Bible

BIBLE

THE word Bible, which in English, as in Mediaeval Latin, is treated as a singular noun, is in its original Greek form a plural,— τα βιβλία, the (sacred) books,— correctly expressing the fact that the sacred writings of Christendom are made up of a number of independent records, which set before us the gradual development of the religion of revelation. The origin of each of these records forms a distinct critical problem; and for the discussion of these questions of detail the reader is referred to the articles on separate Biblical books. The present article seeks to give a general account of the historical and literary conditions under which the unique literature of the Old and New Testaments sprang up, and of the way in which the Biblical books were brought together in a canonical collection and handed down from age to age. The Biblical development is divided into two great periods by the manifestation and historical work of Christ. In its pre-Christian stage the religion of revelation is represented as a covenant between the spiritual God and His chosen people the Hebrews. In accordance with this and in allusion to Jer. xxxi. 31, Jesus speaks of the new dispensation founded in His death as a new covenant (1 Cor. xi. 25). Hence, as early as the 2d century of our era the two great divisions of the Bible were known as the books of the Old and of the New Covenant respectively. Among Latinspeaking Christians the Greek word for covenant was often incorrectly rendered testament, and thus Western Christendom still uses the names of the Old and New Testaments.

Old Testament.— Struggle and Progress of Spiritual Religion. Priests, Prophets, dec.— The pre-Christian age of the Biblical religion falls into a period of religious productivity and a subsequent period of stagnation and mainly conservative traditions. The period of productivity is also a period of contest, during which the spiritual principles of the religion of revelation were involved in continual struggle with polytheistic nature-worship on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with an unspiritual conception of Jehovah as a God whose interest in Israel and care for His sanctuary were independent of moral conditions. In this long struggle, which began with the foundation of the theocracy in the work of Moses, and did not issue in conclusive victory until the time of Ezra, the spiritual faith was compelled to show constant powers of new development,—working out into ever clearer form the latent contrasts between true and false religion, proving itself fitter than any other belief to supply all the religious needs of the people, and, above all, finding its evidence in the long providential history in which, from the great deliverance of the Exodus down to the Captivity and the Restoration, the reality of Jehovah’s kingship over Israel, of His redeeming love, and of His moral government, were vindicated by the most indisputable proofs. As it was only the deliverance from Egypt and the theocratic covenant of Sinai that bound the Hebrew tribes into national unity, Jhe worship of Jehovah was always acknowledged as the national religion of Israel· But from Joshua to Samuel national feeling was far weaker than tribal jealousy; and in the political disintegration of the people the religion of Jehovah seemed ready to be lost in local superstitions. During this period the chief centre of monotheism was the sanctuary and priesthood of the ark; and it was from the priestly circle that Samuel arose to reunite the nation by recalling it to the religion of Jehovah, and thus to prepare the way for the splendid age of David and Solomon. But though Samuel was by education a priest, it was not as a priest, but as a prophet that he accomplished this work.

In all ages a priesthood is conservative, not creative; and it was only as a growing and creative power that the still undeveloped spiritual religion could live. While it was the business of the priest faithfully to preserve ' religious traditions already acknowledged as true and venerable, the characteristic of the prophet is a faculty of spiritual intuition, not gained by human reason, but coming to him as a word from God himself, wherein he apprehends religious truth in a new light, as bearing in a way not manifest to other men on the practical necessities, the burning questions of the present. Unlike the priesthood, the prophets never formed a regular guild. It was an axiom that the gift of prophecy was bestowed by the inward and immediate call of Jehovah. But from the time of Samuel we find a regular succession of prophets working out the spiritual problems of the national faith with ever increasing clearness, and gathering round them, sometimes in regularly formed communities, a circle of disciples and sympathizers which, though never, perhaps, numerically considerable, embraced the names of David and other leaders of Hebrew history, and impressed the stamp of prophetic influence on every part of the national life. From this time the priées hold only the second place in the history of the Old Testament religion; sometimes they even appear as the opponents of the prophetic party, whose progressive ideas are distasteful to their natural conservatism and aristocratic instincts. But on the whole, the more enlightened ministers of the central sanctuary continued to share with the prophets the task of upholding a lofty religious tradition, and not unfrequently both characters were united in one person. It was, in fact, only through the priests that the ideas of the prophets could receive public sanction in the ordinances of religion, as it was only through rulers like David, or Hezekiah, or Jehu, that they could influence the political conduct of affairs.

A just insight into the work of the prophetic party in Israel was long rendered difficult by traditional prejudices. On the one hand the predictive element in prophecy received undue prominence, and withdrew attention from the influence of the prophets on the religious life of their own time; while, on the other hand, it was assumed, in accordance with Jewish notions, that all the ordinances, and almost, if not quite, all the doctrines of the Jewish church in the post-canonical period, existed from the earliest days of the theocracy. The prophets, therefore, were conceived partly as inspired preachers of old truths, partly as predicting future events, but not as leaders of a great development, in which the religious ordinances as well as the religious beliefs of the Old Covenant advanced from a relatively crude and imperfect to a relatively mature and adequate form.

