-The Search for Manuscripts
By 1611 the Western world had got its Bible in Greek and England had got its Bible in English. It might seem that the work was done; but a new work had to be begun. As has been shown, the Greek Bible had been printed from the first manuscripts that came to hand, and from this text the English Bible had been translated. As it happened, the Greek Old Testament was in better state than the New, since Pope Sixtus V had caused, in 1587, the production of an edition of the Septuagint mainly based on the great Vatican MS., which was and still is the best single authority for it, and this text was frequently reprinted; but Erasmus's New Testament, which with little change had become the `received text', was taken from a few late manuscripts. For two hundred and fifty years, and to a great extent even today, this Greek text and this English Bible remained in possession of the field, and few people realized that they were not wholly satisfactory. It needed three centuries of work to collect the materials necessary for their improvement, to digest the results, and to set them before the world at large. That has been the work on which the scholars of Europe and America have been engaged; and in it English scholars have taken an honourable, and often the leading, part.

The first impulse, indeed, came from England, only sixteen years after the publication of the Authorized Version, when the great Codex Alexandrinus came to this country. It was a gift from Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, offered through Sir Thomas Roe, British Ambassador to the Porte, to James I, but did not actually reach England till 1627, when Charles I was on the throne. It is a manuscript of great antiquity, written, as scholars are generally agreed, in the first half of the fifth century, probably in Egypt. Cyril had been Patriarch of Alexandria, and it is believed that he brought the manuscript with him thence, when he was translated in 1621 to Constantinople. It is a beautiful book, written on pages of fine vellum measuring about 12.5 by 10.5 inches, with two columns of writing on each page. At present, bound in four volumes bearing the royal arms and initials of Charles I, it may be seen any day in the British Museum, to which it passed with the rest of the Royal Library by the gift of George II in 1757. It contains the whole Greek Bible, complete except for accidental mutiliations, which have caused the loss of nearly the whole of St. Matthew and substantial parts of the Psalms, St. John, and 2 Corinthians, and a few smaller mutilations elsewhere. In addition, it contains the third and fourth books of Maccabees at the end of the Old Testament, and the two Epistles of Clement at the end of the New, while a table of contents shows that originally it had, at the end of all, the apocryphal Psalms of Solomon; but these, together with the end of 2 Clement, are now lost. In all, 733 leaves remain out of an original total of about 820.

The arrival of a manuscript of such antiquity made an instant sensation among scholars. Patrick Young,Librarian of the Royal Library, lost no time in publishing (in 1633) the Epistles of Clement, hitherto unknown, and made preparations for a complete edition of the whole. These came to nothing, but a collation of the principal readings in the New Testament was included in Bishop Walton's great Polyglot Bible in 1657. The Old Testament was eventually published in full in 1707-20, the new not until 1786; but its readings had been frequently collated and quoted before that. In modern times photographic facsimiles have been published by the British Museum, which for most purposes serve all the needs of scholars.

It was this discovery and its publication that set on foot the search for manuscripts, especially of the New Testament, and the tabulation of the variations of reading found in them. A period of search through the libraries of Europe now set in, resulting in a series of publications ranging over the next two centuries (and still continuing, as occasions serve, today) in which English and German scholars took the leading part. The `received' Greek text continued to be printed without alteration, but readings from various manuscripts were appended to it, and the manuscripts themselves were tabulated and numbered for easy reference. Uncial manuscripts were indicated by the capital letters of the Latin and Greek alphabets, minuscule manuscripts by arabic numerals; and this system has continued in force (with some necessary modifications) to the present day.

A few of the principal landmarks of this work may be doted. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the issue of a series of sumptuous editions of the Bible in several languages, hence known as the Polyglot Bibles.The first of these was the Complutensian Polyglot (1522), already referred to, which in six volumes contained the Old Testament in Hebrew, Latin and Greek (with interlinear Latin translation), and the New Testament in Greek and Latin. Next came the Antwerp Polyglot (1569-72), in eight volumes, in which the Syriac version was added (with a Latin translation) ; then the Paris Polyglot (1629-45), in ten huge volumes, which added Arabic (again with a Latin translation) and the Samaritan Pentateuch to the other languages; and finally the London Polyglot (1657), in eight volumes, edited by Brian Walton, in which the total of languages reaches seven, viz. Hebrew (Old Testament only), Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic and Persian (New Testament only), with Latin translations attached in all cases, besides the Samaritan Pentateuch and various Targums or paraphrases. These massive volumes may be found today on the shelves of the great libraries, or in the ancient collections of colleges and schools, and inspire one with awe at the amount of labour involved in their compilation; but none of them is of any critical value except the one in which Walton added in notes the readings of the Codex Alexandrinus, and so made them available for the use of scholars. He also gave the readings of fifteen manuscripts, besides the fifteen used by Stephanus, and among these authorities were two of great age and value, the Codex Bezae of the Gospels and Acts (fifth century), and the Codex Claromontanus of the Pauline Epistles (sixth century).

The next steps forward were again made in England. In 1675 Dr. John Fell, Dean of Christ Church and hero of a celebrated stanza, printed a critical apparatus in which he claims to have used over a hundred manuscripts, adding a number from the Bodleian to those which he derived from Stephanus, Walton, and others, and using the Coptic and Gothic versions. But the climax of English work in the seventeenth century was that of John Mill, who, encouraged and pecuniarily assisted by Fell, laboured at the task of collecting collations over more than a quarter of a century, and eventually produced in 1707 a New Testament in which he attached to the text of Stephanus the various readings of seventy-eight other manuscripts besides those used by Stephanus himself, with all the versions to which he could get access, and (for the first time) the quotations from the Scriptures ,if the early Christian writers, the evidence of whom as to the texts known to them is often of great value. To all this he prefixed an elaborate introduction, which may fairly be said to have laid the foundations of the textual criticism of the New Testament. It was a great work, and, though assailed by some who thought that doubt was thrown on the integrity of the Scriptures by the presentation of so many various readings, remained as the basis for scholarly work on the New Testament for a long time to come. It was warmly defended by the great scholar, Richard Bentley, against those who foolishly thought that reverence for the Bible was better shown by accepting a faulty text without question than by facing the facts and endeavouring to arrive at the truth by a scholarly study of the evidence.

