CHAPTER II. ON THE GREEK MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. As S the extant Greek manuscripts of the New Testament supply both the most copious and the purest sources of Textual Criticism, we propose to present to the reader some account of their peculiarities in regard to material, form, style of writing, date and contents, before we enter into details respecting individual copies, under the several subdivisions to which it is usual to refer them. SECTION I. On the general character of Manuscripts of the Greek 1. The subject of the present section has been systematically discussed in the "Palaeographia Graeca" (Paris, 1708, folio) of Bernard de Montfaucon [1655-17411], the most illustrious member of the learned Society of the Benedictines of St Maur. This truly great work, although its materials are rather too exclusively drawn from manuscripts deposited in French libraries, and its many illustrative facsimiles somewhat rudely engraved, still remains our best authority on all points relating to Greek Manuscripts, even after more recent discoveries, especially among the papyri of Egypt and Herculaneum, have necessarily modified not a few of its statements. The four splendid volumes of M. J. B. Silvestre's "Paléographie Universelle" (Paris, 1839, 1 In this manner we propose to indicate the dates of the birth and death of the person whose name immediately precedes. &c. folio) afford us no less than forty-one coloured specimens of the Greek writing of various ages, sumptuously executed; though the accompanying letter-press descriptions, by F. and A. Champollion Fils, seem in this branch of the subject a little disappointing; nor are the valuable notes appended to his translation of their work by Sir Frederick Madden (London, 2 vol. 1850, 8vo) sufficiently numerous or elaborate to supply the Champollions' defects. Much, however, may also be learnt from the "Herculanensium voluminum quæ supersunt" (Naples, 10 tom. 1793—1850, fol.); from Mr Babington's three volumes of papyrus fragments of Hyperides, respectively published in 1850, 1853 and 1858; and especially from the Prolegomena to Tischendorf's editions of the Codices Ephraemi (1843), Friderico-Augustanus (1846), Claromontanus (1852), and those other like publications (e.g. Monumenta sacra inedita 1846, 1855 &c. and Anecdota sacra et profana 1855) which have rendered his name the very highest among living scholars in this department of sacred literature. What I have been able to add from my own observation, has been gathered from the study of Biblical manuscripts now in England. 2. Stone, wood, tablets covered with wax, the bark of trees, the dressed skins of animals, the reed papyrus, paper made of cotton or linen, are the chief materials on which writing has been impressed at different periods and stages of civilisation. The most ancient manuscripts of the New Testament now existing are composed of vellum or parchment (membrana), the term vellum being strictly applied to the delicate skins of very young calves; and parchment (which seems to be a corruption of charta pergamena, a name first given to skins prepared by some improved process for Eumenes, king of Pergamus, about B.C. 150) to the integuments of sheep or goats. In judging of the date of a manuscript written on skins, attention must be paid to the quality of the material, the oldest being almost invariably described on the thinnest and whitest vellum that could be procured; while manuscripts of later ages, being usually composed of parchment, are thick, discoloured, and coarsely grained. Thus the Codex Friderico-Augustanus of the fourth century is made of the finest skins of antelopes, the leaves being so large, that a single animal would furnish only two (Tischendorf, Prolegomena, § 1). Its contemporary, the far-famed Codex Vaticanus, challenges universal admiration for the beauty of its vellum: every visitor at the British Museum can observe the excellence of that of the Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth century: that of the Codex Claromontanus of the sixth century is no less remarkable: the material of those purple-dyed fragments of the Gospels which Tischendorf denominates N, also of the sixth century, is so subtle and delicate, that some persons have mistaken the leaves preserved in England (Brit. Mus. Cotton, Titus C xv) for Egyptian papyrus. Paper made of cotton (charta bombycina, called also charta Damascena from its place of manufacture) may have been fabricated in the ninth1 or tenth century, and linen paper (charta proper) as early as the twelth; but they were seldom used for Biblical manuscripts earlier than the thirteenth, and had not entirely displaced parchment at the æra of the invention of printing, about A.D. 1450. Cotton paper is for the most part easily distinguished from linen by its roughness and coarse fibre; some of the early linen paper, both glazed and unglazed, is of a very fine texture, though perhaps a little too stout and crisp for convenient use. Lost portions of parchment or vellum manuscripts are often supplied in paper by some later hand; and the Codex Leicestrensis of the fourteenth century is unique in this respect, being composed of a mixture of inferior vellum and worse paper, regularly arranged in the proportion of two parchment to three paper leaves, recurring alternately throughout the whole volume. 