The proof that this latter view, and not the traditional conception, is alone true to history depends on a variety of arguments which cannot here be reproduced. That the religious ideas of the Old Testament were in a state of growth during the whole prophetic period became manifest as soon as the laws of grammatico-historical exegesis were fairly applied to the Hebrew Scriptures. That the sacred ordinances were subject to variation was less readily admitted, because the admission involved a change of view as to the authorship of the Pentateuch; but here also the facts are decisive. For example, the law in Exod. xx. 24, ∕., contemplates the worship of Jehovah on other altars than that of the central sanctuary (cf Deut, xxxiii. 19). This practice, accordingly, was followed by Samuel, and was fully approved by Elijah (1 Kings xix. 14). But the worship of Jehovah on the high places or local sanctuaries was constantly exposed to superstitious corruption and heathen admixture, and so is frequently attacked by the prophets of the 8th century. It was undoubtedly under their influence that Hezekiah abolished the high places. The abolition was not permanent; but in the reign of Josiah, the next reforming king, we find that the principle of a single sanctuary can claim the support not only of prophetic teaching, but of a written law-book found in the temple, and acknowledged by the high priest (2 Kings xxii., xxiii.) The legislation of this book corresponds not with the old law in Exodus, but with the book of Deuteronomy. But perhaps the clearest proof that, during the period of prophetic inspiration, there was no doctrine of finality with regard to the ritual law any more than with regard to religious ideas and doctrines, lies in the last chapters of Ezekiel, which sketch at the very era of the Captivity an outline of sacred ordinances for the future restoration. From these and similar facts it follows indisputably, that the true and spiritual religion which the prophets and likeminded priests maintained at once against heathenism and against unspiritual worship of Jehovah as a mere national deity without moral attributes, was not a finished but a growing system, not finally embodied in authoritative documents, but propagated mainly by direct personal efforts. At the same time these personal efforts were accompanied and supported by the gradual rise of a sacred literature. Though the priestly ordinances were mainly published by oral decisions of the priests, which are, in fact, what is usually meant by the word law (Torah) in writings earlier than the Captivity, there can be no reasonable doubt that the priests possessed written legal collections of greater or less extent from the time of Moses downwards. Again, the example of Ezekiel, and the obvious fact that the law-book found at the time of Josiah contained provisions which were not up to that time an acknowledged part of the law of the land, makes it probable that legal provisions, which the prophets and their priestly allies felt to be necessary for the maintenance of the truth, were often embodied in legislative programmes, by which previous legal tradition was gradually modified. Then the prophets, especially when they failed to produce immediate reformation, began from the 8th century, if not still earlier, to commit their oracles to writing; and these written prophecies—circulating widely in a nation which had attained a high degree of literary culture, and frequently cited by later seers—disseminated prophetic teaching in a permanent form. Long before this time music and song had been practised in the prophetic circle of Samuel, and were introduced under David into the service of the sanctuary. Another important vehicle of religious instruction was the written history of the nation, which could not fail to be generally set forth in the theocratic spirit in which all loftier Hebrew patriotism had its root. And, indeed, the literary diffusion of spiritual ideas was not confined to the direct efforts of priests and prophets. In spite of the crass and unspiritual character of the mass of the people, the noblest traditions of national life were entwined with religious convictions, and the way in which a prophet, like Amos, could arise untrained from among the herdsmen of the wilderness of Judah, shows how deep and pure a current of spiritual faith flowed among the more thoughtful of the laity. Prophecy itself may from one point of view be regarded simply as the brightest efflorescence of the lay element in the religion of Israel, the same element which in subjective form underlies many of the Psalms, and in a shape less highly developed tinged the whole proverbial and popular literature of the nation; for in the Hebrew commonwealth popular literature had not yet sunk to represent the lowest impulses of national life.

Close of the Old Testament Development. Formation of the Canon.— The struggle between spiritual and unspiritual religion was brought to a crisis when the prophetic predictions of judgment on national sin were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of Judah. The merely political worship of Jehovah as the tutelary god of the state was now reduced to absurdity. Faith in the covenant God was impossible except on the principles of spiritual belief. Nor did the restoration by Cyrus affect this result. No political future lay before the returning exiles, and continued confidence in the destiny of the race was not separable from the religious ideas and Messianic hopes of the prophets. To obey the law of Jehovah and patiently to await the coming Deliverer was the only distinctive vocation of the community that gathered in the new Jerusalem; and after a period of misfortune and failure, in which the whole nation seemed ready to collapse in despair, this vocation was clearly recognized and embodied in permanent institutions in the reformation of Ezra and Nehemiah (445 b.c. ) But with this victory the spiritual religion passed into a stationary state. The spirit of prophecy, long decadent, expired with Malachi, the younger contemporary of Nehemiah; and the whole concern of the nation from this time downwards was simply to preserve the sacred inheritance of the past. The Exile bad so utterly broken all continuity of national life, that that inheritance could only be sought in the surviving monuments of sacred literature. To these, more than to the expiring voice of prophecy in their midst, the founders of the new theocracy turned for guidance. The books that had upheld the exiles’ faith, when all outward ordinances of religion were lacking, were also the fittest teachers of the restored community. Previous reformers had been statesmen or prophets. Ezra is a scribe who comes to Jerusalem armed, not with a fresh message from the Lord, but with “the book of the law of Moses.” This law-book was the Pentateuch, and the public recognition of it as the rule of the theocracy was the declaration that the religious ordinances of Israel had ceased to admit of development, and the first step towards the substitution of a canon or authoritative collection of Scriptures for the living guidance of the prophetic voice. A second step in the same direction is ascribed to Nehemiah by a tradition intrinsically probable, though of no great external authority. He, it is said, collected a library which, besides documents of temporary importance, embraced “the books about the kings aud prophets, and the writings of David” (2 Mac. ii. 13.) Certainly a complete body of the remains of the prophets, with an authentic account of the history of the period of their activity, must soon have been felt to be scarcely second in importance to the law; and so Nehemiah may very well be supposed to have begun the collection which now forms the second part of the Hebrew Bible, embracing, under the general title of The Prophets, the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (Parlier Prophets'), and the four prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets (Latter Prophets'). The mention of the writings of David implies that Nehemiah also began the formation of the third and last part of the Hebrew canon, which comprises, under the title of Ketubim (Scriptures, Hagiographa), the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five Megillot or ro‰ (Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), and, finally, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. It is certain, however, that this part of the collection was not completed till long after Nehemiah’s time; for to say nothing of the disputed dates of Ecclesiastes and Daniel, the book of Chronicles contains genealogies which go down at least to the close of the Persian period. The miscellaneous character of the Ketubim seems, in fact, to show that after the Law and the Prophets were closed, the third part of the canon was open to receive additions, recommended either by their religious and historical value, or by bearing an ancient and venerable name. And this was the more natural because the Hagiographa had not the same place in the synagogue service as was accorded to the Law and the Prophets.

The time and manner in which the collection was absolutely closed is obscure. The threefold division of the sacred writings is referred to in the prologue to the Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) about 130 B.C., but Jewish tradition indicates that the full canonicity of several books, especially of Ecclesiastes, was not free from doubt till the time of the famous R. Akiba, who perished in the great national struggle of the Jews with the Emperor Hadrian (Mishna, Jadaim, 3; Edaiot, 5). The oldest list of canonical books, given by Josephus (c. Apion., i. 8), is of somewhat earlier date. Josephus seems to have had quite our present canon; but he took Ruth along with Judges, and viewed Lamentations as part of the book of Jeremiah, thus counting twenty-two books instead of the twenty-four of the Talmudic enumeration and of the present Hebrew Bible. There is other evidence that only twenty-two books were reckoned by the Jews of the first Christian century; and it appears that this number was accommodated to that of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Even in the time of Jerome, Ruth and Lamentations were not uniformly reckoned apart. The expansion of the Talmudic twenty-four to the thirty-nine Old Testament books of the English version is effected by reckoning the minor prophets one by one, by separating Ezra from Nehemiah, and by subdividing the long books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. In this reckoning, and in the very different order of the books, we follow in the main the Alexandrian Greek and Vulgate Latin versions. But the Alexandrian differed from the Hebrew canon in more important points. The line of distinction between inspired and human writings was not so sharply drawn; and the Greek Bible not only admitted additions to several of the Hagiographa, but contained other apocryphal books, of some of which Greek was the original tongue, while others were translations of Hebrew or Aramaic writings. See Apocrypha.