But for this hostile atmosphere, England might have anticipated by a century the work in which Germany eventually led the way, by applying the evidence thus collected to the revision of the text itself. Bentley himself (who certainly would have been deterred by no criticism) contemplated the preparation of an edition of the New Testament with a revised text, but never got beyond the collection of materials; but two scholars of less note, Edward Wells (in 1709-19) and William Mace, a Presbyterian minister (in 1729), produced such editions, on the basis of the evidence collected by Mill. Both editions were vehemently attacked in their own country, and they made no impression on the course of criticism; but modern German scholars have paid honourable tribute to them, pointing out that in a large majority of cases the corrections made by them in the received text have been confirmed by the scholarship of the nineteenth century. In their own country, however, they were prophets without honour, and little is heard of English contributions to the subject for the next century. On the Continent also text-revision was not in favour; but the work of collecting evidence and cataloguing manuscripts continued actively.

A Swiss pupil of Bentley's, J. J. Wetstein, was the first to compile a list of manuscripts with the method of nomenclature (as described above) which has since been generally followed. His list (published in 1751-2) comprised 21 uncial manuscripts, and over 250 minuscules. C. F. Matthaei added 57 manuscripts to the list in 1782-8, and a few more in 1803-7. Further additions by Alter from manuscripts in the Imperial Library at Vienna, and by three Danish professors from various libraries in Italy, Germany, and Spain, carried on the work to the end of the century; and in the early years of the nineteenth century all that hitherto had been done in the way of listing manuscripts was summed up and greatly extended by J. M. A. Scholz, who in 1830-6 published a catalogue of New Testament manuscripts which included 26 uncials and 469 minuscules of the Gospels, 8 uncials and 192 minuscules of the Acts and Catholic Epistles, 9 uncials and 246 minuscules of the Pauline Epistles, and 3 uncials and 88 minuscules of the Apocalypse, besides 239 lectionaries, or collections of lessons for reading in church. Scholz's object was not to collate manuscripts, but to catalogue them, so that others might know what materials were in existence for them to work on; and his list, for all its defects, provided the basis on which the list has since been kept up, until now the total runs into the neighbourhood of five thousand.

The period during which the mere collection of material predominated over all other considerations may be said to extend from 1627, when the Codex Alexandrinus came to England, to 1830, when Scholz began to publish his catalogue - a period of two hundred years. A new period starts, as we shall see, in 1831 ; but meanwhile it may be useful to sum up what had been achieved. Exactness of figures is illusory, since some manuscripts contain the whole of the New Testament, while others (the large majority) contain only one section of it - the Gospels, or the Acts and Catholic Epistles, or the Pauline Epistles, or the Apocalypse; but it is within the limit to say that something over a thousand manuscripts had been brought to the knowledge of scholars. By far the greater part of these were minuscules - that is were of the tenth century or later; but among the uncials, which were of early date, were some of prime importance. The oldest and best of all, the Codex Vaticanus, was indeed known, since it had been in the Vatican Library since at least 1481; but though it had been used for Pope Sixtus's edition of the Septuagint, it had been little noticed in connexion with the New Testament. Bentley had a collation made of it, but did not use it; other scholars examined it more or less casually; but it was not until after it had been brought to Paris by Napoleon, with other loot from Italy, that a German scholar, Hug, realized and proclaimed its age and value. When it was returned to Rome, after the fall of Napoleon, the Vatican authorities withheld it from foreign scholars, because they contemplated publishing it themselves; but their edition hung fire until 1857, and then was so badly executed as to be quite unserviceable. At the period at which we have arrived, therefore, it was for practical purposes still unknown, or at least unappreciated.

The only two manuscripts of the Gospels of the first rank that were fully known were the Codex Alexandrinus and the Codex Bezae, both in England. The Alexandrinus had been collated by Walton and Mill and other editors, and was published in full in 1786; and its pre-eminence among New Testament manuscripts was generally recognized. The Codex Bezae had been slightly used by Stephanus and Beza, and more fully collated by Walton and others, and was published in full in 1793 by the University of Cambridge; but its peculiar character, and its very marked divergences from the, generally accepted text (as to which more will have to he said later) caused it to be regarded with suspicion, so that not much weight was attached to it. There were also two good and early manuscripts of other parts of the New Testament, the Codex Laudianus of the Acts at Oxford (published in full by Hearne in 1715) and the Codex Claromontanus of the Pauline Epistles at Paris, both of about the sixth century. It will be seen therefore that the scholars of this period had not much acquaintance with manuscripts of a really early date, and may be excused for having failed to realize the imperfections of the text to which they were accustomed. With a few exceptions, they were overwhelmed by the mass of later manuscripts, nearly all of which contained the relatively late Byzantine text which had entrenched itself in the `received text' of Stephanus.

