UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA A BOOK ABOUT THE ENGLISH BIBLE CHAPTER I THE SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE OVER the entrance to the Library of the University of Pennsylvania are the lines: "O blessed letters that combine in one Impressive words! reminding the student who may chance to read them that in literature the world has a heritage with which no other of its possessions can compare in value, for by words, more than by any other form of expression, the mind and heart are revealed and the intellectual and spiritual treasure of the race preserved. Through books we may know the mind of the past and transmit the mind of the present. The greatest book is the Bible, and the reason for the place assigned to it is that it contains interpretations of human life, actual and ideal, which reveal man to himself, in his joys and sorrows, his triumphs and his defeats, his aspirations and his possibilities, his relations to other men, and, comprehending and enveloping all, his relations to God. Men may differ about what 2 A BOOK ABOUT THE ENGLISH BIBLE the Bible is, but the fact remains that for centuries millions of men, of all grades of intelligence and learning, have believed that the Bible speaks to them as no other book has ever spoken, and that what it says comes with an authority derived from God himself. The primary spiritual problem of man is his relations to God. Men, everywhere, recognize the existence of an intelligent power outside and higher than themselves that controls and regulates the universe. The individual who doubts or denies the existence of God is exceptional, and his opinions are at variance with human belief and experience. The Bible, concerned as it is in its component parts with the revelation of God to man, and the relation of man to God, has held the attention of men because it is true to the truths of life and satisfying to the yearnings of the human spirit. Men have found it so, and there is an abiding faith that men will continue to find it so. Beliefs concerning the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and the worship of Jehovah, existed long before any accounts of such beliefs and worship were ever written, The writings we have are not the earliest. Included in the Old Testament are portions of writings that long antedate any of the existing books as we have them, and that may properly be regarded as important sources of the books. The teachings of Jesus were related orally for some years before any part of the New Testament was written. Reverence for the Bible is increased by a knowledge of the history of its transmission down the centuries, through many languages, and many versions, preserving always its distinctive qualities unimpaired by the frailties of human copyists, and unchanged through the lapse of time. THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES The title-pages of the modern English versions of the Bible, with the exception of the Douay Bible, state that they are translations from the original tongues. A copy of the latter states that it is "translated out of the Authentical Latin . . . conferred with the Hebrew, Greeke and other Editions in divers languages." The Old Testament is in Hebrew, with the exception of a few passages, which are in Aramaic, Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26, Daniel 2:4b-7:28, Jeremiah 10:11. The New Testament is in Greek. These are the original languages. The conquests of Alexander spread the knowledge of Greek in the East, and in cities like Alexandria, great and populous, were many Jews who adopted the language as their own. In the time of Jesus the conquests of Rome had brought Latin also into the East where it became the language of the government. At the Crucifixion, the inscription placed on the cross was "in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek." John 19: 20. These three languages contain the immediate sources of our Bible. The original language of the Old Testament was Hebrew, but our oldest manuscripts containing it are in Greek, into which the Jewish Scriptures were translated. Some of the Greek versions antedate by centuries our oldest Hebrew copies, which are the Petrograd Codex of the Prophets 916 A. D. and a manuscript of the entire Scriptures, also at Petrograd, and dating perhaps as early as 1009 A. D. The Jewish Scriptures have come down to us with what is known as an "accepted text❞ as a result of the care of the Sopherim, who were the custodians of the sacred text until the sixth century, when it was taken |