In turning now to a literary and critical survey of the Old Testament books, we shall find it convenient to depart from the division of the Hebrew canon, in favour of a classification suggested by the order of the books followed in the English version and in most other translations. The Old Testament literature is made up of historical, poetico-didactic, and prophetic writings, and under these three heads we will arrange what remains to be said on the subject.

Historical Books.— These form two parallel series of sacred history. The books from Genesis to Kings give a continuous story (with some episodical additions) from the creation to the fall of the kingdom of Judah. The book of Chronicles covers the same ground on a narrower plan, contracting the early history into genealogical lists, and occupying itself almost entirely with the kingdom of Judah, and especially with matters connected with the temple and its worship. The narrative of the chronicler is continued in the books or rather book of Ezra and Nehemiah, which incorporates original memoirs of these two reformers, but otherwise is so exactly in the style of the Chronicles that critics are practically agreed in ascribing the whole to a single author, probably a Levite, who, as we have already seen, cannot have written before the close of the Persian empire. The questions that are raised as to the work of the chronicler belong less to the general history of Biblical literature than to special introduction. We pass on, therefore, to the larger and more important series. The Pentateuch and the so-called earlier prophets form together a single continuous narrative. It is plain, however, that the whole work is not the uniform production of one pen, but that in some way a variety of records of different ages and: styles have been combined to form a single narrative Accordingly. Jewish tradition bears that Moses wrote tho Pentateuch, Joshua the book named after him, Samuel tho book of Judges, and so forth. As all Hebrew history is anonymous,—a sure proof that people had not yet learned to lay weight on questions of authorship,—it is not probable that this tradition rests on any surer ground than conjecture; and, of course, a scribe who saw in the sacred books the whole outcome of Israel’s history would naturally leap to the conclusion that the father of the Law was the author of the Pentateuch, and that the other leaders of Israel’s history could not but be the writers of a great part of the Scriptures. A more careful view of the books themselves shows that the actual state of the case is not so simple. In the first place, the limits of the individual books are certainly not the limits of authorship. The Pentateuch as a law-book is complete without Joshua, but as a history it is so planned that the latter book is its necessary complement. (Cf. i for example, Exod. xvi. 35, Josh. V. 12; Gen. 1. 24, 25; Exod. xiii. 19; Josh, x∑iv. 32.) In truth, an author who wrote after the occupation of Canaan could never have designed a history which should relate all God’s promises to Israel and say nothing of their fulfilment. But in its present shape the Pentateuch is certainly subsequent to the occupation, for it uses geographical names which arose after that time (Hebron, Dan), refers to the conquest as already accomplished (Deut. ii. 12, cf. Num. XV. 32; Gen. xii. 6), and even presupposes the existence of a kingship in Israel (Gen, xxxvi. 31), And with this it agrees, that though there are marked differences of style and language within the book of Joshua, each style finds its counterpart in some section of the Pentateuch. In the subsequent books we find quite similar phenomena. The last chapters of Judges cannot be separated from the book of Samuel, and the earlier chapters of Kings are obviously one with the foregoing narrative; while all three books contain passages strikingly akin to parts of the Pentateuch and Joshua (cf, for example, the book of Deuteronomy with Josh, xxiii., 1 Sam. xii., 1 Kings viii.) Such phenomena not only prove the futility of any attempt to base a theory of authorship on the present division into books, but suggest that the history as we have it is not one narrative carried on from age to age by successive additions, but a fusion of several narratives which partly covered the same ground and were combined into unity by an editor. This view is supported by the fact, that even as it now stands the history sometimes gives more than one account of the same event, and that the Pentateuch often gives several laws on the same subject. Of the latter wé have already had one example, but for our present argument the main point is not diversity of enactment, which may often be only apparent, but the existence within the Pentateuch of distinct groups of laws partly taking up the same topics. Thus the legislation of Exod. xx.-xxiii is partly repeated in ch. xxxiv., and on the passover and feast of unleavened bread we have at least six laws, which if not really discordant, are at least so divergent in form and conception that they cannot be all from the same pen. (Exod. xii. 1-28, xiii. 3-10, xxiii. 15, xxxiv. 18; Lev. xxiii. 5-14, Deut, xvi.) Of historical duplicates the most celebrated are the twofold history of the creation and the flood, to which we must recur presently. The same kind of thing is found in the later books; for example, in the account of the way in which Saul became king, where it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that 1 Sam. xi. 1-11 should attach directly to ch. x. 16 (cf. x. 7). But the extent to which the historical books are made up of parallel narratives which, though they cover the same period, do not necessarily record the same events, was first clearly seen after Astruc (1753 a.d.) obser?ed that the respective uses of Jehovah (Lord) and Elohim (God) as the name of the Deity afford a criterion by which two documents can be dissected out of the book of Genesis. That the way in which the two names are used can only be due to difference of authorship is now generally admitted, for the alternation corresponds with such important duplicates as the two accounts of creation, and is regularly accompanied through a great part of the book by unmistakable peculiarities of language and thought, so that it is still possible to reconstruct at least the Elohim document with a completeness which makes its original independence and homogeneity matter of direct observation. The character of this narrative is annalistic, and where other material fails blanks are supplied by genealogical lists. Great weight is laid on orderly development, and the name Jehovah is avoided in the history of the patriarchs in order to give proper contrast to the Mosaic period (c∕. Gen. xvii. 1; Exod. vi. 3); and, accordingly, we find that the unmistakable secondary marks of this author run through the whole Pentateuch and Joshua, though the exclusive use of Elohim ceases at Exod. vi. Of course the disappearance of this criterion makes it less easy to carry on an exact reconstruction of the later parts of the document; but on many points there can be no uncertainty, and it is clearly made out that the author has strong priestly tendencies, and devotes a very large proportion of his space to liturgical matters. The separation of this document may justly be called the point of departure of positive criticism of the sources of the Old Testament; and present controversy turns mainly on its relation to other parts of the Pentateuch. Of these the most important are—1. The Jehovistic narrative, which also begins with the creation, and treats the early history more in the spirit of prophetic theology and idealism, containing, for example, the narrative of the fall, and the parts of the history of Abraham which are most important for Old Testament theology. That this narrative is not a mere supplement to the other, but an independent whole, appears most plainly in the story of the flood, where two distinct accounts have certainly been interwoven by a third hand. 2. Many of the finest stories in Genesis, especially great part of the history of Joseph, agree with the Elohim-document in the name of God, but are widely divergent in other respects. Since the researches of Hupfeld, a third author, belonging to northern Israel, and specially interested in the ancestors of the northern tribes, is generally postulated for these sections. His literary individuality is in truth sharply marked, though the limits of his contributions to the Pentateuch are obscure.