There were some, however, who saw deeper and took the first steps towards testing the evidence by the application of scientific scholarship. Bentley would have done so, if his edition had ever come to the birth; but a few others actually achieved something, and their work, though it found little acceptance among their contemporaries, is held in honour today. Three scholars deserve particular mention, as having laid the foundations of the theory of the textual criticism of the New Testament on which we build today. The first is J. A. Bengel, who in an edition published in 1734. was the first to endeavour to classify the total mass of authorities and to distinguish the character and relative importance of different groups - in short, to consider the quality of the witnesses, and not only their quantity. He divided the witnesses (including versions as well as Greek manuscripts) into two groups, which he named African and Asian, the former including the few most ancient authorities, which appeared to emanate from Egypt and North Africa, and the latter the great mass of later manuscripts, containing what we have called the Byzantine or received text. J. S. Semler (1767) expanded this division into a threefold classification, (a) Alexandrian, which he attributed to Origen, and to which he assigned the earliest Greek manuscripts and the Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic versions, (b) Eastern, with its centres at Antioch and Constantinople, and including the main mass of authorities, and (c) Western, to be found in the Latin versions and Fathers. This thesis was elaborated and extended by his pupil, J. J. Griesbach, the greatest Biblical scholar of the eighteenth century, who in three editions published between 1774 and 1805 applied Semler's classification to the increased material collected by Wetstein, and allotted the several manuscripts, versions and Fathers precisely to the several groups. In the Alexandrian group he placed three uncials (including the early but incomplete Codex Ephraemi at Paris), six selected minuscules, the Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and later Syriac (known as Harklean) versions, and the quotations in Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius; in the Western, Codex Bezae, the Latin versions, and sometimes the Peshitta Syriac; and in the Eastern or Constantinopolitan, the Codex Alexandrinus and the mass of later authorities. Like Bengel and Semler he regarded the small groups of early witnesses as altogether superior in weight to the numerically preponderant mass of the Constantinopolitan or Byzantine group.

This classification, though minuter criticism has modified it in some of its details, remains substantially the basis of modern textual theory. It rests first on the discernment that certain groups of authorities are linked together by internal agreements which show that they go back to some common ancestor or group of ancestors; secondly, that quality is to be preferred to quantity; thirdly, that quality can be discerned on grounds of internal probability. On the basis of these principles the conclusion is arrived at that the great mass of authorities represent a relatively late revision of the text, and that to find the truth we must look mainly to the small groups of witnesses which are either anterior to this revision or have partially escaped its influence. It was a doctrine wholly inacceptable to the age in which it was produced, and has been hotly disputed since, as we shall see; but it is the doctrine which has been universally applied by the editors of ancient classical texts, and is now accepted by practically all Biblical scholars. We shall reach the last stages in the controversy when we come to the English Revised Version in 1881.

Chapter 5 Table of Contents Chapter 7
Chapter 11 - The Last Thirty Years by F. F. BRUCE
It is not often that an important announcement in the field of textual criticism is first made in a popular work, but Sir Frederic Kenyon made such an announcement in 1936 in the first edition of The Story of the Bible. Two years previously he had edited the ten leaves of the Pauline codex (P46) originally acquired as part of the Chester Beatty collection of biblical papyri ; now he was able to report not only that the University of Michigan had acquired thirty leaves of the same codex but also that Sir Alfred Chester Beatty himself had acquired a further forty-six.

But the story of manuscript discovery did not come to an end in 1936. In the 1946 printing of this book the note on page 15 was added, drawing readers' attention to the Rylands fragment of the Greek Deuteronomy and to the Canaanite archives from Ugarit. And before Sir Frederic's death in 1952, in his ninetieth year, he was able to greet, and appreciate the significance of, the news of the discovery of Hebrew biblical texts at Qumran, a millennium older than he or anyone else had thought to be within the bounds of probability.

I. THE OLD TESTAMENT

A new era in the textual study of the Old Testament began with the discovery, in 1896-97, of a mass of manuscript material in the genizah, or store-room, of a synagogue in Old Cairo. This room had been walled up and forgotten for centuries; it came to light when the synagogue was rebuilt. It contained around 200,000 manuscript fragments, most of which are now divided between Leningrad, London, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester. The oldest of them go back before the ninth century A.D., and include some portions of the Hebrew Bible representing earlier stages in the Massoretic editing of the text than were previously attested, and exhibiting earlier systems of punctuation and vocalization than the system of Tiberias which ultimately prevailed. From five manuscripts in the genizah the major part of the Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus (The Wisdom of Ben Sira) was recovered; the complete work had survived in the Greek translation made by the author's grandson shortly after 1 32 B.C. Two non-biblical manuscripts in the genizah contained most of the text of a previously unknown treatise called the `Zadokite Work' or the `Damascus Document' ; not until the discovery of the Qumran texts was it possible to establish its true context, for it proved to be a Document of the Qumran community.

The manuscript fragments discovered in eleven caves at or near Qumran, northwest of the Dead Sea, between 1947 and 1956, represent about 500 books, of which 100 are books of the Hebrew Bible. Every book of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, is represented apart from Esther. Most of these books have survived only in fragmentary form, but some are relatively complete : there is a virtually complete scroll of Isaiah from Cave I, another copy of the same book from the same cave with the second half virtually intact; from Cave 4 there is a copy of Samuel of which parts of 47 columns out of an original 57 have been preserved, and from Cave I I there are substantial portions of a Leviticus scroll and a Psalms scroll.

Converging lines of evidence point to a date before A.D. 70 for the Qumran texts. Some of the biblical manuscripts included among them are dated palaeographically in the first half of the second century B.C., and a few earlier still. This means that we now have Hebrew biblical manuscripts 1,000 years older than the oldest known to us before 1947. The question rises immediately: what is the quality of the text of the oldest manuscripts previously known in the light of these most recent discoveries? The answer is that (as we already had good reason to believe) the scribes who copied and recopied the Hebrew scriptures during the first thousand years of the Christian era carried out their work with the most scrupulous accuracy. Here and there the Qumran texts enable us to emend a copyist's error or supply a missing word, but in general they confirm the trustworthiness of the text exhibited in the earliest Massoretic manuscripts. When the first Qumran discoveries were made, the Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament was in the last stages of production, but there was time to include in the footnotes to Isaiah some references to the complete Isaiah scroll from Cave I. In his book The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), PP. 304 ff., Dr. Millar Burrows tells us that he and his fellow-revisers adopted thirteen readings in which this scroll deviates from the traditional text, and that subsequent reflection convinced him that in some cases their decision was a mistake, and that they ought to have retained the Massoretic reading.

