“Readings must be judged on internal grounds. One can hardly avoid doing so. It is natural and almost unavoidable. It must be admitted indeed that the choice of readings on internal evidence is liable to abuse. Arbitrary caprice may characterize it. It may degenerate into simple subjectivity. But though the temptation to misapply it be great, it must not be laid aside.... While allowing superior weight to the external sources of evidence, we feel the pressing necessity of the subjective. Here, as in other instances, the objective and subjective should accompany and modify one another. They cannot be rightly separated.” (Biblical Criticism, vol. ii. p. 374, 1852.)
Chapter IX. History Of The Text.
An adequate discussion of the subject of the present chapter would need a treatise by itself, and has been the single theme of several elaborate works. We shall here limit ourselves to the examination of those more prominent topics, a clear understanding of which is essential for the establishment of trustworthy principles in the application of external evidence to the correction of the text of the New Testament.
1. It was stated at the commencement of this volume that the autographs of the sacred writers “perished utterly in the very infancy of Christian history:” nor can any other conclusion be safely drawn from the general silence of the earliest Fathers, and from their constant habit of appealing to “ancient and approved copies[262],” when a reference to the originals, if extant, would have put an end to all controversy on the subject of various readings. Dismissing one passage in the genuine Epistles of Ignatius (d. 107), which has no real connexion with the matter[263], the only allusion to the autographs of Scripture met with in the primitive ages is the well-known declaration of [pg 258] Tertullian (fl. 200): “Percurre Ecclesias Apostolicas, apud quas ipsae adhuc Cathedrae Apostolorum suis locis praesident, apud quas ipsae Authenticae Literae eorum recitantur, sonantes vocem, et repraesentantes faciem uniuscujusque. Proximè est tibi Achaia, habes Corinthum. Si non longè es a Macedoniâ, habes Philippos, habes Thessalonicenses. Si potes in Asiam tendere, habes Ephesum. Si autem Italiae adjaces, habes Romam ...” (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, c. 36.) Attempts have been made, indeed, and that by eminent writers, to reduce the term “Authenticae Literae” so as to mean nothing more than “genuine, unadulterated Epistles,” or even the authentic Greek as opposed to the Latin translation[264]. It seems enough to reply with Ernesti, that any such non-natural sense is absolutely excluded by the word “ipsae,” which would be utterly absurd, if “genuine” only were intended (Institutes, Pt. iii. Ch. ii. 3)[265]: yet the African Tertullian was too little likely to be well informed on this subject, to entitle his rhetorical statement to any real attention[266]. We need not try to explain away his obvious meaning, but we may fairly demur to the evidence of this honest, but impetuous and wrong-headed man. We have no faith in the continued existence of autographs which are vouched [pg 259] for on no better authority than the real or apparent exigency of his argument[267].
2. Besides the undesigned and, to a great extent, unavoidable differences subsisting between manuscripts of the New Testament within a century of its being written, the wilful corruptions introduced by heretics soon became a cause of loud complaint in the primitive ages of the Church[268]. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, addressing the Church of Rome and Soter its Bishop (a.d. 168-176), complains that even his own letters had been tampered with: καὶ ταύτας οἱ τοῦ διαβόλου ἀπόστολοι ζιζανίων γεγέμικαν, ἃ μὲν ἐξαιροῦντες, ἃ δὲ προστιθέντες; οἷς τὸ οὐαὶ κεῖται: adding, however, the far graver offence, οὐ θαυμαστὸν ἄρα εἰ καὶ τῶν κυριακῶν ῥαδιουργῆσαί τινες ἐπιβέβληνται γραφῶν (Euseb., Eccl. Hist., iv. 23), where αἱ κυριακαὶ γραφαί can be none other than the Holy Scriptures. Nor was the evil new in the age of Dionysius. Not to mention Asclepiades, or Theodotus, or Hermophylus, or Apollonides, who all under the excuse of correcting the sacred text corrupted it[269], or the Gnostics Basilides (a.d. 130?) and Valentinus (a.d. 150?) who published additions to the sacred text which were avowedly of their own composition, Marcion of Pontus, the [pg 260] arch-heretic of that period, coming to Rome on the death of its Bishop Hyginus (a.d. 142)[270], brought with him that mutilated and falsified copy of the New Testament, against which the Fathers of the second century and later exerted all their powers, and whose general contents are known to us chiefly through the writings of Tertullian and subsequently of Epiphanius. It can hardly be said that Marcion deserves very particular mention in relating the history of the sacred text[271]. Some of the variations from the common readings which his opponents detected were doubtless taken from manuscripts in circulation at the time, and, being adopted through no private preferences of his own, are justly available for critical purposes. Thus in 1 Thess. ii. 15, Tertullian, who saw only τοὺς προφήτας in his own copies, objects to Marcion's reading τοὺς ἰδίους προφήτας (“licet suos adjectio sit haeretici”), although ἰδίους stands in the received text, in Evann. KL (DE in later hands) and all cursives except eight, in the Gothic and both (?) Syriac versions, in Chrysostom, Theodoret, and John Damascenus. Here the heretic's testimony is useful in showing the high antiquity of ἰδίους, even though אABDEFGP, eight cursives, Origen thrice, the Vulgate, Armenian, Ethiopic, and all three Egyptian versions, join with Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort in rejecting it, some of them perhaps in compliance with Tertullian's decision. In similar instances the evidence of Marcion, as to matters of fact to which he could attach no kind of importance, is well worth recording[272]: but where on the contrary the dogmas of his own miserable system are touched, or no codices or other witnesses countenance his changes (as is perpetually the case in his edition of St. Luke, the only Gospel—and that maimed or interpolated from the others—he seems to have acknowledged at all), his blasphemous extravagance may very well be forgotten. In such cases he [pg 261] does not so much as profess to follow anything more respectable than the capricious devices of his misguided fancy.