It will be remembered that we have already seen that three currents of influence run through the Old Testament development,—the traditional lore of the priests, the teaching of the prophets, and the religious life of the more enlightened of the people. Now, in the three main sections of the early history just enumerated we find the counterpart of each of these. The priestly narrative of the Elohist, the prophetic delineation of the Jehovist, the more picturesque and popular story of the third author, embody three tendencies, which are not merely personal but national, and which constantly reappear in other parts of Hebrew literature. Up ,to the book of Joshua all three run side by side. But the priestly interest found little scope in the subsequent history; and from the time of the Judges we can generally distinguish only sections marked by prophetic pragmatism and others which, though distinctly religious and even theocratic, are, so to speak, written from a layman’s stand-point. The latter comprise a large part of Judges, and by far the greatest part of Samuel, as well as the beginning of Kings. To the modern mind this part of the narrative, which is rich in colour and detail, is by far the most interesting, and it is with sincere regret that we pass at 1 Kings xi. to a division of the history for which the chief sources—cited as the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and Judah respectively—treat almost exclusively of the outer political life of the nation. In striking contrast to the uniformity of this narrative are the interspersed histories of Elijah and other northern prophets. These histories are very remarkable in style and even in language; and, containing some of the noblest passages of the Old Testament, form one of many proofs of the unusual literary genius of the kingdom of Ephraim. But how are these various narratives related to each other Î This question is not easy to answer. In general the third or lay element of the history seems to stand nearest to the events recorded, and even, perhaps, to form the direct basis of the prophetical matter; while, occasionally, old lists of names and places, poetico-historical pieces, and the like, form a still deeper stratum in the story. (Poetical pieces in the Book of the Wars of Jehovah., Num. xxi. 14; Book of Jashar [the upright], Josh. x. 13; 2 Sam. i. Lists like 2 Sam. xxiii.) Whether the same hands or only the same tendencies as appear in the non-Levitical parts of Genesis run on as far as the book of Kings, is a question which, though answered in the affirmative by Schrader and others, cannot be viewed as decided. Even the date of these elements of the Pentateuch is obscure; but in the 8th century Hosea refers quite clearly to passages of both. Thus far there is tolerable agreement among critics; but the Levitical or Elohistic history is the subject of violent controversy, which, however, turns mainly on the analysis of the legal parts of the Pentateuch. These contain other elements besides those already enumerated, of which we need only mention the brief code which follows the Decalogue in Exod. xx.-xxiii., and the great repetition of the law in a prophetic spirit which occupies the major part of Deuteronomy. Both these codes may be called popular in tone. They are precepts not for the priests, but for the whole people; and the former is the fundamental sketch of the whole theocratic constitution, which the latter develops and to some extent alters. Now the book of Deuteronomy presents a quite distinct type uf style which, as has been already mentioned, recurs from time to time in passages of the later books, and that in such a connection as to suggest to many critics since Graf the idea, that the Deuteronomic hand is the hand of the last editor of the whole history from Genesis to Kings, or, at least, of the non-Levitical parts thereof. This conclusion is not stringent, for a good deal may be said in favour of the view that the Deuteronomic style, which is very capable of imitation, was adopted by writers of different periods. But even so it is difficult to suppose that the legislative part of Deuteronomy is as old as Moses. If the law of the kingdom in Deut. xvii. was known in the time of the Judges, it is impossible to comprehend Judg. viii. 23, and above all 1 Sam. viii. 7. That the law of high places given in this part of the Pentateuch was not acknowledged till the time of Josiah, and was not dreamed of by Samuel and Elijah, we have already seen. The Deuteronomic law is familiar to Jeremiah, the younger contemporary of Josiah, but is referred to by no prophet of earlier date. And the whole theological stand-point of the book agrees exactly with the period of prophetic literature, and gives the highest and most spiritual view of the law, to which our Lord himself directly attaches his teaching, and which cannot be placed at the beginning of the theocratic development without making the whole history unintelligible. Beyond doubt the book is, as already hinted, a prophetic legislative programme; and if the author put his work in the mouth of Moses instead of giving it, with Ezekiel, a directly prophetic form, he did so not in pious fraud, but simply because his object was not to give a new law, but to expound and develop Mosaic principles in relation to new needs. And as ancient writers are not accustomed to distinguish historical data from historical deductions, he naturally presents his views in dramatic form in the mouth of Moses. If then the Deuteronomic legislation is not earlier than the prophetic period of the 8th and 7th centuries, and, accordingly, is subsequent to the elements of the Pentateuchal history which we have seen to be known to Hosea, it is plain that the chronology of the composition of the Pentateuch may be said to centre in the question whether the Levitico-Elohistic document, which embraces most of the laws in Leviticus with large parts of Exodcs and Numbers, is earlier or later than Deuteronomy. The answer to this question turns almost wholly on archaeological inquiries, for there is, perhaps, no quite conclusive reference to the Elohistic record in the prophets before the Exile, or in Deuteronomy itself. And here arises the great dispute which divides critics, and makes our whole construction of the origin of the historical books uncertain. The Levitical laws give a graduated hierarchy of priests and Levites; Deuteronomy regards all Levites as at least possible priests. Round this difference, and points allied to it, the whole discussion turns. We know, mainly from Ezek. xliv., that before the Exile the strict hierarchical law was not in force, apparently never had been in force. But can we suppose that the very idea of such a hierarchy is the latest point of liturgical development '? If so, the Levitical element is the latest thing in the Pentateuch, or, in truth, in the historical series to which the Pentateuch belongs; or, on the opposite view, the hierarchic theory existed as a legal programme long before the Exile, though it was fully carried out only after Ezra. As all the more elaborate symbolic observances of the ritual law are bound up with the hierarchial ordinances, the solution of this problem has issues of the greatest importance for the theology as well as for the literary history of the Old Testament.

