It is specially remarkable that the Canon of Holy Scripture, which like the Text had met with opposition, was being settled in the later part of the century in which these two manuscripts were produced, or at the beginning of the next. The two questions appear to have met together in Eusebius. His latitudinarian proclivities seem to have led him in his celebrated words249 to lay undue stress upon the objections felt by some persons to a few of the Books of the New Testament; and cause us therefore not to wonder that he should also have countenanced those who wished without reason to leave out portions of the Text. Now the first occasion, as is well known, when we find all the Books of the New Testament recognized with authority occurred at the Council of Laodicea in 363 a.d., if the passage is genuine250, which is very doubtful; and the [pg 173] settlement of the Canon which was thus initiated, and was accomplished by about the end of the century, was followed, as was natural, by the settlement of the Text. But inasmuch as the latter involved a large multitude of intricate questions, and corruption had crept in and had acquired a very firm hold, it was long before universal acquiescence finally ensued upon the general acceptance effected in the time of St. Chrysostom. In fact, the Nature of the Divine Word, and the character of the Written Word, were confirmed about the same time:—mainly, in the period when the Nicene Creed was re-asserted at the Council of Constantinople in 381 a.d.; for the Canon of Holy Scripture was fixed and the Orthodox Text gained a supremacy over the Origenistic Text about the same time:—and finally, after the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 a.d., at which the acknowledgement of the Natures of the Son of Man was placed in a position superior to all heresy; for it was then that the Traditional Text began in nearly perfect form to be handed down with scarce any opposition to future ages of the Church.

Besides the multiplicity of points involved, three special causes delayed the complete settlement of the Text, so far as the attainment was concerned all over the Church of general accuracy throughout the Gospels, not to speak of all the New Testament.

1. Origenism, going beyond Origen, continued in force till it was condemned by the Fifth General Council in 553 a.d., and could hardly have wholly ended in that year. Besides this, controversies upon fundamental truths agitated the Church, and implied a sceptical and wayward spirit which would be ready to sustain alien variations in the written Word, till the censure passed upon Monothelitism at the Sixth General Council in 680 a.d.

2. The Church was terribly tried by the overthrow of the Roman Empire, and the irruption of hordes of Barbarians: [pg 174] and consequently Churchmen were obliged to retire into extreme borders, as they did into Ireland in the fifth century251, and to spend their energies in issuing forth from thence to reconquer countries for the Kingdom of Christ. The resultant paralysis of Christian effort must have been deplorable. Libraries and their treasures, as at Caesarea and Alexandria under the hands of Mahommedans in the seventh century, were utterly destroyed. Rest and calmness, patient and frequent study and debate, books and other helps to research, must have been in those days hard to get, and were far from being in such readiness as to favour general improvement in a subject of which extreme accuracy is the very breath and life.

3. The Art of Writing on Vellum had hardly passed its youth at the time when the Text advocated by B and ? fell finally into disuse. Punctuation did but exist in the occasional use of the full stop: breathings or accents were perhaps hardly found: spelling, both as regards consonants and vowels, was uncertain and rudimental. So that the Art of transcribing on vellum even so far as capital letters were concerned, did not arrive at anything like maturity till about the eighth century.

But it must not be imagined that manuscripts of substantial accuracy did not exist during this period, though they have not descended to us. The large number of Uncials and Cursives of later ages must have had a goodly assemblage of accurate predecessors from which they were copied. It is probable that the more handsome and less correct copies have come into our hands, since such would have been not so much used, and might have been in the possession of the men of higher station whose heathen [pg 175] ancestry had bequeathed to them less orthodox tendencies, and the material of many others must have been too perishable to last. Arianism prevailed during much of the sixth century in Italy, Africa, Burgundy, and Spain. Ruder and coarser volumes, though more accurate, would be readily surrendered to destruction, especially if they survived in more cultured descendants. That a majority of such MSS. existed, whether of a rougher or more polished sort, both in vellum and papyrus, is proved by citations of Scripture found in the Authors of the period. But those MSS. which have been preserved are not so perfect as the others which have come from the eighth and following centuries.

Thus Codex A, though it exhibits a text more like the Traditional than either B or ?, is far from being a sure guide. Codex C, which was written later in the fifth century, is only a fragmentary palimpsest, i.e. it was thought to be of so little value that the books of Ephraem the Syrian were written over the Greek: it contains not more than two-thirds of the New Testament, and stands as to the character of its text between A and B. Codex Q, a fragment of 235 verses, and Codex I of 135, in the same century, are not large enough to be taken into consideration here. Codexes F and S, recently discovered, being products of the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth, and containing St. Matthew and St. Mark nearly complete, are of a general character similar to A, and evince more advancement in the Art. It is unfortunate indeed that only a fragment of either of them, though that fragment in either case is pretty complete as far as it goes, has come into our hands. After them succeeds Codex D, or Codex Bezae, now in the Cambridge Library, having been bequeathed to the University by Theodore Beza, whose name it bears. It ends at Acts xxii. 29.