In addition to the straightforward biblical manuscripts, other Hebrew documents from Qumran convey much information about the biblical text. A number of commentaries, for example, reproduce portions of the biblical text before giving the interpretation, and the interpretation sometimes reflects the commentator's knowledge of variant readings. Thus, a commentary on Habakkuk, found in Cave I, quotes part of Hab. 2:16 in the form `Drink, yourself, and stagger' - the reading Of the Septuagint and Peshitta versions, adopted in the Revised Standard Version. But the interpretation of these words shows that the commentator was acquainted also with the reading `Drink, yourself, and be uncircumcised', which appears in the Massoretic text and is adopted in the Authorized and Revised Versions.

The Qumran biblical manuscripts bear witness to at least three types of Hebrew text which were current in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. One was the 'proto-Massoretic' text - that is to say, the direct ancestor of the Massoretic text of later centuries. Another was the text on which the Greek Septuagint version was based; no samples of this text type in Hebrew were known until the discovery of the Qumran manuscripts. There are a number of places in the Old Testament where scholars had confidently emended the Massoretic Hebrew text on the basis of the Septuagint rendering and where their emendations have now been recognized in Hebrew texts from Qumran; one example is at the end of Deut.32:8, where the reading `sons of God', attested by the Septuagint in place of the Massoretic `sons (children)of Israel', and accordingly adopted in the Revised Standard Version, has now been confirmed in a Hebrew text from Cave 4 at Qumran. A third text type, so far as the first five books of the Bible are concerned, is that hitherto known only from the Samaritan Bible. Some of the distinctive readings of the Samaritan Bible are designed to support Samaritan claims against the Jews, but others have no such sectarian tendency, and several of these latter have now been identified in Qumran manuscripts. Apart from the sectarian readings, the Samaritan Bible now appears to be based on a popular Palestinian edition of the Hebrew Pentateuch, used by Jews as well as by Samaritans.

Among the prophetical books of the Old Testament, the greatest divergence between the Massoretic and Septuagint texts is found in Jeremiah, which is considerably shorter in the Septuagint. Both the shorter and longer recensions are represented in Jeremiah manuscripts from Qumran. The Samuel manuscript already mentioned is of special textual interest; not only does it exhibit very much the type of Hebrew text which the Septuagint translator of Samuel must have used, but its text is in some respects closer to that which the author of Chronicles seems to have known than it is to the Massoretic edition.

Other biblical documents from Qumran exhibit a `mixed' type of text or a type of text not otherwise identified; a comparative study of the various text types may help us to carry the history of the Old Testament text back some way earlier than the earliest Qumran manuscripts

From other areas farther south along the western shore of the Dead Sea other manuscripts of Hebrew scripture have come to light in recent years - more particularly from caves in the Murabba` at and Engedi regions which served as guerrilla outposts in the second Jewish revolt against Rome (A.D. 132-135). But the biblical manuscripts from these caves uniformly exhibit the protoMassoretic text. This may confirm the theory that about A.D. too, under the influence of Rabbi Akiba and his colleagues, one of the existing text types (the protoMassoretic) was standardized for use among the Jews, and the circulation of other types was henceforth discontinued among them. A few biblical fragments of protoMassoretic type have also been discovered recently in excavations at Masada, south-west of the Dead Sea, where the last band of insurgents in the first Jewish revolt against Rome held out until the stronghold was stormed in May, A.D. 73. These include fragments of the Psalms and Leviticus. In addition, fragments of four or five, chapters of a scroll of Ecclesiasticus were found at Masada, and a large fragment of the book of Jubilees, both in Hebrew.

These and other books commonly assigned to the category of `apocrypha and pseudepigrapha' are also represented among the manuscripts from Qumran. Other books in this category represented at Qumran are Tobit (In Aramaic and Hebrew) and I Enoch (in Aramaic).

Some Aramaic paraphrases or 'Targums' of Old Testment books were found at Qumran. Most interesting of these was a Targum of Job found in Cave 11. We have references in antiquity to the existence of such a Targum at the end of the pre-Christian and beginning of the Christian era. Fragments of a Leviticus Targum have been found in Cave 4. An Aramaic document from Cave 1,the so called `Genesis Apocryphon', contains narratives of the patriarchs in an expanded form; scholars disagree on the question whether it is a proper Targum or not. It certainly contains targumic material.

It might have been thought that such conservative religionists as the men of Qumran or such uncompromising patriots as the fighters in the second revolt against Rome would have had no use for the Greek version of the Old Testament, but in fact Septuagint fragments have come to light both from the caves of Qumran and from the outposts of Bar-kokhba's unyielding guerrillas. From Cave 4 at Qumran come Septuagint fragments of two Leviticus manuscripts and one of Numbers; from Cave 7 come Septuagint fragments of Exodus and of the Epistle of Jeremiah (which frequently appears in editions of the Apocrypha as the last chapter of Baruch, though it is an independent composition). But the most important Greek biblical find in the Dead Sea region was made not at Qumran but in the Wadi Heber, near Engedi, where a number of documents from the period of the second revolt have been discovered. This is a fragmentary copy of a Greek version of the Minor Prophets, the text of which is similar to that used by Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century A.D. ; it has been hailed as a missing link in the history of the Septuagint. These early manuscripts of the Greek Old Testament are a welcome addition to the two pre-Christian papyrus fragments of the Septuagint of Deuteronomy in Manchester (see p. 15) and Cairo respectively, both of the second century B.C. and not surpassed in antiquity even by these recent discoveries.

