The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels

by John William Burgon

It was only to have been anticipated that the Author of the Everlasting Gospel—that masterpiece of Divine Wisdom, that miracle of superhuman skill—would shew Himself supremely careful for the protection and preservation of His own chiefest work. Every fresh discovery of the beauty and preciousness of the Deposit in its essential structure does but serve to deepen the conviction that a marvellous provision must needs have been made in God's eternal counsels for the effectual conservation of the inspired Text.

Yet it is not too much to assert that nothing which man's inventive skill could have devised nearly comes up [pg 021] to the actual truth of the matter. Let us take a slight but comprehensive view of what is found upon investigation, as I hold, to have been the Divine method in respect of the New Testament Scriptures.

I. From the very necessity of the case, copies of the Gospels and Epistles in the original Greek were multiplied to an extraordinary extent all down the ages and in every part of the Christian Church. The result has been that, although all the earliest have perished, there remains to this day a prodigious number of such transcripts; some of them of very high antiquity. On examining these with care, we discover that they must needs have been (a) produced in different countries, (b) executed at intervals during the space of one thousand years, (c) copied from originals no longer in existence. And thus a body of evidence has been accumulated as to what is the actual text of Scripture, such as is wholly unapproachable with respect to any other writings in the world[16]. More than two thousand manuscript copies are now (1888) known to exist[17].

It should be added that the practice of reading Scripture aloud before the congregation—a practice which is observed to have prevailed from the Apostolic age—has resulted in the increased security of the Deposit: for (1) it has led to the multiplication, by authority, of books containing the Church Lessons; and (2) it has secured a living witness to the ipsissima verba of the Spirit—in all the Churches of Christendom. The ear once thoroughly familiarized with the words of Scripture is observed to resent the slightest departure from the established type. As for its tolerating important changes, that is plainly out of the question.

II. Next, as the Gospel spread from land to land, it became translated into the several languages of the ancient world. For, though Greek was widely understood, the commerce and the intellectual predominance of the Greeks, and the conquests of Alexander having caused it to be spoken nearly all over the Roman Empire, Syriac and Latin Versions were also required for ordinary reading, probably even in the very age of the Apostles. And thus those three languages in which “the title of His accusation” was written above His cross—not to insist upon any absolute identity between the Syriac of the time with the then “Hebrew” of Jerusalem—became from the earliest time the depositaries of the Gospel of the World's Redeemer. Syriac was closely related to the vernacular Aramaic of Palestine and was spoken in the adjoining region: whilst Latin was the familiar idiom of all the Churches of the West.

Thus from the first in their public assemblies, orientals [pg 023] and occidentals alike habitually read aloud the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles. Before the fourth and fifth centuries the Gospel had been further translated into the peculiar idioms of Lower and Upper Egypt, in what are now called the Bohairic and the Sahidic Versions,—of Ethiopia and of Armenia,—of Gothland. The text thus embalmed in so many fresh languages was clearly, to a great extent, protected against the risk of further change; and these several translations remain to this day as witnesses of what was found in copies of the New Testament which have long since perished.

III. But the most singular provision for preserving the memory of what was anciently read as inspired Scriptures remains to be described. Sacred Science boasts of a literature without a parallel in any other department of human knowledge. The Fathers of the Church, the Bishops and Doctors of primitive Christendom, were in some instances voluminous writers, whose works have largely come down to our times. These men often comment upon, freely quote, habitually refer to, the words of Inspiration: whereby it comes to pass that a host of unsuspected witnesses to the truth of Scripture are sometimes producible. The quotations of passages by the Fathers are proofs of the readings which they found in the copies used by them. They thus testify in ordinary quotations, though it be at second hand: and sometimes their testimony has more than usual value when they argue or comment upon the passage in question. Indeed, very often the manuscripts in their hands, which so far live in their quotations, are older—perhaps centuries older—than any copies that now survive. In this way, it will be perceived that a three-fold security has been provided for the integrity of the Deposit:—Copies,—Versions,—Fathers. On the relation of each of which heads to one another something particular has now to be delivered.

§ 3.

Manuscript copies are commonly divided into Uncial, i.e. those which are written in capital letters, and Cursive or “minuscule,” i.e. those which are written in “running” or small hand. This division though convenient is misleading. The earliest of the “Cursives” are more ancient than the latest of the “Uncials” by full one hundred years[18]. The later body of the Uncials belongs virtually, as will be proved, to the body of the Cursives. There is no merit, so to speak, in a MS. being written in the uncial character. The number of the Uncials is largely inferior to that of the Cursives, though they usually boast a much higher antiquity. It will be shewn in a subsequent chapter that there is now, in the face of recent discoveries of Papyrus MSS. in Egypt, much reason for inferring that Cursive MSS. were largely derived from MSS. on Papyrus, just as the Uncials themselves were, and that the prevalence for some centuries of Uncials took its rise from the local library of Caesarea. For a full account of these several Codexes, and for many other particulars in Sacred Textual Criticism, the reader is referred to Scrivener's Introduction, 1894.

Now it is not so much an exaggerated, as an utterly mistaken estimate of the importance of the Textual decrees of the five oldest of these Uncial copies, which lies at the root of most of the criticism of the last fifty years. We are constrained in consequence to bestow what will appear to some a disproportionate amount of attention on those five Codexes: viz. the Vatican Codex B, and the Sinaitic Codex א, which are supposed to be both of the fourth century: the Alexandrian Codex A, and the fragmentary Parisian Codex C, which are assigned to the fifth: and lastly D, the Codex Bezae at Cambridge, which is supposed to have been written in the sixth. To these [pg 025] may now be added, as far as St. Matthew and St. Mark are concerned, the Codex Beratinus Φ, and the Rossanensian Codex Σ, both of which are of the early part of the sixth century or end of the fifth. But these two witness generally against the two oldest, and have not yet received as much attention as they deserve. It will be found in the end that we have been guilty of no exaggeration in characterizing B, א, and D at the outset, as three of the most corrupt copies in existence. Let not any one suppose that the age of these five MSS. places them upon a pedestal higher than all others. They can be proved to be wrong time after time by evidence of an earlier period than that which they can boast.