3. Nothing throws so strong a light on the real state of the text in the latter half of the second century as the single notice of Irenaeus (fl. 178) on Apoc. xiii. 18. This eminent person, the glory of the Western Church in his own age, whose five books against Heresies (though chiefly extant but in a bald old Latin version) are among the most precious reliques of Christian antiquity, had been privileged in his youth to enjoy the friendly intercourse of his master Polycarp, who himself had conversed familiarly with St. John and others that had seen the Lord (Euseb., Eccl. Hist., v. 20). Yet even Irenaeus, though removed but by one stage from the very Apostles, possessed (if we except a bare tradition) no other means of settling discordant readings than are now open to ourselves; namely, to search out the best copies and exercise the judgement on their contents. His locus classicus must needs be cited in full, the Latin throughout, the Greek in such portions as survive. The question is whether St. John wrote χξιϛ᾽ (666), or χιϛ᾽ (616).
“Hic autem sic se habentibus, et in omnibus antiquis et probatissimis et veteribus scripturis numero hoc posito, et testimonium perhibentibus his qui facie ad faciem Johannem viderunt (τούτων δὲ οὕτως ἐχόντων, καὶ ἐν πᾶσι δὲ τοῖς σπουδαίοις καὶ ἀρχαίοις ἀντιγράφοις τοῦ ἀριθμοῦ τούτου κειμένου, καὶ μαρτυρούντων ἀυτῶν ἐκείνων τῶν κατ᾽ ὄψιν τὸν Ἰωάννην ἑωρακότων, καὶ τοῦ λόγου διδάσκοντος ἡμᾶς ὅτι ὁ ἀριθμὸς τοῦ ὀνόματος τοῦ θηρίου κατὰ τὴν τῶν Ἑλλήνων ψῆφον διὰ τῶν ἐν ἀυτῷ γραμμάτων [ἐμφαίνεται]), et ratione docente nos quoniam numerus nominis bestiae, secundum Graecorum computationem, per literas quae in eo sunt sexcentos habebit et sexaginta et sex: ignoro quomodo erraverunt quidam sequentes idiotismum et medium frustrantes numerum nominis, quinquaginta numeros deducentes, pro sex decadis unam decadem volentes esse (οὐκ οἶδα πῶς ἐσφάλησάν τινες ἐπακολουθήσαντες ἰδιωτισμῷ καὶ τὸν μέσον ἠθέτησαν ἀριθμὸν τοῦ ὀνόματος, ν᾽ ψήφισμα ὑφελόντες καὶ ἀντὶ τῶν ἓξ δεκάδων μίαν δεκάδα βουλόμενοι εἶναι). Hoc autem arbitror scriptorum peccatum fuisse, ut solet fieri, quoniam et per literas numeri ponuntur, facilè literam Graecam quae sexaginta enuntiat numerum, in iota Graecorum literam expansam.... Sed his quidem qui simpliciter et sine malitia hoc fecerunt, arbitramur veniam dari a Deo.” (Contra Haeres. v. 30. 1: Harvey, vol. ii. pp. 406-7.)
Here we obtain at once the authority of Irenaeus for receiving the Apocalypse as the work of St. John; we discern the living interest its contents had for the Christians of the second century, even up to the traditional preservation of its minutest readings; [pg 262] we recognize the fact that numbers were then represented by letters[273]; and the far more important one that the original autograph of the Apocalypse was already so completely lost, that a thought of it never entered the mind of the writer, though the book had not been composed one hundred years, perhaps not more than seventy[274].