4. The importance attached to the books by their possessors.
In a certain sense, the religion of the Greeks and Romans was embodied in the works of their poets; but the religious fervour of the people had never linked itself with those works, as if they were the depositories of their faith: books were the possession of the opulent and the educated classes;—they were prized by the few as the means of intellectual enjoyment. But Judaism first, and Christianity not less, were religions of historical fact: the doctrines and the laws of these religions were inferences, arising naturally from the belief of certain memorable events, and from the expectation of other events, that were yet to take place; the record of the past had become at once the rule of duty, and the charter of hope. To the dispersed and hated Jew his books were the solace of his wounded national pride: to the persecuted Christian his books were his title to “a better country,” and his support under present privations and sufferings. If the canonical books are valued by the Christian of modern times who believes them to be divine, they were valued with a far deeper sense by the early Christians, who, on the ground of undoubted miracles, received them as the word of Him who is omnipotent.
The veneration felt by the Jews for their sacred books was of a kind that is altogether without parallel: the reverence of the Christians for theirs, if it was not more profound, was much more impassioned, and this feeling gave intensity to a sentiment wholly unlike any with which one might seek to compare it: the fondness of a learned Greek or Roman for his books, was but in comparison as the delight of a child with his toys.
To this deep feeling towards the sacred writings, in the minds of Christians, was owing, not only the concealment and the preservation of copies in times of active persecution; but the assiduous reproduction of them by persons of all ranks who found leisure to occupy themselves in a work which they deemed to be so meritorious, and which they found to be so consoling.
5. The respect paid to them by copyists of later ages.
We have seen that, throughout the middle ages, though nothing like a widely diffused taste for the classic authors existed, yet at all times, there were, here and there, individuals by whom they were read and valued, and by whose agency and influence so much care was bestowed upon their preservation as served to insure a safe transmission of them to modern times. But that the Latin authors, at any time after the decline of the western empire, received the benefit of a careful and competent collation of copies there is little reason to believe. Of the Greek authors there were issued new recensions from Alexandria, while that city continued to be the seat of learning; and some measure of the same care was exercised by the scholars of Constantinople; yet even there the celebrated works of antiquity suffered a great degree of neglect during the last four centuries of the eastern empire.
But in this respect, as well as in those already mentioned, the text of the Scriptures—Jewish and Christian—possesses an incomparable advantage over that of the classic authors. The scrupulosity and the servile minuteness of the Jewish copyists in transcribing the Hebrew Scriptures are well known; in a literal sense of the phrase, “not a tittle of the law” was slighted: not only—as with the Greeks—was the number of verses in each book noted, but the number of words and of letters; and the central letter of each book being distinguished, it became, as a point of calculation, the key-stone of that portion of the volume. This unexampled exactness affords security enough for the safe transmission of the text; and if there were any grounds for the suspicion that the Rabbis, to weaken the evidence adduced against them by the Christians, wilfully corrupted some particular passages, we have other security, as we shall see, against the consequences of such an attempt.
The flame of true piety was, at no time, extinguished in the Christian community; nor can any century or half century of the middle ages be named, in relation to which it may not be proved that there were individuals by whom the books of the New Testament were known and regarded with a heartfelt reverence and affection. There were, besides, multitudes in the religious houses who, influenced perhaps by superstitious notions, thought it a work of superlative merit to execute a fair copy of the Scriptures, or any part of them; and all the adornments which the arts of the times afforded, were lavished to express the veneration of the scribe for the subject of his labours.
And more than this;—the Scriptures, especially in the first eight centuries, underwent several careful and skilful revisions in the hands of learned and able men, who, collating all the copies they could procure, restored the text wherever, as they thought, errors had been admitted. The prodigious labours of Origen in restoring the text of the Septuagint version have been often spoken of. The fathers of the Western, the African, and the Asiatic Churches—especially Jerome, Eusebius, and Augustine, with such means as they severally possessed, did what they could to stop the progress of accidental corruption in the sacred text, by instituting new comparisons of existing copies.
6. The wide local separation, or the open hostility of those in whose custody these books were preserved.