CHAPTER IV
NEARER THE CRISIS
Our author begins his "Introduction to the Study of the New Testament" with an account of the language and characters in which most of it was originally written, as he did the Old. These were Greek Uncials, all capital letters, without any space divisions between the words, and neither accent nor punctuation marks; that from these original manuscripts, down to the invention of printing, all copies were made by hand copying. The oldest existing manuscripts were made in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, and no two of these are exactly alike. During the succeeding centuries several thousand manuscript copies of all or parts of the New Testament were made that are still extant, and no two exactly alike!
I also learned that there are still extant quite a number of ancient Versions of the New Testament, translated into different languages, all of which are more or less different from each other, not alone in the text, but in the books recognized as authentic and canonical.
Here the author gives a brief history of the formation of the New Testament Canon, which so surprised, and even startled me, that I must make some mention of it. (In his treatment of the Old Testament the author gives but a few pages to the formation of the Old Testament Canon.) In the fifth Article of Religion in the Methodist Discipline it says: "In the name of the Holy Scriptures we do understand those canonical books of the Old and New Testaments of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church." (Italics mine.) But here I was to learn that for over three hundred years there was more or less controversy, and sometimes very bitter, over what books of the New Testament were, or were not, authentic and authoritative; that as a matter of fact there never was complete agreement among the Church Fathers; and that there never was any authoritative declaration on the subject by any Church Council until the Council of Trent (Roman Catholic) in 1545, which included in its canon all of our present recognized books of both the Old and New Testaments, and in addition thereto, included as canonical the Old Testament Apocrypha, which is universally excluded from the Protestant Bibles.
As this work is designed, at least partly, to stimulate additional study in others it may be well to cite a few examples, as I learned them from this book, designed to prove conclusively the authenticity, divine inspiration and infallible truth of the Holy Scriptures.
The canon of Muratori, about A.D. 160, omits Hebrews, both epistles of Peter, James and Jude, as uncanonical, and expresses doubts as to the Revelation.
The Peshito Syriac, about A.D. 200, omits Second Peter, Jude, Second and Third John and Revelation.
The Latin Version Itala, about the middle of the second century, omits James and Second Peter.
The Version of Clemens, about A.D. 202, omits Second Peter, James, Second and Third John and Philemon.