Yet, after making a large deduction from our first impressions of the amount of labour performed by Scholz, enough and more than enough would remain to entitle him to our lasting gratitude, if it were possible to place any tolerable reliance on the correctness of his results. Those who are, however superficially, acquainted with the nature of such pursuits, will readily believe that faultless accuracy in representing myriads of minute details is not to be looked for from the most diligent and careful critic. Oversights will mar the perfection of the most highly finished of human efforts; but if adequate care and pains shall have been bestowed on detecting them, such blemishes as still linger unremoved are no real subject of reproach, and do not greatly lessen the value of the work which contains them. But in the case of Scholz's Greek Testament the fair indulgence we must all hope for is abused beyond the bounds of reason or moderation. The student who has had much experience of his volumes, especially if he has ever compared the collations there given with the original manuscripts, will never dream of resorting to them for information he can expect to gain elsewhere, or rest with confidence on a statement of fact merely because Scholz asserts it. J. Scott Porter (Principles of Textual Criticism, Belfast, 1848, pp. 263-66) and Tischendorf (N. T., Proleg. c-cii, 7th edition) have dwelt upon his strange blunders, his blind inconsistencies, and his habitual practice of copying from his predecessors without investigation and without acknowledgement; so that it is needless for us to repeat or dwell on that ungracious task[231]; but it is our duty to put the student once for [pg 229] all on his guard against what could not fail to mislead him, and to express our sorrow that twelve years and more of hard and persevering toil should, through mere heedlessness, have been nearly thrown away.
As was natural in a pupil of J. L. Hug of Freyburg (see vol. i. p. 111), who had himself tried to build a theory of recensions on very slender grounds, Dr. Scholz attempted to settle the text of the N. T. upon principles which must be regarded as a modification of those of Griesbach. In his earliest work, like that great critic, he had been disposed to divide all extant authorities into five separate classes; but he soon reduced them to two, the Alexandrian and the Constantinopolitan. In the Alexandrian family he included the whole of Griesbach's Western recension, from which indeed it seems vain to distinguish it by any broad line of demarcation: to the other family he referred the great mass of more recent documents which compose Griesbach's third or Byzantine class; and to this family he was inclined to give the preference over the other, as well from the internal excellency of its readings, as because it represents the uniform text which had become traditional throughout the Greek Church. That such a standard, public, and authorized text existed he seems to have taken for granted without much enquiry. “Codices qui hoc nomen [Constantinopolitanum] habent,” he writes, “parum inter se dissentiunt. Conferas, quaeso, longè plerosque quos huic classi adhaerere dixi, atque lectiones diversas viginti trigintave in totidem capitibus vix reperies, unde conjicias eos esse accuratissimè descriptos, eorumque antigrapha parum inter se discrepasse” (N. T., Proleg., vol. i. § 55). It might have occurred to one who had spent so many years in studying Greek manuscripts, that this marvellous concord between the different Byzantine witnesses (which is striking enough, no doubt, as we turn over the pages of his Greek Testament) is after all due to [pg 230] nothing so much as to the haste and carelessness of collators. The more closely the cursive copies of Scripture are examined, the more does the individual character of each of them become developed. With certain points of general resemblance, whereby they are distinguished from the older documents of the Alexandrian class, they abound with mutual variations so numerous and perpetual as to vouch for the independent origin of nearly all of them, and their exact study has “swept away at once and for ever” (Tregelles' “Account of Printed Text,” p. 180) the fancy of a standard Constantinopolitan text, and every inference that had been grounded upon its presumed existence. If (as we firmly believe) the less ancient codices ought to have their proper weight and appreciable influence in fixing the true text of Scripture, our favourable estimate of them must rest on other arguments than Scholz has urged in their behalf.
Since this editor's system of recensions differed thus widely from Griesbach's, in suppressing altogether one of his three classes, and in yielding to the third, which the other slighted, a decided preference over its surviving rival, it might have been imagined that the consequences of such discrepancy in theory would have been strongly marked in their effects on his text. That such is not the case, at least to any considerable extent (especially in his second volume), must be imputed in part to Griesbach's prudent reserve in carrying out his principles to extremity, but yet more to Scholz's vacillation and evident weakness of judgement. In fact, on his last visit to England in 1845, he distributed among Biblical students here a “Commentatio de virtutibus et vitiis utriusque codicum N. T. familiae,” that he had just delivered on the occasion of some Encaenia at Bonn, in which (after various statements that display either ignorance or inattention respecting the ordinary phenomena of manuscripts which in a veteran collator is really unaccountable[232]) he declares his purpose, chiefly it would seem from considerations of internal evidence, that if ever it should be his lot to prepare another edition of the New Testament, “se plerasque codicum Alexandrinorum lectiones illas quas in margine interiore textui editionis suae Alexandrinas dixit, in textum recepturum” (p. 14). [pg 231] The text which its constructor distrusted, can have but small claim on the faith of others.
