The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels Part 26

[409] E.g. ver. 1. All the three officiously insert [Greek: ho Iesous], in order to prevent people from imagining that Lazarus raised Lazarus from the dead; ver. 4, D gives the gloss, [Greek: apo Karyotou] for [Greek: Iskariotes]; ver. 13, spells thus,--[Greek: hossana]; besides constant inaccuracies, in which it is followed by none. [Symbol: Aleph]

omits nineteen words in the first thirty-two verses of the chapter, besides adding eight and making other alterations. B is far from being accurate.

[410] 'Let her alone, that she may keep it against the day of My burying' (Alford). But how _could_ she keep it after she had poured it all out?--'Suffer her to have kept it against the day of My preparation unto burial' (M^{c}Clellan). But [Greek: hina terese] could hardly mean that: and the day of His [Greek: entaphiasmos] had not yet arrived.

[411] Consider ii. 11 and xi. 40: St. Luke xiii. 17: Heb. i. 3.

[412] Consider v. 36 and iv. 34.

[413] Consider St. John xix. 30. Cf. St. Luke xxii. 37.

[414] Lewis, 'and the work I have perfected': Harkleian, 'because the work,' &c., 'because' being obelized.

[415] The Bohairic and Ethiopic are hostile.

[416] i. 245 (= Constt. App. viii. 1; _ap._ Galland. iii. 199).

[417] P. 419.

[418] Mcell p. 157.

[419] i. 534.

[420] ii. 196, 238: iii. 39.

[421] v. 256: viii. 475 _bis_.

[422] iii. 542: iv. 954: v^{1}. 599, 601, 614: v^{2}. 152.--In the following places Cyril shews himself acquainted with the other reading,--iv. 879: v^{1}. 167, 366: vi. 124.

[423] Polyc. frg. v (ed. Jacobson).

[424] Ps.-Ignat. 328.

[425] _Ap._ Gall. iii. 215.

[426] P. 285.

[427] ii. 545.

[428] Pp. 510, 816, 1008. But _opere constummato_, pp. 812, 815.--Jerome also once (iv. 563) has _opere completo._

[429] _Ap._ Gall. v. 135.

[430] P. 367.

[431] _Ap._ Gall. iii. 308.

[432] _Ap._ Aug. viii. 622.

[433] iii^{2}. 761: viii. 640.

[434] v. 1166.

[435] Ibid. 1165 g, 1166 a.

[436] Though the Bohairic, Gothic, Vulgate, and Ethiopic versions are disfigured in the same way, and the Lewis reads 'is.'

[437] Theoph. 216 note: [Greek: hos kindyneuein auta bythisthenai].

[438] Cod. Amiat.

[439] g,--at Stockholm.

[440] Stepha.n.u.s De Urbibus in voc. [Greek: Beroia].

CHAPTER XIII.

CAUSES OF CORRUPTION CHIEFLY INTENTIONAL.

IX. Corruption by Heretics.

-- 1.

The Corruptions of the Sacred Text which we have been hitherto considering, however diverse the causes from which they may have resulted, have yet all agreed in this: viz. that they have all been of a lawful nature. My meaning is, that apparently, at no stage of the business has there been _mala fides_ in any quarter. We are prepared to make the utmost allowance for careless, even for licentious transcription; and we can invent excuses for the mistaken zeal, the officiousness if men prefer to call it so, which has occasionally not scrupled to adopt conjectural emendations of the Text. To be brief, so long as an honest reason is discoverable for a corrupt reading, we gladly adopt the plea. It has been shewn with sufficient clearness, I trust, in the course of the foregoing chapters, that the number of distinct causes to which various readings may reasonably be attributed is even extraordinary.

But there remains after all an alarmingly large a.s.sortment of textual perturbations which absolutely refuse to fall under any of the heads of cla.s.sification already enumerated. They are not to be accounted for on any ordinary principle. And this residuum of cases it is, which occasions our present embarra.s.sment. They are in truth so exceedingly numerous; they are often so very considerable; they are, as a rule, so very licentious; they transgress to such an extent all regulations; they usurp so persistently the office of truth and faithfulness, that we really know not what to think about them. Sometimes we are presented with gross interpolations,--apocryphal stories: more often with systematic lacerations of the text, or transformations as from an angel of light.

We are constrained to inquire, How all this can possibly have come about? Have there even been persons who made it their business of set purpose to corrupt the [sacred deposit of Holy Scripture entrusted to the Church for the perpetual illumination of all ages till the Lord should come?]

At this stage of the inquiry, we are reminded that it is even notorious that in the earliest age of all, the New Testament Scriptures were subjected to such influences. In the age which immediately succeeded the Apostolic there were heretical teachers not a few, who finding their tenets refuted by the plain Word of G.o.d bent themselves against the written Word with all their power. From seeking to evacuate its teaching, it was but a single step to seeking to falsify its testimony.

Profane literature has never been exposed to such hostility. I make the remark in order also to remind the reader of one more point of [dissimilarity between the two cla.s.ses of writings. The inestimable value of the New Testament entailed greater dangers, as well as secured superior safeguards. Strange, that a later age should try to discard the latter].

