Chapter I. Ancient Versions.

[Transcriber's Note: This book contains much Greek text, which will not be well-rendered in plain text versions of this E-book. Also, there is much use of Greek characters with a vertical bar across the tops of the letters to indicate abbreviations; because the coding system used in this e-book does not have such an “overline”, they are rendered here with underlines. It also contains much text in Syriac, which is written right-to-left; for the sake of different transcription methods, it is transcribed here in both right-to-left and left-to-rights, so that regardless of the medium of this E-book, one or the other should be readable.]

1. The facts stated in the preceding volume have led us to believe that no extant manuscript of the Greek Testament yet discovered is older than the fourth century, and that those written as early as the sixth century are both few in number, and (with one notable exception) contain but incomplete portions, for the most part very small portions, of the sacred volume. When to these considerations we add the well-known circumstance that the most ancient codices vary widely and perpetually from the commonly received text and from each other, it becomes desirable for us to obtain, if possible, some evidence as to the character of those copies of the New Testament which were used by the primitive Christians in times anterior to the date of the most venerable now preserved.

Such sources of information, though of a more indirect and precarious kind than manuscripts of the original can supply, are open to us in the Versions of Holy Scripture, made at the remotest period in the history of the Church, for the use of [pg 002] believers whose native tongue was not Greek. After the composition of the writings of the New Testament, it is evident that the Church was in possession of Sacred Books which were of the utmost value, both to those who were already members, and in the conversion of such as had not yet come to the real knowledge of the Faith. The nearness of Syria to Judea, and the growth of the Church at Antioch and Damascus in the earliest days, must have produced a demand for a rendering into the Syriac languages; and the bilingual condition of most of the Roman Empire must have entailed a constant desire amongst vast multitudes to read in their own tongue a verification of the truths taught them. Accordingly translations, certainly of the New and probably also of the Old Testament, were executed not later than the second century in the Syriac and Latin languages, and, so far as their present state enables us to judge of the documents from which they were rendered, they represent to us a modification of the inspired text which existed within a century of the death of the Apostles. Later on, the influence of Alexandria opened the districts to the south and gave birth to the Coptic versions. And about the time of the acceptance of the Christian Religion by the Empire a further impetus was given, and the Vulgate and the Gothic and Ethiopic versions were soon made, followed by others according as the demand arose.

Indeed, the fact that versions as a class go much further back than MSS., constitutes one of the chiefest points of their importance in Textual Criticism; since the range of the ancient versions may be roughly estimated as reaching from the second to the tenth century, whereas the period of extant MSS. did not commence till the fourth century was well advanced, and were continued into the sixteenth. Their respective ages, too, are actually known, and do not rest upon probabilities, as in the first kind of evidence. They are also generally authorized translations, made either by a body of men, or by one eminent authority whose work was adopted amongst the people for whose use the Holy Scriptures had been translated. And they probably represented, either many MSS., or a small body of accepted MSS.