And now a single word on the way in which these various elements, mirroring so many sides of the national life, and dating from so various ages, came to be fused into a single history, and yet retained so much of their own identity. The Semitic genius does not at all lie in the direction of organic structure. In architecture, in poetry, in history, the Hebrew adds part to part instead of developing a single notion. The temple was an aggregation of small cells, the longest Psalm is an acrostic, and so the longest Biblical history is a stratification and not an organism. This process was facilitated by the habit of anonymous writing, and the accompanying lack of all notion of anything like copyright. If a man copied a book it was his to add and modify as he pleased, and he was not in the least bound to distinguish the old from the new. If he had two books before him to which he attached equal worth, he took large extracts from both, and harmonized them by such additions or modifications as he felt to be necessary. But in default of a keen sense for organic unity very little harmony was sought in points of internal structure, though great skill was often shown, as in the book of Genesis, in throwing the whole material into a balanced scheme of external arrangement. On such principles minor narratives were fused together one after the other, and at length in exile a final redactor completed the great work, on the first part of which Ezra based his reformation, while the latter part was thrown into the 8econd canon. The curious combination of the functione of copyist and author which is here presupposed did not wholly disappear till a pretty late date; and where, as in the books of Samuel, we have two recensions of the text, one in the Hebrew and one in the Septuagint translation, the discrepancies are of such a kind that criticism of the text and analysis of its sources are separated by a scarcely perceptible line.

Poetical Books.— The origin of some leading peculiarities of Hebrew poetry has been recently referred by Assyriologists to Accadian models; but however this may be, the key to the whole development of the poetical literature of Israel is found in the same psychological characteristics of the race which are impressed on the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the language. The Hebrew tongue is sensuous, mobile, passionate, almost incapable of expressing an abstract idea, or depicting a complex whole with repose and symmetry of parts, but fit to set forth with great subtilty individual phases of nature or feeling. It is the speech of a nation whose naturally quick perceptions minister to an emotional temperament and an imperious will, which subordinates knowledge to action and desire, and habitually contemplates the universe through the medium of personal feeling or practical purpose. To speak with the philosophers, the Hebrew character is one of predominant subjectivity, eager to reduce everything to a personal standard, swift to seize on all that touches the feelings or bears directly on practical wants, capable of intense effort and stubborn persistence where the motive to action is personal affection or desire, but indisposed to theoretical views, unfit for contemplation of things as they are in themselves apart from relation to the thinker. In the poetry of such a nation the leading current must necessarily be lyrical, for the lyric is the natural vehicle of intense and immediate personal feeling. The earliest Hebrew poems are brief, pregnant expressions of a single idea, full of the fire of passion, full, too, of keen insight into nature, in her power to awake or sustain human emotion; but recording this insight not with the pictorial fulness of western art, but in swift, half-formed outlines, in metaphor piled on metaphor, without regard to any other principle of proportion or verisimilitude than the emotional harmony of each broken figure with the dominant feeling. Such a poetry could not but find its highest scope in the service of spiritual religion. The songs in Exod. xv. and Judg. V. prove the early origin of a theocratic poetry; but the proper period of Hebrew psalmody begins with David, and its history is practically the history of the Psalter. Here, as in the case of the historical books, we have to begin by questioning the tradition contained in the titles, which ascribe seventy-three Psalms to David, and besides him name as authors Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses, Hernan, Ethan. Again the tendency is to refer as much as possible to familiar names. There is no reason to believe that any title is as old as the Psalm to which it is prefixed, and some titles are certainly wrong; for example, the author of the elegy on Saul and Jonathan could not possibly have written Ps. lxxxvi,, which is a mere cento of reminiscences from other poems. On the other hand the titles are not purely arbitrary. They seem to supply useful hints as to the earlier collections from which our present Psalter was made up. The Korahite and Asaphite Psalms may probably have been derived from collections in the hands of these families of singers; and the so-called “Psalms of David” were very likely from collections which really contained poems by David and other early singers. The assertion that no Psalm is certainly David’s is hyper-sceptical, and few remains of ancient literature have an authorship so well attested as the 18th or even as the 7th Psalm. These, along with the indubitably Davidic poems in the book of Samuel, give a sufficiently clear image of a very unique genius, and make the ascription of several other poems to David extremely probable. So, too, a very strong argument claims Psalm ii. for Solomon, and in later times we have sure landmarks in the psalms of Habakkuk (Hab. iii.) and Hezekiah. (Isa. xxxviii.) But the greater part of the lyrics of the Old Testament remain anonymous, and we can only group the l ’ salms in broad masses, distinguished by diversity of historical situation and by varying degrees of freshness and personality. As a rule the older Psalms are the most personal, and are not written for the congregation, but flowfrom apresent necessity of individual (though not individualistic) spiritual life. This current of productive psalmody runs apparently from David down to the Exile, losing in the course of centuries something of its original freshness and fire, but gaining a more chastened pathos and a wider range of spiritual sympathy. Psalm li., obviously composed during the desolation of the temple, marks, perhaps, the last phase of this development. The epoch of the return was still not without poetic freshness, as some of the so-called Songs of Degrees (Pilgrim-songs 1) prove. But on the whole the Psalms of the second temple are only reflections of old ideas, cast mainly in directly liturgical form, or at least embodying the experience of the nation rather than of the individual. The date of the latest Psalms is much disputed. Most lines of evidence suggest that the collection was complete before the latest books of the canon were written, but many expositors find in individual Psalms (44, 74, 79, 83, &c.) clear traces of the Maccabee age.

