The Text
(Tre statement is often made that the Bible is full of mistakes, that in the process of being handed down from age to age parts of its text have become untrustworthy. Such opinions are confidently expressed by detractors from Holy Scripture. Only too often Christians permit these statements to pass unchallenged. Because of their own ignorance of the history of the writings upon which their faith is built, they are unable to rebut an error that admitted would destroy the authority of the Bible.
But Wwhatare the facts that guarantee the textual, integrity.of.the Bible? Numerous as they are, a few from them may be selected as suggestive.
The whole literature of antiquity, the great body of writings that men call the
8 classics, rightly considered rests upon a slender documentary basis. The intervals between the time of the composition of these works and the date of their earliest copies are astonishingly wide. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus probably wrote his plays between 500 and 458 B.C. The earliest manuscript of his works belongs to the eleventh century. For a period of 1,500 years, consequently, there is extant no record of his plays. Approximately the same is true of the historians Thucydides and Herodotus; while for the odist Pindar and the dramatist Euripides the gap is 1,600 years. Of such a greatly important work as the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, we have no copy earlier than one made in the tenth century, and Aristotle lived in the fourth century B.C. With the Latin authors, the interval of silence is necessarily somewhat smaller, for the great writers of Rome lived later than their Greek predecessors. Nevertheless we must pass over 750 years before we find an
9 extant manuscript of Tacitus; and even then most of the text of this important historian rests upon the authority of a single manuscript. Horace’s odes do not survive in any copy made earlier than 900 years after he wrote them; and Catullus comes down to us only through a few manuscripts written 1,450 years after he died.
Such is the precarious basis upon which the texts of the classics rest. [Tn some cases, one or two good copies’ made a millennium after the death of the author are accepted by scholarship as evidence sufficient to establish the authenticity of the text.) For the filling in of gaps and the correcting of miscopyings, conjectural emendation must suffice. Yet that the literature of antiquity is spurious, that the great bulk of it is forgery, no sensible scholar would maintain. It takes the brilliant but erratic mind of the con-
*As a matter of fact, some important classical texts are based on even less evidence than this. No single manuscript, for instance, has the entire text of Lucian.
10 firmed seeker after parodox such as Hardouin to go to such an extremity. And but one Hardouin has arisen to question the authenticity of the classics. If, then, the classical texts are accepted, should the text of the Bible especially be doubted, providing its foundation is at least as sure as that of other ancient literature?
In answer to this question, consider now the Scriptures. (While the interval which separates the oldest extant classical manuscripts from the time of their writing averages about 1,000 years, we have complete copies of the New Testament made within 250 years after its actual composition. While the great gaps in the life of the classics are shrouded in darkness, we have the full and convincing history of the Old Testament from before Christ up to the time of our oldest sacred manuscripts. For each bit of classical parchment that came to light during the Renaissance, there are literally scores or more copies of the Word of God. Almost every old monastery has yielded its share. [Next to the works of the Church Fathers, the Scriptures themselves are the most numerous of ancient books. As early as 1780, Benjamin Kennicott, canon of Christ Church, Oxford, performed a tremendous service to Biblical scholarship by collating six hundred Old Testament manuscripts and sixteen manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch; and between 1784-1787 De Rossi published in Italy collations of about eight hundred more. And not only are the ancient copies of the sacred writings more numerous than the secular manuscripts, but they are also oldery a large majority of the classical manuscripts come from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among the most ancient of classical manuscripts is one in the Vatican library, a Virgil of the fourth century. Yet the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus of the New Testament belong to the fourth century, while portions
12 of the Greek translation of the Old Testament date back to the third century.
The inferences to be drawn are plain. If the text of the classics is authentic, that of the Bible must be more certainly authentic. Older copies of it exist. Vastly more — copies of it exist.) This duplication of manuscripts in particular has been highly valuable to scholarship, for, through affording the opportunity for close comparison of a large number of copies of widely different origin, it has aided greatly in establishing the remarkable accuracy of the present text.
In the continuity of its early history, the Bible stands alone. The centuries of silence which confront the scholar in the case of the classics are no problem for the student of Scripture. As far back as 800 A.D. the number of reliable manuscripts is legion. Much evidence from the writings of the ancient rabbis and learned commentators, the Massoretes, as they were called, throws light upon the earlier period from 800 A.D.