14. “Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, Carolus Lachmannus recensuit, Philippus Buttmannus Ph. F. Graecae lectionis auctoritates apposuit” is the simple title-page of a work, by one of the most eminent philologists of his time, the first volume of which (containing the Gospels) appeared at Berlin (8vo), 1842, the second and concluding one in 1850, whose boldness and originality have procured it, as well for good as for ill, a prominent place in the history of the sacred text. Lachmann had published as early as 1831 a small edition containing only the text of the New Testament, with a list of the readings wherein he differs from that of Elzevir, preceded by a notice of his plan not exceeding a few lines in length, itself so obscurely worded that even to those who happened to understand his meaning it must have read like a riddle whose solution they had been told beforehand; and referring us for fuller information to what he strangely considered “a more convenient place,” a German periodical of the preceding year's date[233]. Authors who take so little pains to explain their fundamental principles of criticism, especially if (as in the present case) these are novel and unexpected, can hardly wonder when their drift and purpose are imperfectly apprehended; so that a little volume, which we now learn had cost Lachmann five years of thought and labour, was confounded, even by the learned, with the mass of common, [pg 232] hasty, and superficial reprints. Nor was the difficulty much removed on the publication of the first volume of his larger book. It was then seen, indeed, how clean a sweep he had made of the great majority of Greek manuscripts usually cited in critical editions:—in fact he rejects all in a heap excepting Codd. ABC, the fragments PQTZ (and for some purposes D) of the Gospels; DE of the Acts only; DGH of St. Paul. Yet even now he treats the scheme of his work as if it were already familiarly known, and spends his time in discursive controversy with his opponents and reviewers, whom he chastises with a heartiness which in this country we imputed to downright malice, till Tregelles was so good as to instruct us that in Lachmann it was but “a tone of pleasantry,” the horseplay of coarse German wit (Account of Printed Text, p. 112). The supplementary Prolegomena which preface his second volume of 1850 are certainly more explicit: both from what they teach and from the practical examples they contain, they have probably helped others, as well as myself, in gaining a nearer insight into his whole design.
It seems, then, to have been Lachmann's purpose, discarding the slightest regard for the textus receptus as such, to endeavour to bring the sacred text back to the condition in which it existed during the fourth century, and this in the first instance by documentary aid alone, without regarding for the moment whether the sense produced were probable or improbable, good or bad; but looking solely to his authorities, and following them implicitly wheresoever the numerical majority might carry him. For accomplishing this purpose he possessed but one Greek copy written as early as the fourth century, Cod. B; and of that he not only knew less than has since come to light (and even this is not quite sufficient), but he did not avail himself of Bartolocci's papers on Cod. B, to which Scholz had already drawn attention. His other codices were not of the fourth century at all, but varying in date from the fifth (ACT) to the ninth (G); and of these few (of C more especially) his assistant or colleague Buttmann's representation was loose, careless, and unsatisfactory. Of the Greek Fathers, the scanty Greek remains of Irenaeus and the works of Origen are all that are employed; but considerable weight is given to the readings of the Latin version. The Vulgate is printed at length as [pg 233] revised, after a fashion, by Lachmann himself, from the Codices Fuldensis and Amiatinus: the Old Latin manuscripts abc, together with the Latin versions accompanying the Greek copies which he receives[234], are treated as primary authorities: of the Western Fathers he quotes Cyprian, Hilary of Poictiers, Lucifer of Cagliari, and in the Apocalypse Primasius also. The Syriac and Egyptian translations he considers himself excused from attending to, by reason of his ignorance of their respective languages.
The consequence of this voluntary poverty where our manuscript treasures are so abundant, of this deliberate rejection of the testimony of many hundreds of documents, of various countries, dates, and characters, may be told in a few words. Lachmann's text seldom rests on more than four Greek codices, very often on three, not unfrequently on two; in Matt. vi. 20-viii. 5, and in 165 out of the 405 verses of the Apocalypse, on but one. It would have been a grievous thing indeed if we really had no better means of ascertaining the true readings of the New Testament than are contained in this editor's scanty roll; and he who, for the sake of some private theory, shall presume to shut out from his mind the great mass of information God's Providence has preserved for our use, will hardly be thought to have chosen the most hopeful method for bringing himself or others to the knowledge of the truth.