Through the whole period of Hebrew lyric, represented not only by the Psalter, but by the Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, and by various scattered pieces in Prophets (e.g., Isa. xii) and in historical books (e.g., Num. xxi. 17; 1 Sam. ii,), there is little change in form and poetic structure. From first to last the rhythm consists not in a rise and fall of accent or quantity of syllables, but in a pulsation of sense, rising and falling through the parallel, antithetic, or otherwise balanced members of each verse. (So-called Hebrew Parallelism; better, Senserhythm.) Beyond this one law of rhythm, which is itself less an artificial rule than a natural expression of the principle, that all poetic utterance must proceed in harmonious undulation, and not in the spasm of unmodulated passion, the Hebrew poet was subject to no code of art, though strophical arrangements, sometimes marked by a refrain, are not uncommon; while poems of acrostic structure (alphabetic Psalms) are found not exclusively in the most recent literature (Ps. ix., x. form a single undoubtedly old acrostic). The later are on the whole longer than the earlier poems. But this is due not to increased constructive power, but to a diffuser style, a less vigorous unity of feeling and thought, and a tendency to ring many variations on one key. A wider range of artistic power appears in the Song of Solomon, a lyrical drama, in which, according to most critics, the pure love of the Shulamite for her betrothed is exhibited as victorious over the seductions of Solomon and his harem. As the motive of the piece is political as well as ethical, it is most naturally assigned to the early period of the northern kingdom.

l > The remaining poetical books of the Old Testament belong to a different category. Unfit for abstract speculation, valuing no wisdom that is not practical, and treasuring up such wisdom in sententious rhythmical form,—enforced by symbol and metaphor, and warm with the breath of human interest,—the Hebrew is a poet even in his philosophy. Side by side with the ode the earliest Hebrew literature shows us the Mashal, or similitude, sometimes in the form of biting epigram (Num. xxi. 27, ff.) or sarcastic parable (Judg. ix. 8,2 Kings xiv. 8), sometimes as the natural vehicle of general moral teaching. The greatest name in the early proverbial wisdom of Israel is that of Solomon (1 Kings iv. 32), and beyond doubt many of his aphorisms are to be found in the book of Proverbs. Yet this book is not all SalomonTc. The last two chapters are ascribed to other names, and part of the collection was not put in shape till the time of Hezekiah (xxv. 1), who can have had no infallible criterion of authorship by Solomon, and must not be credited with critical intentions. In truth, the several sections of the book are varied enough in colour to make it plain that we have before us the essence of the wisdom of centuries, while the introductory address in chapters i.-ix. shows how a later age learned to develop the gnomic style, so as to fit it for longer compositions. The fundamental type of Hebrew philosophy remains, however, unchanged, even in the book of Ecclesiastes, which bears every mark of a very late date, long after the Exile. On the other hand, a fresh and creative development, alike in point of form and of thought, is found in the book of Job, which, in grandly dramatic construction, and with wonderful discrimination of character in the several speakers, sums up the whole range of Hebrew speculation on the burning question of Old Testament religion, the relation of affliction to the justice and goodness of God and to the personal merit and demerit of the sufferer. Like the other noblest parts of the Old Testament, the book of Job has a comparatively early date. It was known to Jeremiah, and may be plausibly referred to the 7th century b.c.

In the book of Job we find poetical invention of incidents, attached for didactic purposes to a name apparently derived from old tradition. There is no valid a priori reason for denying that the Old Testament may contain other examples of the same art. The book of Jonah is generally viewed as a casein point. Esther, too, has been viewed as a fiction by many who are not over sceptical critics; but on this view a book which finds no recognition in the New Testament, and whose canonicity was long suspected by the Christian as well as by the Jewish Church, must sink to the rank of an apocryphal production.

In the poetical as in the historical books anonymous writing is the rule; and along with this we observe great freedom on the part of readers and copyists, who not only made verbal changes (cf. Ps. xiv. with Ps. liii), but composed new poems out of fragments of others (Ps. cviii. with lvii. and lx.) In a large part of the Psalter a later hand has systematically substituted Elohim for Jehovah, and an imperfect acrostic, like Ps. ix., x., cannot have proceeded in its present form from the first author. Still more remarkable is the case of the book of Job, in which the speeches of Elihu quite break the connection, and are almost universally assigned to a later hand.