13 to 100g A.D. We learn from these commentaries, or Massorah, that the Old Testament text throughout this time was substan-.. ° whe es tially what it is now.) (ABSut the end of the first century A.D. a company of the persecuted Massoretes gathered at Jamnia to discuss the question of the canon, that is, what books were to be considered sacred and what ones profane. At this conference the traditional text seems to have been fixeds As for the New Testament, it was, like Virgil’s Aineid, almost from the years of its composition the subject of discussion and exposition. No other book has such an immense tributary literature as it has. But what of the years before Christ? Here the lineage of the Bible takes on, once more, its unique character. Neither original manuscript nor traditional commentary tell us of the Word of God during this period. Instead the evidence is of another and, in some ways, more convincing class — the translation of the Bible into other tongues. One transla-
14 tion, the Samaritan version, made by the mixed population led into Samaria by the Assyrians after the subjection of the Ten Tribes, is incomplete, as it includes but the Pentateuch. The other is the Greek version, or Septuagint, as it is called. This is complete. Inasmuch as the Samaritan version dates from the fifth century B.C. and the Greek version from the third century, we are able to trace the Bible very close to the actual time of its writing. Yet of what em ies works is this true? Few indeed. [N o book in the world has had the reverent, the fastidtowsty careful treatment that throughout centuries has been given the Bible. It has been copied by scribes who regarded mistakes with superstitious terror. In making it known its translators added to their labor their lives. Throughout the dark ages monks in obscure retreats toiled over its pages. For hundreds of years Jewish scribes labored upon the texts of the law and the prophets; painstakingly they revised, 1B interpreted, and cleansed the sacred word from error. The ancient Greek copyists recorded the number of verses written. The Hebrew scribes counted not only verses, but also each word and each letter. Distinguishing the central portion of the book copied, they marked the middle letter of the whole work as a keystone, se-te-speak, on which to base their ideal edifice of perfect copying. If they detected the slightest error, even unto the miswriting of a single letter, it was their duty to destroy at once the page upon which the error appeared. They wrote with a peculiar ink upon sheets made from the skin of a “clean” animal. They spoke aloud each word before writing it; to write even a single word from memory would have been a gross crime. It is said that these scribes prayerfully wiped their pens before writing the name of God, and before writing that most holy word “Jehovah” they washed their whole bodies. After these rules had been observed in the production of a new manu-
16 script, it was compared with the original; and if only one wrong letter were,discovered,
the entire copy was rejected. he solemn 60°
warning of one rabbi to a scribe has been recorded: ‘Take heed how thou doest thy work, for thy work is the work of heaven, lest thou drop or add a letter of the manuscript and so become a destroyer of the world!”
The piety which characterized these Hebrew scribes was passed on to the Christian copyists. The very ornaments which beautify the monastic manuscripts, the elaborate initial letters, the splendid coloring of the conventional designs, are all witnesses to the reverence with which the copyists worked. Like their ancient Hebrew prototypes, they were passionately zealous for accuracy. The fact that, in certain cases, five of their manuscripts of a classic author have been considered by the best scholarship sufficient
*Cf. Collett, “All About the Bible,” p. 15. 17
& Vet evidence for establishing the text of that author proves their reliability. Moreover, as in the case of the Old Testament, the whole body of Scripture had the benefit of frequent revision during the dangerous period of its life — the first six centuries. Origen restored the text of the Septuagint; Jerome, Eusebius, and Augustine, to mention outstanding names, compared existing copies of the Bible. Thus many errors were detected and in consequence serious corruption was obviated.
With memorable devotion the Church fathers pored over both Old and New Testaments. Utilizing a scholarship that is even now, in this day of advanced research, held in veneration, they compared and revised. And then, centuries later during the Renaissance, Melancthon, Luther, and Erasmus, to name some of the greatest scholars of all time, labored over the Word of God. A hundred years later a company of the most learned men that royal command could
18 muster assembled in England for the making of the Authorized Version. Again, after a lapse of more than two hundred years, English and American scholars met for the revision of the King James Bible; and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the American Revised Version was produced. But notwithstanding this marshalling of scholarship, a few corruptions have insinuated themselves into the text. The great body of these corruptions, however, are mere scribal errors. Let us look at a typical error of this kind. The fourth verse of the eighth chapter of the Second Book of Samuel states that David took from Hadadezer, king of Zobah, seven hundred horsemen. But in First Chronicles, chapter eighteen, verse four, David is said to have taken seven thousand horsemen from Hadadezer. It is easy, however, to understand how a mistake such as this came to be made; a scribe confounded the two Hebrew letters indicating the numbers and forgot the points over one of them.
Such scribal errors are, on the whole, of little importance. (Their bearing u Te the integrity of the Bible is negligible. The remarkable thing is not that the scribes made errors, but that they made so few. Especially in the case of the Old Testament, the difficulties under which they worked were colossal. Ancient Hebrew manuscripts were originally written entirely in consonants with the vowels omitted and without spacing. If we were to write English in this way, the result would be well-nigh undecipherable. In spite of these difficulties, however, it has been estimated that the variations of any importance in the text of the Bible amount to far less than one one-thousandth of the whole. One need only compare the accuracy of the sacred text with the accuracy of profane literature to realize that God guided the makers of the Bible. In its preservation throughout ancient times it is, as in its subject matter, unique — a book apart from other books.