It is found therefore that Satan could not even wait for the grave to close over St. John. 'Many' there were already who taught that Christ had not come in the flesh. Gnosticism was in the world already. St. Paul denounces it by name[441], and significantly condemns the wild fancies of its professors, their dangerous speculations as well as their absurd figments. Thus he predicts and condemns[442] their pestilential teaching in respect of meats and drinks and concerning matrimony. In his Epistle to Timothy[443] he relates that Hymeneus and Philetus taught that the Resurrection was past already. What wonder if a flood of impious teaching broke loose on the Church when the last of the Apostles had been gathered in, and another generation of men had arisen, and the age of Miracles was found to be departing if it had not already departed, and the loftiest boast which any could make was that they had known those who had [seen and heard the Apostles of the Lord].

The 'grievous wolves' whose a.s.saults St. Paul predicted as imminent, and against which he warned the heads of the Ephesian Church[444], did not long 'spare the flock.' Already, while St. John was yet alive, had the Nicolaitans developed their teaching at Ephesus[445] and in the neighbouring Church of Pergamos[446]. Our risen Lord in glory announced to His servant John that in the latter city Satan had established his dwelling-place[447]. Nay, while those awful words were being spoken to the Seer of Patmos, the men were already born who first dared to lay their impious hands on the Gospel of Christ.

No sooner do we find ourselves out of Apostolic times and among monuments of the primitive age than we are made aware that the sacred text must have been exposed at that very early period to disturbing influences which, on no ordinary principles, can be explained. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria,--among the Fathers: some Old Latin MSS.[448] the Bohairic and Sahidic, and coming later on, the Curetonian and Lewis,--among the Versions: of the copies Codd. B and [Symbol: Aleph]: and above all, coming later down still, Cod. D:--these venerable monuments of a primitive age occasionally present us with deformities which it is worse than useless to extenuate,--quite impossible to overlook. Unauthorized appendixes,--tasteless and stupid amplifications,--plain perversions of the meaning of the Evangelists,--wholly gratuitous a.s.similations of one Gospel to another,--the unprovoked omission of pa.s.sages of profound interest and not unfrequently of high doctrinal import:--How are such phenomena as these to be accounted for? Again, in one quarter, we light upon a systematic mutilation of the text so extraordinary that it is as if some one had amused himself by running his pen through every clause which was not absolutely necessary to the intelligibleness of what remained. In another quarter we encounter the thrusting in of fabulous stories and apocryphal sayings which disfigure as well as enc.u.mber the text.--How will any one explain all this?

Let me however at the risk of repeating what has been already said dispose at once of an uneasy suspicion which is pretty sure to suggest itself to a person of intelligence after reading what goes before. If the most primitive witnesses to our hand are indeed discovered to bear false witness to the text of Scripture,--whither are we to betake ourselves for the Truth? And what security can we hope ever to enjoy that any given exhibition of the text of Scripture is the true one? Are we then to be told that in this subject-matter the maxim '_id verius quod prius_' does not hold? that the stream instead of getting purer as we approach the fountain head, on the contrary grows more and more corrupt?

Nothing of the sort, I answer. The direct reverse is the case. Our appeal is always made to antiquity; and it is nothing else but a truism to a.s.sert that the oldest reading is also the best. A very few words will make this matter clear; because a very few words will suffice to explain a circ.u.mstance already adverted to which it is necessary to keep always before the eyes of the reader.

The characteristic note, the one distinguis.h.i.+ng feature, of all the monstrous and palpable perversions of the text of Scripture just now under consideration is this:--that they are never vouched for by the oldest doc.u.ments generally, but only by a few of them,--two, three, or more of the oldest doc.u.ments being observed as a rule to yield conflicting testimony, (which in this subject-matter is in fact contradictory). In this way the oldest witnesses nearly always refute one another, and indeed dispose of one another's evidence almost as often as that evidence is untrustworthy. And now I may resume and proceed.

I say then that it is an adequate, as well as a singularly satisfactory explanation of the greater part of those gross depravations of Scripture which admit of no legitimate excuse, to attribute them, however remotely, to those licentious free-handlers of the text who are declared by their contemporaries to have falsified, mutilated, interpolated, and in whatever other way to have corrupted the Gospel; whose blasphemous productions of necessity must once have obtained a very wide circulation: and indeed will never want some to recommend and uphold them. What with those who like Basilides and his followers invented a Gospel of their own:--what with those who with the Ebionites and the Valentinians interpolated and otherwise perverted one of the four Gospels until it suited their own purposes:--what with those who like Marcion shamefully maimed and mutilated the inspired text:--there must have been a large ma.s.s of corruption festering in the Church throughout the immediate post-Apostolic age. But even this is not all. There were those who like Tatian constructed Diatessarons, or attempts to weave the fourfold narrative into one,--'Lives of Christ,' so to speak;--and productions of this cla.s.s were multiplied to an extraordinary extent, and as we certainly know, not only found their way into the remotest corners of the Church, but established themselves there. And will any one affect surprise if occasionally a curious scholar of those days was imposed upon by the confident a.s.surance that by no means were those many sources of light to be indiscriminately rejected, but that there must be some truth in what they advanced? In a singularly uncritical age, the seductive simplicity of one reading,--the interesting fullness of another,--the plausibility of a thirds--was quite sure to recommend its acceptance amongst those many eclectic recensions which were constructed by long since forgotten Critics, from which the most depraved and worthless of our existing texts and versions have been derived.