Wheel. 1 Evan. 68
Wheel. 2 Evan. 95
Wheel. 3 Evst. 3
Wech. videas p. 191
Mill merely drew from other sources Barb., Steph., Vel., Wech.; the copies deposited abroad (B 1-3, Clar., Colb. 1-11, Cypr., Genev., Med., Per., Pet. 1-3, Vat. Vien.), and Trin. or Apost. 3 he only knew from readings sent to him; all the rest, not being included in Walton's list, and several of them also, he collated for himself.
The Prolegomena of Mill, divided into three parts—(1) on the Canon of the New Testament; (2) on the History of the Text, including the quotations of the Fathers and the early editions; and (3) on the plan and contents of his own work,—though by this time too far behind the present state of knowledge to bear reprinting, comprise a monument of learning such as the world has seldom seen, and contain much information the student will not even now easily find elsewhere. Although Mill perpetually pronounces his judgement on the character of disputed readings[198], especially in his Prolegomena, which were printed long after some portions of the body of the work, yet he only aims at reproducing Stephen's text of 1550, though in a few places he departs from it, whether by accident or design[199].
In 1710 Ludolph Kuster, a Westphalian, republished Mill's [pg 204] Greek Testament, in folio, at Amsterdam and Rotterdam (or with a new title page, Leipsic, 1723, Amsterdam, 1746), arranging in its proper place the matter cast by Mill into his Appendix, as having reached him too late to stand in his critical notes, and adding to those notes the readings of twelve fresh manuscripts, one collated by Kuster himself, which he describes in a Preface well worth reading. Nine of these codices collated by, or under, the Abbé de Louvois are in the Royal Library at Paris (viz. Paris. 1, which is Evan. 285; Paris. 2 = Evan. M; Paris. 3 = Evan. 9; Paris. 4 = Evan. 11; Paris. 5 = Evan. 119; Paris. 6 = Evan. 13; Paris. 7 = Evan. 14; Paris. 8 = Evan. 15; Paris. 9 = the great Cod. C): but Lips. = Evan. 78 was collated by Boerner; Seidel. = Act. 42 by Westermann; Boerner. = Paul. G by Kuster himself. He keeps his own notes separate from Mill's by prefixing and affixing the marks [symbol], [symbol], and his collations both of his own codices and of early editions will be found more complete than his predecessor's.
5. In the next year after Kuster's Mill (1711), appeared at Amsterdam, from the press of the Wetsteins, a small N. T., 8vo, containing all the critical matter of the Oxford edition of 1675, a collation of one Vienna manuscript (Caes. = Evan. 76), 43 canons “secundum quos variantes lectiones N. T. examinandae,” and discussions upon them, with other matter, especially parallel texts, forming a convenient manual, the whole by G. D. T. M. D., which being interpreted means Gerhard de Trajecto Mosae Doctor, this Gerhard von Mästricht being a Syndic of Bremen. The text is Fell's, except in Apoc. iii. 12, where the portentous erratum λαῷ for ναῷ of Stephen is corrected. A second and somewhat improved edition was published in 1735, but ere that date the book must have become quite superseded.