3. Although parchment was in occasional, if not familiar, use at the period when the New Testament was written (rà ßißxía, μáriota tàs peμßpávas, 2 Tim. iv. 13), yet the cheaper and more perishable papyrus of Egypt was chiefly employed for ordinary purposes, and was probably what is meant by xáρτηs in 2 John v. 12. This vegetable production had been long used for literary purposes in the time of Herodotus (B.c. 440), and that not only in Egypt (Herod. Hist. II. 100) but elsewhere, for 1 Tischendorf (Notitia Codicis Sinaitici, p. 54) has recently taken to St Petersburg a fragment of a Lectionary, which cannot well be assigned to a later date than the ninth century, among whose parchment leaves are inserted two of cotton paper, manifestly written on by the original scribe. he expressly states that the Ionians, for lack of byblus1, had been compelled to have recourse to the skins of goats and sheep (v. 58). We find a minute, if not a very clear, description of the mode of preparing the papyrus for the scribe in the works of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. 1. XIII. c. 11, 12). Its frail and brittle quality has no doubt caused us the loss of some of the choicest treasures of ancient literature; the papyri which yet survive in the museums of Europe owe their preservation to the accidental circumstance of having been buried in the tombs of the Thebais, or beneath the wreck of Herculaneum. As we before intimated, no existing manuscript of the New Testament is written on papyrus, nor can the earliest we possess on vellum be dated higher than the middle of the fourth century. 4. We have some grounds for suspecting that papyrus was not over plentiful even in the best times of the Roman dominion; and it may be readily imagined that vellum (especially that fine sort by praiseworthy custom required for copies of Holy Scripture) could never have been otherwise than scarce and dear. Hence arose, at a very early period of the Christian æra, the practice and almost the necessity of erasing ancient writing from skins, in order to make room for works in which the living generation felt more interest. This process of destruction, however, was seldom so fully carried out, but that the strokes of the elder hand might still be traced, more or less completely, under the more modern writing. Such manuscripts are called codices rescripti or palimpsests (aλíμηoτa), and several of the most precious monuments of sacred learning are of this description. The Codex Ephraemi at Paris contains large fragments both of the Old and New Testament under the later Greek works of St Ephraem the Syrian: and the Codex Nitriensis, recently disinterred from a monastery in the Egyptian desert and brought to the British Museum, comprises a portion of St Luke's Gospel, nearly obliterated, and covered over by a Syriac treatise of Severus of Antioch against Grammaticus, comparatively of no value whatever. It will be easily believed that the collating or transcribing of palimpsests has cost much toil and patience to 1 Herodotus calls the whole plant byblus (11. 92), but Theophrastus (Hist. Plant. IV. 9) papyrus, reserving the term ßißlos for the liber, the inner rind, from which alone the writing material was fabricated. those whose loving zeal has led them to the attempt: and after all their true readings will be sometimes (not often) rather uncertain, even though chemical mixtures (such as prussiate of potash or the tinctura Giobertina) have recently been applied, with much success, to restore the faded lines and letters of these venerable records. 5. We need say but little of a practice which St Jerome1 and others speak of as prevalent towards the end of the fourth century, that of dyeing the vellum purple, and of stamping rather than writing the letters in silver and gold. The Cotton fragment of the Gospels, mentioned above (p. 21), is one of the few remaining copies of this kind, and it is not unlikely that the great Dublin palimpsest of St Matthew owes its present wretched discolouration to some such dye. But, as Davidson sensibly observes, "the value of a Manuscript does not depend on such things" (Biblical Criticism, vol. 11. p. 264). We care for them only as they serve to indicate the reverence paid to the Scriptures by men of old. The style, however, of the pictures, illustrations, arabesques and initial ornaments that prevail in later copies from the eighth century downwards, whose colours and gilding are sometimes as fresh and bright as if laid on but yesterday, will not only interest the student by tending to throw light on mediæval art and habits and modes of thought, but will often fix the date of the books which contain them with a precision otherwise quite beyond our reach. 6. The ink used in the most ancient Manuscripts has unfortunately for the most part turned red or brown, or very pale, or peeled off, or eaten through the vellum; so that in many cases (as in the Codex Vaticanus itself) a later hand has ruthlessly retraced the letters, and given a false semblance of coarseness or carelessness to the original writing. In such instances a few passages will usually remain untouched, just as the first scribe left them, and from the study of these a right notion can be formed of the primitive condition of the rest: see, for example, the two facsimile plates (63, 64) of the Coislin MS. (H) of St Paul's Epistles in Silvestre's Paléographie Universelle. 1 "Habeant qui volunt veteres libros, vel in membranis purpureis auro argentoque descriptos." Præf. in Job. |