History of the transmission of ancient books to modern times / together with the process of historical proof; or, a concise account of the means by which genuineness of ancient literature generally, and the authenticity of historical works especially are ascertained including incidental remarks upon the relative strength of the evidence usually adduced in behalf of the Holy Scriptures

by Isaac Taylor

11. The means of comparison with spurious works; or with works intended to share the reputation that had been acquired by others.

Imitations—whether good or bad—are useful in serving to set originals in a more advantageous light. Good imitations, calling into activity, as they do, all the acumen and the utmost diligence of critics, enable them to place genuine writings out of the reach of suspicion. Bad imitations, by serving as a foil or contrast, exhibit more satisfactorily, the dignity, the consistency, and the simplicity of what is genuine.

Several good imitations of the style of Cicero have appeared in different ages, and they have called for so much acuteness on the part of critics as have materially strengthened the evidence of the genuineness of his acknowledged works. In like manner the celebrated epistles of Phalaris excited a learned and active controversy, the beneficial result of which was not so much the settling of the particular question in debate, as the concentration of powerful and accomplished minds upon the general subject of the genuineness of ancient books, by means of which other questionable remains of antiquity received the implicit sanction of retaining their claims, after they had been brought within the reach of so fiery an ordeal.

Many bad imitations of classic authors have been offered to the world, and some such are still extant; and sometimes these are appended to the author’s genuine works. No one can read these spurious pieces immediately after he has made himself familiar with such as are genuine, without receiving, from the contrast, a forcible impression of the truth and reality of the latter. The life of Homer, for example, which is usually appended to the history of Herodotus, and which claims his name, and which has something of his manner, yet presents a contrast which few readers can fail to observe.

No good imitations, either of the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, have ever appeared; but in the place of that elaborate investigation which the existence of such productions would have called forth, other motives of the strongest kind have prompted a fuller and more laborious examination of the Scriptures than any other writings have endured.

Bad imitations of the style of the Scriptures—some of the Old Testament, and many of the New—have been attempted, and are still in existence; and they are such as to afford the most striking illustration that can be imagined of the difference in simplicity, dignity, and consistency, which one should expect to find, severally, in the genuine and the spurious. The apocryphal books (which however are not, most of them, properly termed spurious) afford an advantageous contrast in this way, to the genuine or canonical writings of the Old Testament; and as to the spurious gospels—passing under the names of Peter, Judas, Nicodemus, Thomas, Barnabas—a very cursory examination of them is enough to enhance, immeasurably, the confidence we feel in the genuineness of the true Gospels and Epistles.

The preservation of these latter worthless productions to modern times, is an extraordinary fact, and it affords proof of a state of things, the knowledge of which is important in questions of literary antiquity—namely, that there were many copyists in the middle ages who wrote, and went on writing, mechanically, whatever came in their way, without exercising any discrimination. Now there is more satisfaction in knowing that ancient books have come down through a blind and unthinking medium of this sort, than there would be in believing that we possess only such things as the copyists, in the exercise of an assumed censorship, deemed worthy to be handed down to posterity. It is far better that we should—by accident and ignorance, have lost some valuable works, and that, by the same means, some worthless ones have been preserved, than that the results of accident and ignorance should have been excluded by the constant exercise of a power of selection governed by, we know not what rule or influence. Nothing more pernicious can be imagined than the existence, from age to age, of a synod of copyists sagely determining what works should be perpetuated, and what should be suffered to fall into oblivion. Happily for literature and religion, there were, in the monasteries, numbers of unthinking labourers, who, in selecting the subject of their mindless toils, seemed to have followed the easy rule of taking—the next book on the shelf!

12. The strength of the inference that may be drawn from the genuineness of the books to the credibility of their contents.

Nothing can be more simple or certain than the inference derived from the acknowledged antiquity and genuineness of an historical work, in proof of the general credibility of the narrative it contains. If it be proved that Cicero’s Orations against Catiline, and that Sallust’s History of the Catiline War, were written by the persons whose names they bear; or if it were only proved that these compositions were extant and well known as early as the age of Augustus; that they were then universally attributed to those authors, and were universally admitted to be authentic records of matters of fact; and if the same facts are, with more or less explicitness, alluded to by the writers of the same, and of the following age, there remains no reasonable supposition, except that of the truth of the story—in its principal circumstances, by aid of which the existence and the acceptance of these narratives, these orations, and these allusions, so near to the time of the conspiracy, can be accounted for.

In Sallust’s History some facts may be erroneously stated; or the principal facts may be represented under the colouring of prejudice. In the Orations of Cicero there may be (or we might for argument sake suppose there to be) exaggeration, and an undue severity of censure; but after any such deductions have been made, or any others which reason will allow, it remains incontestably certain that, if these writings be genuine, the story, in the main, is true. The sophisms of a college of sceptics, in labouring to show the improbability of the facts, or the suspiciousness of the evidence, would not avail to shake our belief if we are convinced that the books are not spurious.