Prophetical Books.— We have already seen that the earliest prophecies of certain date are of the 8th century, though there is a probability that Joel flourished in the 9th century, in the reign of Joash of Judah, and that the opening verses of Amos are cited from his book. On the other hand, the old school of prophecy, whose members from Samuel to Elisha were men of action rather than of letters, was not likely to leave behind it any written oracles. The prophets generally spoke under the immediate influence of the Spirit or “hand of Jehovah.” What they wrote was secondary, and was, no doubt, greatly abridged. The most instructive account of the literary activity of a prophet is given in Jer. xxxvi. Jeremiah did not begin to write till he had been more than twenty years a prophet. Some prophetic books, like that of Amos, seem to have been composed at one time and with unity of plan. Other prophets, like Isaiah, published several books summing up portions of their ministry. In one or two cases, especially in that of Ezekiel, the prophet writes oracles which were apparently never spoken. Before the Exile there was circulation of individual prophetic books, and earlier prophets quote from their predecessors. But the task of collecting and editing the remains of the prophets was hardly undertaken till the commencement of the second canon; and by this time, no doubt, many writings had been lost, others were more or less fragmentary, and the tradition of authorship was not always complete. . It was, indeed, more important to have an oracle authenticated by the name of its author than to know the writer of a history or a Psalm, and many prophets seem to have prefixed their names to their works. But other prophecies are quite anonymous, and prophets who quote earlier oracles never give the author’s name. (A famous case occurs, Isa. xv., xvi., where in xvi. 13, for since that time read long ago.) Now all the remains of prophecy, whether provided with titles or not, were ultimately arranged in four books, the fourth of which names, in separate titles, twelve authors; while the first three books are named after Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and actually mention no other names in the titles of the several prophecies of which they are made up. But is it safe to assume that every anonymous prophecy in these books must be by the author of the next preceding prophecy which has a title Î Certainly any such assumption can only be provisional, and may be overthrown by internal evidence. But internal evidence of date, it is said, cannot apply to prophetic books in which the author looks in a supernatural way into the future. The value of this argument must be tested by looking more closely at the actual contents of the prophetic books. The prophecies contain—lsi, reproof of present sin; 2d, exhortation to present duty; 3d, encouragement to the godly and threatening to the wicked, based on the certainty of God’s righteous purpose. In this last connection prophecy is predictive. It lays hold of the ideal elements of the theocratic conception, and depicts the way in which, by God’s grace, they shall be actually realized in a Messianic age, and in a nation purified by judgment and mercy. But in all this the prophet starte from present sin, present needs, present historical situations. There is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time. If we find, then, that after the prophecy of Zechariah i.-viii., which is complete in itself, there begins at ch. ix. a new oracle, quite distinct in subject and style, which speaks of an alliance between Judah and Israel as a thing subsisting in the prophet’s own time, which knows no oppressor later than Assyria and Egypt, and rebukes forms of idolatry that do notappear after the Exile;—if, in short, the whole prophecy becomes luminous when it is placed a little after the time of Hosea, and remains absolutely dark if it is ascribed to Zechariah, we are surely entitled to let it speak for itself. When the principle is admitted other applications follow, mainly in the book of Isaiah, where the anonymous chapters, xh-lxvi., cannot be understood in a natural and living way except by looking at them from the historical stand-point of the Exile. Then arises a further question, whether all titles are certainly authentic and conclusive; and here, too, it is difficult to answer by an absolute affirmative. For example, in Isa. xxx. 6, the title, “The burden of the beasts of the south,” interrupts the connection in a most violent way. This is not a solitary instance, but on the whole the titles are far more trustworthy in the prophecies than in the Psalms, and partly on this account, but mainly from the direct historical bearing of prophetic teaching, we can frame a completer history of written prophecy than of any other part of Old Testament literature. We have, on the one hand, a series of prophets—Amos, Hosea, and the anonymous author of Zech, ix.-xi.—who preached in the northern kingdom, but are not descendants of the school of Elisha, which had so decayed under court favour from the dynasty of Jehu, that Amos had to be sent from the wilderness of Judah to take up again the forgotten word of the Lord. In Judah proper we have the great Assyrian prophets, Isaiah with his younger contemporary Micah, the powerful supporters of the reformation of Hezekiah, labouring one in the capital, the other in the country district of the Philistine border. To the Assyrian period belongs also Nahum, who wrote, perhaps, in captivity, and foretold the fall of Nineveh. Then comes Zephaniah about the time of the Scythian ravages, followed by the prophets of the Chaldean period; first Habakkuk and then Jeremiah and Ezekiel, men of a heavier spirit and less glowing poetic fire than Isaiah, no longer upholding the courage of Judah in the struggle with the empire of the East, but predicting the utter dissolution of existing things, and finding hope only in a new covenant —a new theocracy. In the period of Exile more than one anonymous prophet raised his voice; for not only the “Great Unnamed” of Isa. xh-lxvi., but the authors of other Babylonian prophecies, are probably to be assigned to this time. In the new hope of deliverance the poetic genius, as well as the spiritual insight of prophecy, awakes to fresh life, and sets forth the mission of the new Israel to carry the knowledge of the Lord to all nations. But the spirit of the new Jerusalem had little in common with these aspirations, and in Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, prophecy retains not much of its old power except an uncompromising moral earnestness. The noble poetry of the old prophets, which even in the time of Ezekiel had begun to give way to plain prose, finds no counterpart in these latest oracles; and imaginative power is shown, where it still exists, in the artificial structure of symbolic visions. No important new ideas are set forth, and even the tone of moral exhortation sometimes reminds us more of the rabbinical maxims of the fathers in the Mishna, than of the prophetic teaching of the 8th century. And as if the spirit of prophecy foresaw its own dissolution, Malachi looks not to the continued succession of prophets, but to the return of Elijah as the necessary preparation for the day of the Lord. In this sketch of the prophetic writings we find no place for the book of Daniel, which, whether composed in the early years of the Persian empire, or, as modern critics hold, at the time of the Maccabee wars, presents so many points of diversity from ordinary prophecy as to require entirely separate treatment. It is in point of form the precursor of the apocalyptic books of post-canonical Judaism, though in its intrinsic qualities far superior to these, and akin to the prophets proper.

Further History of the Old Testament Canon in the Jewish Church.— Under this head we confine ourselves to points which lead up to the reception of the Old Testament by Christendom. These are mainly two:—(1), the history of the Hebrew text, which we now possess only in the recension established by Jewish scribes at a time later than the Christian era; (2), the history of those versions which arose among Jews, but have influenced Christendom.

The Text of the Old Testament.— Semitic alphabets have no full provision for distinguishing vowels, and the oldest writing, before orthography became fixed, was negligent in the use even of such vowel letters as exist. For a long time, then, not only during the use of the old Phoenician character, but even after the more modern square or Babylonian letters were adopted, the written text of the Bible was consonantal only, leaving a certain scope for variety of pronunciation and sense. But even the consonantal text was not absolutely fixed. The loose state of the laws of spelling and the great similarity of several letters made errors of copying frequent. The text of Micah, for example, is often unintelligible, and many hopeless errors are older than the oldest versions. But up to the time of the Alexandrian version, MSS. were in circulation which differed not merely by greater or less accuracy of transcription, but by presenting such differences of recension as could not arise by accident. The Greek text of Jeremiah is vastly different from that of the Hebrew Bible, and it is not certain that the latter is always best. In the books of Samuel the Greek enables us to correct many blunders of the Hebrew text, but shows at the same time that copyists used great freedom with details of the text. For the Pentateuch we have, in the copies of the Samaritans, a third recension, often but not always closely allied to the Greek. The three recensions show important variations in the chronology of Genesis; and it is remarkable that the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish treatise, which cannot be much older than the Christian era, perhaps not much older than the destruction of the Jewish state, sometimes agrees with the Samaritan or with the Alexandrian recension. Up to this time, then, there was no absolutely received text. But soon after the Christian era all this was changed, and by a process which we cannot follow in detail, a single recension became supreme. The change was, no doubt, connected with the rise of an overdrawn and fantastic system of interpretation, which found lessons in the smallest peculiarity of the text; but Lagarde has made it probable that no critical process was used to fix the standard recension, and that all existing MSS. are derived from a single archetype, which was followed even in its marks of deletion and other accidental peculiarities. (Lagarde, Anmerkn. zur griech. Uebersetzung der Prov., 1863, p. 1; cf. Nöldeke in Hilgenfeld’s Zeitschr., 1873, p. 445.) Theu the received text became the object of farther care, and the Massorets, or “possessors of tradition” with regard to the text, handed down a body of careful directions as to the true orthography and pronunciation. The latter was fixed by the gradual invention of subsidiary marks for the vowels, »fcc., an invention developed in slightly divergent forms in the Babylonian and Palestinian schools of Jewish scholarship. The vowel points were not known to Jerome, but the system was complete before the 9th century, presumably several hundred years before that time. All printed Bibles follow the Western punctuation, but old Karaite MSS. with the Babylonian vowels exist, and are now in course of publication. It is from the Massoretic text, with Massoretic punctuation, that the English version and most Protestant translations are derived. Older Christian versions, so far as they are based on the Hebrew at all (Jerome’s Latin, Syriac), at least follow pretty closely the received consonantal text.