But supposing, for the sake of argument, that Lachmann had availed himself to the utmost of the materials he has selected, and that they were adequate for the purpose of leading him up to the state of the text as it existed in the fourth century, would he have made any real advance in the criticism of the sacred volume? Is it not quite evident, even from the authorities contained in his notes, that copies in that age varied as widely—nay even more widely—than they did in later times? that the main corruptions and interpolations which perplex the student in Cod. Bezae and its Latin allies, crept in at a period anterior to the age of Constantine? From the Preface to his second volume (1850) it plainly appears (what might, perhaps, have been gathered by an esoteric pupil from the Preface to his first, [pg 234] pp. v, xxxiii), that he regarded this fourth century text, founded as it is on documentary evidence alone, as purely provisional; as mere subject-matter on which individual conjecture might advantageously operate (Praef. 1850, p. v). Of the many examples wherewith he illustrates his principle we must be content with producing one, as an ample specimen both of Lachmann's plan and of his judgement in reducing it to practice. In Matt. xxvii. 28 for ἐκδύσαντες, which gives a perfectly good sense, and seems absolutely required by τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ in ver. 31, BDabc read ἐνδύσαντες, a variation either borrowed from Mark xv. 17, or more probably a mere error of the pen. Had the whole range of manuscripts, versions, and Fathers been searched, no other testimony in favour of ἐνδύσαντες could have been found save Cod. 157, ff2 and q of the Old Latin, the Latin version of Origen, and a few codices of Chrysostom[235]. Against these we might set a vast company of witnesses, exceeding those on the opposite side by full a hundred to one; yet because Cod. A and the Latin Vulgate alone are on Lachmann's list, he is compelled by his system to place ἐνδύσαντες in the text as the reading of his authorities, reserving to himself the privilege of removing it on the ground of its palpable impropriety: and all this because he wishes to keep the “recensio” of the text distinct from the “emendatio” of the sense (Praef. 1850, p. vi). Surely it were a far more reasonable, as well as a more convenient process, to have reviewed from the first the entire case on both sides, and if the documentary evidence were not unevenly balanced, or internal evidence strongly preponderated in one scale, to place in the text once for all the reading which upon the whole should appear best suited to the passage, and most sufficiently established by authority.
But while we cannot accord to Lachmann the praise of wisdom in his design, or of over-much industry and care in the execution of it (see Tischendorf, N. T., Proleg. pp. cvii-cxii), yet we would not dissemble or extenuate the power his edition has exerted over candid and enquiring minds. Earnest, single-hearted, [pg 235] a true scholar both in spirit and accomplishments, he has had the merit of restoring the Latin versions to their proper rank in the criticism of the New Testament, which since the failure of Bentley's schemes they seem to have partially lost. No one will hereafter claim for the received text any further weight than it is entitled to as the representative of the manuscripts on which it was constructed: and the principle of recurring exclusively to a few ancient documents in preference to the many (so engaging from its very simplicity), which may be said to have virtually originated with him, has not been without influence with some who condemn the most strongly his hasty and one-sided, though consistent, application of it. Lachmann died in 1851.
15. “Novum Testamentum Graece. Ad antiquos testes denuo recensuit, apparatum criticum omni studio perfectum apposuit, commentationem isagogicam praetexuit Aenoth. Frid. Const. Tischendorf, editio octava:” Lipsiae, 1865-1872. This is beyond question the most full and comprehensive edition of the Greek Testament existing; it contains the results of the latest collations and discoveries, and as copious a body of various readings as is compatible with the design of adapting it for general use: though Tischendorf's notes are not sufficiently minute (as regards the cursive manuscripts) to supersede the need of perpetually consulting the labours of preceding critics. His earliest enterprise[236] in connexion with Biblical studies was a small edition of the New Testament (12mo, 1841), completed at Leipzig in 1840, which, although greatly inferior to his subsequent works, merited the encouragement which it procured for him, and the praises of D. Schulz, which he very gratefully acknowledged. Soon afterwards he set out on his first literary journey: “quod quidem tam pauper suscepi,” he ingenuously declares, “ut pro paenula quam portabam solvere non possem;” and, while busily engaged on Cod. C, prepared three other editions of the New Testament, which appeared in 1843 at Paris, all of them being booksellers' speculations on which, perhaps, he set no high value; one inscribed to Guizot, the Protestant statesman, a second (having [pg 236] the Greek text placed in a parallel column with the Latin Vulgate, and somewhat altered to suit it) dedicated to Denys Affre, the Archbishop of Paris who fell so nobly at the barricades in June, 1848. His third edition of that year contained the Greek text of the second edition, without the Latin Vulgate. It is needless to enlarge upon the history of his travels, sufficiently described by Tischendorf in the Preface to his seventh edition (1859); it will be enough to state that he was in Italy in 1843 and 1866; four times he visited England (1842, 1849, 1855, 1865); and thrice went into the East, where his chief discovery—that of the Cod. Sinaiticus—was ultimately made. In 1849 came forth his second Leipzig or fifth edition of the New Testament, showing a very considerable advance upon that of 1841, though, in its earlier pages more especially, still very defective, and even as a manual scarce worthy of his rapidly growing fame. The sixth edition was one stereotyped for Tauchnitz in 1850 (he put forth another stereotyped edition in 1862), representing the text of 1849 slightly revised: the seventh, and up to that date by far the most important, was issued in thirteen parts at Leipsic during the four years 1856-9. It is indeed a monument of persevering industry which the world has not often seen surpassed: yet it was soon to be thrown into the shade by his eighth and latest edition, issued in eleven parts, between 1864 and 1872, the text of which is complete, but the Prolegomena, to our great loss, were never written, by reason of his illness and death (Dec. 7, 1874)[237].