The truth about the Samaritan manuscript mentioned on p. 13, which according to a scribal note at the end was written by Aaron's great-grandson Abisha, was revealed in 1952. The Spanish Hebraist, F. Perez Castro, procured a photographic copy of the complete scroll, and found that while the last part of it (from Numbers 35 to the end of Deuteronomy) was quite old, dating perhaps from the eleventh century A.D., the remainder was a much later manuscript attached to the older part. There is reason to suppose that the greater part of the old manuscript was torn away from the hands of the priest who held it by a sudden gust of wind during an open-air service in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

The complete text of an early Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch was identified in a manuscript in the Vatican Library (Neofiti 1) in 1957. In addition to its importance for the history of the text and interpretation of the Old Testament, the Palestinian Aramaic in which this Targum is written brings us close to the form of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the early disciples.

The standard critical text of the Hebrew Bible has for six decades been Rudolf Kittel's Biblia Hebraica, first published in 1905. The third edition (1937), edited by Paul Kahle, broke away from the practice of its predecessors, which was to use as the basic text that edited by Jacob lien Chayyim for a printed Hebrew Bible of 1524-25. Kahle used as his basic text that of a Leningrad codex Of A.D. 1008, which is one of a group of manuscripts believed to represent the work of the Massoretic family of Ben Asher - the family responsible for the final form of the vocalization of Tiberias. (Other Ben Asher manuscripts have been mentioned on p. 9.) In 1958 the British and Foreign Bible Society published a new edition of the Hebrew Bible, edited by N. H. Snaith, which also departed from the Ben Chayyim text. Like Dr. Kahle, Dr.Snaith aimed at reproducing the Ben Asher text, but he based his edition on the first hand of Hebrew manuscripts of Spanish provenance in the British Museum, together with the first hand of the Shem Tob manuscript in the David Sassoon Library. Yet another critical edition is in process of production at the hand of scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Here the basic text is that exhibited by a codex of the early tenth century A.D., a most valuable witness to the Ben Asher text. This codex formerly belonged to a synagogue in Aleppo; it was damaged in 1948, but the greater part was rescued and it now belongs to the Hebrew University.

As regards the Septuagint, the large critical Cambridge edition referred to in the note on p. 14. has gone ahead but slowly. The first instalment of Vol. III (Esther, Judith, Tobit) appeared in 1940. Fortunately, another critical edition, published at Gottingen in 1939 and the following years, under the editorship of J. Ziegler, began with those books as yet unpublished in the Cambridge edition. All the prophetical books have now appeared in this Gottingen Septuagint, and a beginning has been made with the Wisdom books.

In editing the Septuagint, a question to be considered is whether or not there was one original Septuagint text which can be recovered by critical methods. Paul Kahle maintained that there was none, and that therefore the attempt to establish it was doomed to failure; in his view the Septuagint began as a number of competing private attempts to translate parts of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, and the establishment of one standard Greek text followed a lengthy process of such attempts. The latest discoveries and studies show that his thesis, for all the scholarship with which it was sustained, was vastly exaggerated, if not completely mistaken.

An excellent edition of the principal Aramaic Targums of the Old Testament is A. Sperber's The Bible in Aramaic (4 volumes, 1959 and following years). As for the Latin Old Testament, the pre-Vulgate version is being critically edited by the Vetus Latina Commission of the ArchAbbey of Beuron, Germany (1949 and following years), while a critical edition of the Vulgate is being produced by a community of the Benedictine Order (1926 and following years).

II. THE NEW TESTAMENT

The study of New Testament textual criticism has been promoted during the last thirty years both by the discovery of manuscripts previously unknown and by the cataloguing, photographing and examination of manuscripts previously inaccessible to the majority of scholars. Special mention should be made of the work being carried on at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in the University of Munster, Westphalia, cinder the direction of Kurt Aland. In a paper read at the centenary meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New York at the end of 1964., Professor Aland enumerated the material now available to New Testament textual critics as comprising 78 papyri, 224 uncials, about 2,650 cursives and about 2,000 lectionaries (all this representing an increase by some 9oo manuscripts over thirty years). Of these the Munster Institute had then facsimiles (photocopy or microfilm) of 71 papyri, :208 uncials, 1,910 cursives and 1,320 lectionaries, and he hoped that in the following year it would be possible to procure 500 further manuscripts on microfilm. Professor Aland keeps the internationally recognized catalogue 0f New Testament manuscripts, in which each manuscript receives an appropriate number as it is discovered.

Of recent discoveries in New Testament manuscripts the most important are the Bodmer papyri. These are papyri acquired by the Bodmer Library, Geneva; the name 0f M. Martin Bodmer now rivals that 0f Sir Alfred Chester Beatty as a collector 0f biblical papyri. About 1956 the Bodmer Library acquired a papyrus codex 0f John's Gospel (P66) which was written about A.D. 200. The first fourteen chapters are almost complete; the remaining seven survive in substantial fragments. Of comparable date in the same collection are P75, containing the second half 0f Luke and the first half 0f John, and P72, containing the Epistles 0f Peter and Jude. Much later is P74 (sixth 0r seventh century), which contains Acts and the Catholic Epistles.