6. We have to return to England once more, where the criticism of the New Testament had engrossed the attention of Richard Bentley [1662-1742], whose elevation to the enviable post of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1699, was a just recognition of his supremacy in the English world of letters. As early as 1691 he had felt a keen interest in sacred criticism, and in his “Epistola ad Johannem Millium” had urged that editor, in language fraught with eloquence and native vigour, to [pg 205] hasten on the work (whose accomplishment was eventually left to others) of publishing side by side on the opened leaf Codd. A, D (Bezae), D (Clarom.), E (Laud.). For many years afterwards Bentley's laurels were won on other fields, and it was not till his friend was dead, and his admirable labours were exposed to the obloquy of opponents (some honest though unwise, others hating Mill because they hated the Scriptures which he sought to illustrate), that our Aristarchus exerted his giant strength to crush the infidel and to put the ignorant to silence. In his “Remarks upon a late Discourse of Free Thinking in a letter to F[rancis] H[are] D.D. by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,” 1713, Bentley displayed that intimate familiarity with the whole subject of various readings, their causes, extent, and consequences, which has rendered this occasional treatise more truly valued (as it was far more important) than the world-renowned “Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris” itself. As his years were now hastening on and the evening of life was beginning to draw nigh, it was seemly that the first scholar of his age should seek for his rare abilities an employment more entirely suited to his sacred office than even the most successful cultivation of classical learning; and so, about this time, he came to project what he henceforth regarded as his greatest effort, an edition of the Greek New Testament. In 1716 we find him in conference with J. J. Wetstein, then very young, and seeking his aid in procuring collations. In the same year he addressed his memorable “Letter” to Wm. Wake [1657-1737], Archbishop of Canterbury, whose own mind was full of the subject, wherein he explains, with characteristic energy and precision, the principles on which he proposed to execute his great scheme. As these principles must be reviewed afterwards, we will but touch upon them now. His theory was built upon the notion that the oldest manuscripts of the Greek original and of Jerome's Latin version resemble each other so marvellously, even in the very order of the words, that by this agreement he could restore the text as it stood in the fourth century, “so that there shall not be twenty words, or even particles, difference.” “By taking two thousand errors out of the Pope's [i.e. the Clementine] Vulgate, and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephen's [1550], I can set out an edition of each in columns, without using any book under nine hundred [pg 206] years old, that shall so exactly agree word for word, and, what at first amazed me, order for order, that no two tallies, nor two indentures, can agree better[200].” In 1720, some progress having been made in the task of collation, chiefly at Paris, by John Walker, Fellow of Trinity, who was designated by Bentley “overseer and corrector of the press,” but proved in fact a great deal more; Bentley published his Proposals for Printing[201], a work which “he consecrates, as a κειμήλιων, a κτῆμα ἐσαεί, a charter, a magna charta, to the whole Christian Church; to last when all the ancient MSS. here quoted may be lost and extinguished.” Alas for the emptiness of human anticipations! Of this noble design, projected by one of the most diligent, by one of the most highly gifted men our dear mother Cambridge ever nourished, nothing now remains but a few scattered notices in treatises on Textual Criticism, and large undigested stores of various readings and random observations, accumulated in his College Library; papers which no real student ever glanced through, but with a heart saddened—almost sickened—at the sight of so much labour lost[202]. The specimen chapter (Apocalypse xxii) which accompanied his Proposals shows clearly how little had yet been done towards arranging the materials that had been collected; codices are cited there, and in many of his loose notes, not separately and by name, as in Mill's volume, but mostly as “Anglicus unus, tres codd. veterrimi, Gall. quatuor, Germ. unus,” &c., in the rough fashion of the Oxford N. T. of 1675[203].
It has been often alleged that Bentley seems to have worked but little on the Greek Testament after 1729: that his attention was diverted by his editions of Paradise Lost (1732) and of Manilius (1739), by his Homeric studies and College litigation, until he was overtaken by a paralytic stroke in 1739, and died in his eighty-first year in 1742. Walker's collations of cursive manuscripts at Christ Church (Evan. 506), however, obviously made for Bentley's use, bear the date of 1732[204], and a closer examination of his papers, bequeathed in 1786 by his nephew Richard Bentley to Trinity College, shows that much more progress had been made by him than has been usually supposed. Besides full collations of the uncial Codd. AD (Gospels and Acts), of Cod. F (his θ) and G of St. Paul, of Arundel 547 (Evst. 257) executed by Bentley himself, of Codd. B and C by others at his cost, three volumes are found there full of critical materials, which have been described by Mr. Ellis, and digested by Dr. Westcott. One of these (B. xvii. 5) I was allowed by the Master and Seniors to study at leisure at home. It is a folio edition of the N. T., Greek and Latin (Paris, ap. Claud. Sonnium, 1628, the Greek text being that of Elzevir 1624), whose margin and spaces between the lines are filled with various readings in Bentley's hand, but not all of them necessarily the results of his own labour, collected out of ten Greek and thirty Latin manuscripts. The Greek are all cursives save Evst. 5, and his connexion with them has been referred to above under the Cursive MSS. They are