Yet it may truly be asserted that the reputation of Tischendorf as a Biblical scholar rests less on his critical editions of the N. T., than on the texts of the chief uncial authorities which in rapid succession he has given to the world. In 1843 was published the New Testament, in 1845 the Old Testament portion of “Codex Ephraemi Syri rescriptus (Cod. C)”, 2 vols. 4to, in uncial type, with elaborate Prolegomena, notes, and facsimiles. In 1846 appeared “Monumenta sacra inedita,” 4to, containing transcripts of Codd. FaLNWaYΘa of the Gospels, and B of the Apocalypse; [pg 237] the plan and apparatus of this volume and of nearly all that follow are the same as in the Codex Ephraemi. In 1846 he also published the Codex Friderico-Augustanus in lithographed facsimile throughout, containing the results of his first discovery at Mount Sinai: in 1847 the Evangelium Palatinum ineditum of the Old Latin: in 1850 and again in 1854 less splendid but good and useful editions of the Codex Amiatinus of the Latin Vulgate. His edition of Codex Claromontanus (D of St. Paul), 1852, was of precisely the same nature as his editions of Cod. Ephraemi, &c, but his book entitled “Anecdota sacra et profana,” 1855 (second and enlarged edition in 1861), exhibits a more miscellaneous character, comprising (together with other matter) transcripts of Oa of the Gospels, M of St. Paul; a collation of Cod. 61 of the Acts being the only cursive copy he seems to have examined; notices and facsimiles of Codd. ΙΓΛ tisch.[238] or Evan. 478 of the Gospels, and of the lectionaries tisch.ev (Evst. 190) and tisch.6. f. (Apost. 71). Next was commenced a new series of “Monumenta sacra inedita” (projected to consist of nine volumes), on the same plan as the book of 1846. Much of this series is devoted to codices of the Septuagint version, to which Tischendorf paid great attention, and whereof he published four editions (the latest in 1869) hardly worthy of him; but vol. i (1855) contains transcripts of Codd. I, venev. (Evst. 175); vol. ii (1857) of Codd. NbRΘa; vol. iii (1860) of Codd. QWc, all of the Gospels; vol. iv (1869) was given up to the Septuagint, as vol. vii would have been to the Wolfenbüttel manuscript of Chrysostom, of the sixth century; but Cod. P of the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse comprises a portion of vols. v (1865) and of vi (1869); while vol. viii was to have been devoted to palimpsest fragments of both Testaments, such as we have described amongst the Uncials: the Appendix or vol. ix (1870) contains Cod. E of the Acts, &c. An improved edition of his system of Gospel Harmony (Synopsis Evangelica, 1851) appeared in 1864, with some fresh critical matter, a better one in 1871, and the fifth in 1884. His achievements in regard to Codd. א and Β we have spoken of in [pg 238] their proper places. He published his “Notitia Cod. Sinaitici” in 1860, his great edition of that manuscript in 1862, with full notes and Prolegomena; smaller editions of the New Testament only in 1863 and 1865; “an Appendix Codd. celeberrimorum Sinaitici, Vaticani, Alexandrini with facsimiles” in 1867. His marvellous yet unsatisfactory edition of Cod. Vaticanus, prepared under the disadvantages we have described, appeared in 1867; its “Appendix” (including Cod. B of the Apocalypse) in 1869; his unhappy “Responsa ad calumnias Romanas” in 1870. To this long and varied catalogue must yet be added exact collations of Codd. EGHKMUX Gospels, EGHL Acts, FHL of St. Paul, and more, all made for his editions of the N. T. A poor issue of the Authorized English Version of the N. T. was put forth in his name in 1869, being the thousandth volume of Tauchnitz's series.