The number of Greek New Testament manuscripts going back to the early years 0f the third century 0r later years 0f the second century is thus increasing - although nothing so far can compete in antiquity with the papyrus fragment of John 18 in the John Rylands Library, Manchester (P52), which was written in the first half 0f the second century, less than fifty years after the original composition 0f the Fourth Gospel (see p. 99). With the increase in available manuscripts 0f such early date, fresh problems confront textual critics. The widely accepted classification 0f New Testament manuscripts and other authorities into `families' or text types was based mainly 0n copies made in the fourth and later centuries. Attempts to classify the more recently discovered manuscripts 0f earlier date in terms 0f these text types are not always successful, and may even be misguided. Where, for example, a study of P66 leads to the conclusion that this manuscript has five `Western' readings and four `Caesarean' readings and that, as compared with Codices Aleph and B, it is `neutral in a non-pure way', textual scholars know what is meant; but it can only lead to confusion to try to define such early evidence by the standards 0f later witnesses. If possible, we should endeavour, 0n the basis 0f our witnesses to the text of the period A.D. 150-250, to ascertain what types of text were current in that period, to classify the phenomena 0f these witnesses and trace their pre-history. The lines 0f procedure are set out in a monograph by J. N. Birdsall on The Bodmer Papyrus of the Gospel of John (1960)

So far as the Pauline corpus is concerned, a notable contribution was made by G. Zuntz in the Schweich Lectures for 1946, The Text of the Epistles (published 1954) - a worthy sequel to Sir Frederic Kenyon's Schweich Lectures for 1932 (Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek Bible, 1933). The task of the textual critic 0f the Pauline letters is to recover as far as possible the text 0f the original edition of the Corpus Paulinum; only rarely and indirectly is it possible to get behind this stage to the state of affairs in the first century, when Paul's epistles still existed separately or in small regional collections. On the basis 0f the earliest and best evidence, Professor Zuntz envisages the first editor of the Pauline corpus as copying at least ten Pauline epistles, together with Hebrews, into a codex from which copies were made for use in many parts of the Christian world. This work must have been accomplished early in the second century; from this point onwards all writers who refer to the Pauline writings knew them in the form of a corpus. Professor Zuntz concludes that the corpus was compiled and published at Alexandria in Egypt, since it shows signs of dependence on editorial methods characteristic of Alexandrian scholarship in the Hellenistic age, including the noting of variant readings.

The story of the Diatessaron has been carried forward from the point to which Sir Frederic Kenyon brought it on pp. 73-76 above. In September 1957 a considerable portion of the Syriac original of Ephrem's commentary on the Diatessaron (see p. 73) was identified in a parchment manuscript belonging to Sir Alfred Chester Beatty. This Syriac text was edited and translated by Dom Louis Leloir, O.S.B., who had already published an edition and translation of the Armenian version in 1953-54. The edition and translation of Syriac appeared at Dublin in 1963 (Saint Ebhrem: Commentaire de l'Evangile Concordant, Texte Syriaque. Manuscrit Chester Beatty 709). We are now presented with further evidence not only for the original text of Ephrem's commentary, but for the Syriac Diatessaron text which formed the basis of his commentary, and also incidentally for Ephrem's text of the Pauline epistles and therewith for the pre-Peshitta Syriac version of these epistles. Moreover, since the Armenian translator of Ephrem's commentary tended to conform his Gospel quotations at times to the Old Armenian version of the Gospels, a comparative study of the Syriac and Armenian texts of the commentary may supply further information about the early history of the Armenian Gospel text.

As for critical editions of the Greek New Testament, a second edition of A. Souter's Novum Testamentum Graece appeared in 1947, in which the critical apparatus was revised and brought up to date. In accordance with the policy of the Oxford University Press, however, the text remained (as in the first edition of 1910) the Greek text presumed to underlie the Revised Version of 1881 - an artificial and unsatisfactory text. Much more satisfactory is the new edition of the British and Foreign Bible Society's Greek New Testament, prepared to mark the Society's I50th anniversary in 1954, but first published in 1958. This edition, replacing the Society's Greek Testament of 1904, which reproduced the `resultant' text established by Eberhard Nestle in 1898, was produced by Erwin Nestle and G. D. Kilpatrick; its text is a revision 0f the 19o4 text, and it is provided with a new, up-to-date and useful critical apparatus. Professor Kilpatrick has also produced for the British and Foreign Bible Society several parts of A Greek-English Diglot for the Use of Translators (1958 and following years), in which his principles and conclusions in the field of textual criticism receive free expression.

In 1964 the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses published an edition of the Greek New Testament, edited by R. V. G. Tasker, which sets forth the eclectic text underlying the New English Bible of 1961. An appendix of 35 pages contains valuable notes on those variant readings to which reference is made in the footnotes in the large `Library Edition' of the New English Bible.

S. C. E. Legg's edition of the Greek text of Mark (1935), mentioned on p. 63 above, presented a fuller critical apparatus than any previously published. It was followed in 1940 by a similar edition of Matthew. No further volumes of this `New Tischendorf' have been published; a continuation of the scheme is being conducted as an international project, on different principles from those reflected in the first two instalments. Work is now in progress on Luke.

In Germany the Nestle text, published by the Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, has appeared in one edition after another. The 24th edition, edited by Erwin Nestle and K. Aland, appeared in 1960.. The critical apparatus is kept up to date; the text is still substantially the original Nestle text of 1898, but a thorough revision is on the way for future editions.

From 1956 to 1966 an international committee, sponsored by the American Bible Society with the cooperation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the National Bible Society of Scotland, the Netherlands Bible Society, and the Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, cooperated in the preparation of a new text and apparatus of the Greek New Testament. This edition (the editors of which are K. Aland, M. Black, B. M. Metzger and A. Wikgren) has been published in a handsome volume (May 1966) ; the select apparatus supplies, in a readily intelligible form, the textual evidence for about 1,440 variant readings throughout the New Testament. Although the material on which the new text is based includes very much that was not available to Westcott and Hort, it is noteworthy that the text is essentially of the same type as Westcott and Hort's text, although in a number of places the reading of the `Received Text' has been preferred, being now supported by early evidence. It is planned to keep this text and apparatus up to date by successive revisions.

Before we leave the New Testament, a word must be added about something that is not strictly within the New Testament field, although it has been referred to in the earlier part of this work. The papyrus fragments containing `Sayings of Jesus' in Greek, mentioned on p. 86, are now known to have belonged to a much larger compilation, which has lately come to light intact in a Coptic translation. This Coptic translation is the `Gospel of Thomas', included in the Nag Hammadi papyri, discovered about 1945 in Upper Egypt. These are thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, containing 49 documents, mostly Coptic translations of Greek works dating from the fourth century A.D. or thereabout. Many of them are Gnostic treatises, and the `Gospel of Thomas' itself has a Gnostic flavour. It is called the `Gospel of Thomas' in its colophon, and it opens with the words: These are the secret sayings which Jesus the Living One spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down. He said: Whosoever finds the interpretation of these sayings shall never taste death. Jesus said: Let not him who seeks cease until he finds. When he finds he will be troubled; when he is troubled he will marvel, and he will reign over the universe.' These last words plainly reproduce the same saying as that quoted on p. 86; perhaps the Coptic version is based on a somewhat different Greek edition than that preserved in the Oxyrhynchus fragments, which belong to the second century. In all, the Gospel of Thomas contains about 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus. Of these about half bear a close resemblance to sayings served in the canonical Gospels. A useful and reliable English translation, with introductory chapters and notes, is given in The Secret Sayings of Jesus, by R. M.Grant, D. N. Freedman and W. R. Schoedel (1960).

III. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE

Towards the end of Chapter 7, Sir Frederic Kenyon has explained why, despite its representing a far sounder text than the Authorized Version of 1611, the Revised Version of 1881-85 (with which may be bracketed the American Standard Version of 1901) was not generally accepted as a substitute for the Authorized. Because of its pedantic literalness it remains a useful handbook for students; for example, no other English version lends itself so well to the synoptic study of the first three Gospels, thanks to the precision with which, as far as possible, the same Greek words are consistently rendered by the same English equivalents. But for general purposes it has been left far behind by a number of subsequent translations, official and unofficial, individual and cooperative, especially of the New Testament.

The Twentieth Century New Testament (1902), a cooperative production based on Westcott and Hort's edition of the Greek, and R. F. Weymouth's New Testament in Modern Speech (1903), based on Weymouth's own `resultant' Greek text, were scholarly and accurate versions. James Moffatt's New Testament: A New Translation (1913) was more colloquial; it was based on H. von Soden's Greek text. It was followed in 1924 by The Old Testament: A New Translation. Moffatt's translation held its own for many years as the chief of the `modern speech' versions of the Bible. Its principal competitor was the American Translation by E. J. Goodspeed and others (New Testament, 1923; complete Bible, 1927). For the New Testament part of this version Dr. Goodspeed followed Westcott and Hort's text for the most part, deviating from it in half a dozen places where more recent investigation seemed to justify this course, and adopting (rather unwisely) a conjectural emendation in I Peter 3:19, according to which not Christ but Enoch went and preached to the spirits in prison (Moffatt accepted the same emendation).

During the last thirty years the number of new English versions of the Bible in part or in whole has greatly increased. Among private enterprises may be mentioned C. B. Williams's New Testament in the Language of the People (1937), marked by special (but sometimes misguided) attention to Greek tenses; The Book of Books, all anonymous version of the New Testament published by the United Society for Christian Literature (1938) to mark the quatercentenary of Henry VIII's injunction for the setting up of an English Bible for public use in every parish church in England; The Bible in Basic English (New Testament, 1940; complete Bible, 1949), a work which, despite its severely limited vocabulary, is an independent and critical rendering of the original text marked by the scholarship and insight of its translator, S. H. Hooke; The New Testament Letters, by J. W. C. Wand (1943); J. B. Phillips's New Testament in Modern English (1958), which began with his Letters to Young Churches (1947), and has justly won widespread popularity as a vigorous and effective paraphrase of the original; E. V. Rieu's `Penguin' translation of The Four Gospels (1952), followed by The Acts of the Apostles, by C. H. Rieu (1957) ; The Authentic New Testament, by H. J. Schonfield (1955) ; The Berkeley Version in Modern English, by G. Verkuyl and others (New Testament, 1945; complete Bible, 1959), and The Amplified Bible (New Testament, 1958; complete Bible, 1965).

Soon after the International Council of Religious Education (of the United States and Canada) acquired the copyright of the American Standard Version in 1928, a committee was set up to consider the further revision of this version, and recommended a thorough revision. The Council adopted the recommendation, and authorized the work of revision in 1937. The committee of thirty-two scholars entrusted with the revision worked in two sections (one for the Old Testament and one for the New). The first published fruit of its work was the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament (1946). This was followed in 1952 by the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (incorporating some improvements in the text of the New Testament) ; the Revised Standard Version of the Apocrypha appeared in 1957. A new edition of the whole RSV in 1962 incorporated 85 minor changes in wording. The RSV is the latest version of the Bible in the great tradition which stems from Tyndale and includes the versions of 1611, 1881-85 and 1901. In the Old Testament the RSV has made a freer use of the evidence of ancient versions and even of conjectural) emendation than its predecessors did; for some of renderings Hebrew evidence became available for the first time among the Qumran manuscripts after its publication. Occasionally the translation reflects the light that has been thrown on some obscure Hebrew expressions by the texts from Ras Shamra, the ancient Ugarit (see p. 15 above). An example of this is the replacement of `fields of offerings' in II Samuel 1:21 by 'upsurging of the deep', which (whether it be the proper rendering of the Hebrew or not) suits the context better. In the New Testament the RSV has been more deliberately eclectic in its choice of variant readings than its predecessors were; even so, it is striking how often the text which it adopts as its basis agrees with Westcott and Hort's It has adopted one conjectural reading-'he who saved' in Jude 5, in place of `the Lord, having saved' of AV, RV, and ASV (the original reading is more probably the `difficult' one attested by Codices A and B and a number of other authorities, `Jesus, having saved').

In Great Britain and Ireland it was decided not to undertake a revision of the Revised Version but to produce a completely new translation, breaking loose from the Tyndale tradition. A joint committee of the principal non-Roman Churches, of the two leading Bible Societies and the Oxford and Cambridge University Tresses, was appointed in 1947 to deal with the matter; it set up three panels of translators (one for each of the Testaments and one for the Apocrypha) and a fourth panel of literary advisors. Its policy, in the words of ( H. Dodd, director of the translation, has been to 'aim at a "timeless" English, avoiding equally both archaisms and transient modernisms'. The New Testament part of this New English Bible was published on March 14, 1961. It met with an unexpectedly favourable reception; within twelve months four million copies wire bought. Some criticisms were voiced on theological grounds others on grounds of English style; of the latter, the most serious were those expressed by T. S,. Eliot in the (London) Sunday Telegraph of December 16, 1962, in which he said: `So long as the New English Bible wits used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the twentieth century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.' To a large extent this judgment is based on a stylistic comparison of the New English Bible with the Authorized Version. But the translators were not so much concerned to make a contribution to English literature which would stop the rot in linguistic usage as to provide a faithful and intelligible rendering which should as far as possible produce in the twentieth-century reader an effect equivalent to that produced by the original on the first-century reader.

As for the textual principles of the new translation, the translators say, comparing their procedure with that of the Revisers of 1881: `The problem of restoring a form of text as near as possible to the vanished autographs now appears less simple than it did to our predecessors. There is not at the present time any critical text which would command the same degree of general acceptance as the Revisers' text did in its day. Nor has the time come, in the judgement of competent scholars, to construct such a text, since new material constantly comes to light, and the debate continues. The present translators therefore could do no other than consider variant readings on their merits, and, having weighed the evidence for themselves, select for translation in each passage the reading which to the best of their judgement seemed most likely to represent what the author wrote.' The underlying text, in other words, is thoroughly eclectic. No conjectural emendations were admitted.

The Old Testament part of the New English Bible is not expected to appear before 1970, and no assessment of the translation as a whole can be made before then.The work of Bible revision and translation has proceeded apace at the same time among English-speaking Roman Catholics. In the United States a new version has been in course of production in recent years, under .sponsorship of the Episcopal Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. The New Testament, which appeared in 1941, represents a thorough-going revision of the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version previously in use, but the Old Testament (to be completed in four volumes) is an entirely new translation from the original. In Great Britain the version of R. A. Knox (New Testament, 1945; Old Testament, 1949; complete Bible, revised, 1955) is a highly individual piece of work, by a rare master of sophisticated style; it carries the authorization of the hierarchy of England and Wales and the Hierarchy of Scotland. Its great defect lies in its being a translation not of the original texts but of the Latin Vulgate (albeit with constant reference to the Hebrew and Greek). By 1964 the introduction to an edition of the New Testament for Roman Catholics could say: `Catholics no longer make their translations from the Latin Vulgate.' This 1964 edition in another way marked a new advance in the history of the English Bible; it is the Catholic Edition of the RSV New Testament (RSSCE), which was followed in 1966 by the Catholic Edition of the RSV Bible. The Catholic Edition contains it small number of alterations in the RSV designed to make it acceptable to Roman Catholics; in addition, the books of the Apocrypha, instead of appearing as an appendix to the Old Testament, are interspersed among the Old Testament books in accordance with the tradition going back to the Septuagint and the Vulgate. That Protestants and Roman Catholics should share what is to all intents and purposes a common English Bible is a welcome development, which could scarcely have been envisaged twenty years ago. Still less would it have been possible to envisage the Catholic imprimatur being given to an edition of the Bible annotated by Protestants; but this happened in May 1966, when Cardinal Cushing gave his imprimatur to such an edition of the RSV: The Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha.

Catholic editions of the Bible with annotations include The Westminster Version of the Sacred Scriptures (1913 and following years), not yet complete, and La Bible de Jerusalem (first edition completed in 1956; revision in process). The latter edition, an excellent annotated translation by Dominican scholars of the French Biblical and Archaeological School in Jerusalem, calls for mention here because an English translation of it, The Jerusalem Bible, is due to be published before the end of 1966.

Something should be said of Jewish translations of the Old Testament. In 1917 the Jewish Publication Society of America published The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text, a version preserving the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible, and owing a manifest debt in style and language to the Authorized and Revised Versions. It is now in process of supersession by A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text, the work of a committee under the chairmanship of H. M. Orlinsky (a Jewish scholar who participated in the production of the RSV Old Testament). The first instalment of this new venture appeared in 1963 (The Torah: The Five Books of Moses). This version breaks loose from the `King James' idiom and presents the sacred text in the language of today. In textual matters it is conservative; emendations based on the ancient versions are noted in the margin, but not admitted into the text.

A thoroughly ecumenical venture in Bible translation is The Anchor Bible, to be completed in thirty-eight volumes. Volume I (Genesis) appeared in 1964, and eight others have been published since then. In addition to translation, each volume includes introduction and commentary. The general editors are W. F. Albright and D. N. Freedman, and the enterprise as a whole represents the cooperation of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant scholars. The Jewish contribution is not restricted to the Old Testament; the volume on the Epistle to the Hebrews has been entrusted to a professor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The day has probably passed away for good when one Bible version could serve all practical purposes - for church use, scholarly study, and private reading - as the version of 1611 was designed to do. But we may well be thankful that today we have such a variety of firstrate English translations to serve the different purposes for which the Bible is used, reproducing as closely as may be at this remove of time, place and language the message of the original documents, declaring the way of life for all mankind.

Chapter 10 Table of Contents Appendix 1