Jewish Versions.— Versions of the Old Testament became necessary partly because the Jews of the Western Dispersion adopted the Greek language, partly because even in Palestine the Old Hebrew was gradually supplanted by Aramaic. The chief seat of the Hellenistic Jews was in Egypt, and here arose the Alexandrian version, commonly km,. u as the Septuagint or Version of the LXX., from a fable that it was composed, with miraculous circumstances, by seventy-two Palestinian scholars summoned to Egypt by Ptolemy Philadelphus. In reality there can be no doubt that the version was gradually completed by several authors and at different times. The whole is probably older than the middle of the 2d century B.U. We have already seen that the text that lay before the translators was in many parts not that of the present Hebrew. The execution is by no means uniform; and, though there are many good renderings, the defects are so numerous that the Greek-speaking Jews, as well as the large section of the Christian church which long depended directly or indirectly on this version, were in many places quite shut out from a right understanding of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, the authority of the version was very great, its inspiration was often asserted, and its interpretations exercised a great influence on Jewish and Christian thought, though among the Jews it was to a certain extent displaced by the version of the proselyte Aquila (2d century of our era), which followed with slavish exactness the letter of the Hebrew text.

Among the Jews who spoke Aramaic, translations into the vernacular accompanied, instead of supplanting the use of the original text, which was read and then orally paraphrased in the synagogues by interpreters or Methur-gemanim, who used great freedom of embellishment and application. This practice naturally led to the formation of written Taτgums, or Aramaic translations, which have not, however, reached us in at all their earliest form. It used, indeed, to be supposed that the simple and literal Targum of Onkelos on the Pentateuch was earlier than the time of Christ. But recent inquirers have been led to see in it, and in the linguistically cognate Targum on the Prophets (Targum of Jonathan), products of the Babylonian schools, in which the freedom of the early paraphrastic method was carefully avoided. Upon this view the date of these Targums is some centuries after the Christian era. On the other hand, an older style of paraphrase is preserved in the Palestinian Targums, which nevertheless contain in their present form elements later than the Babylonian versions. The Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan on the Pentateuch is apparently the latest form of the free Palestinian version, full of legendary adornments and other additions to the text. Other fragments of Palestinian translation, known as the Jerusalem Targum, and referring to individual passages of the Pentateuch and Prophets, probably represent an earlier stage in the growth of the Aramaic versions. There are also Targums on the Hagiographa, which, however, have less importance, and do not seem to have had so changeful a history. The Targums as a whole do not offer much to the textual critic. They are important, partly from the insight they give into an early and in part pre-Christian exegesis, partly from their influence on later Jewish expositors, and through them on Christian versions and expositions. In some cases the literal or Babylonian Targums have a text differing from the Massoretic. But it is not unlikely that if we had a satisfactory text of the Targums (towards which almost nothing has hitherto been done), these variations would find their explanation in the Eastern text and the Assyrian punctuation.

New Testament.— Relation of the Earliest Christianity to the Literary and Intellectual Activity of the Age.— In the literature of Palestine at the time of Christ we distinguish a learned and a popular element. The learned class or scribes were busy on their twofold structure of Halacha, or legal tradition and inference, supplementing and “hedging in” the Pentateuchal law, and Haggada, or fantastic exegesis, legendary, ethical, or theosophic, under which the religious directness of the Old Testament almost wholly disappeared. The popular religious literature of the day seems again to have been mainly apocalyptic. (See Apocalyptic Literature.) The people never wearied of these mysterious revelations couched in strange symbolic and enigmatic forms, and placed in the mouths of ancient patriarchs and worthies, which held forth golden visions of deliverance and vengeance in a shape which, because crasser and earthlier, was also more palpable than the spiritual hopes of the old prophets. Beyond the limits of Palestine thought took a wider range. In adopting the Greek language the Hellenistic Jews had also become open to the influences of foreign speculation, and the schools of Alexandria, whose greatest teacher, Philo, was contemporary with the foundation of Christianity, had in great measure exchanged the faith of the Old Testament for a complicated system of metaphysico-theological speculations upon the Absolute Being, the Divine Wisdom, the Logos, and the like, which by the aid of allegorical interpretation were made to appear as the true teaching of Hebrew antiquity.

To these currents of thought the relation of the earliest Christianity, entirely absorbed in the one great fact of the manifestation of God in Christ crucified, risen, and soon to return in glory, was for the most part hostile, when it was not merely superficial. With the spirit of the scribes Jesus had openly joined issue. In the legal tradition of the elders he saw the commandment of God annulled (Matt, xv.) It was His part not to destroy but to fill up into spiritual completeness the teaching of the old dispensation (Matt, v.); and herein He attached himself directly to the prophetic conception of the law in Deuteronomy (Matt, xxii. 37,∕.) And not only in His ethical teaching but in His personal sense of fellowship with the Father, and in the inner consciousness of His Messianic mission, Jesus stood directly on the Old Testament, reading in the Psalms and Prophets, which so vainly exercised the unsympathetic exegesis of the scribes, the direct and unmistakable image of His own experience and work as the founder of the spiritual kingdom of God (cf. especially, Luke xxiv. 25,∕".) Thus Jesus found His first disciples among men who were strangers to the theological culture of the day (Acts iv. 13), cherishing no literature but the Old Testament witness to Christ, and claiming no wisdom save the knowledge of Him. At first, indeed, the church at Jerusalem was content to express its new life in simple exercises of faith and hope, without any attempt to define its relation to the past dispensation, and without breaking with the legal ordinances of the temple. But the spread of Christianity to the Gentiles compelled the principles of the new religion to measure themselves openly with the Judaism of the Pharisees. In the heathen mission of Paul the ceremonial law was ignored, and men became Christians without first becoming proselytes. The stricter Pharisaically-trained believers were horror-stricken. The old apostles, though they could not refuse the right hand of fellowship to workers so manifestly blessed of God as Paul and Barnabas, were indisposed to throw themselves into the new current, and displayed considerable vacillation in their personal conduct. Paul and his associates had to fight their own battle against the constant efforts of Judaizing emissaries, and the rabbinical training acquired at the feet of Gamaliel enabled the apostle of the heathen to meet the Judaizers on their own ground, and to work out the contrast of Christianity and Pharisaism with a thoroughness only possible to one who knew Pharisaism from long experience, and had learned the gospel not from the tradition or teaching of men but by revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. i. 12).

The relation of the first Christians to the current apocalyptic was of a different kind. The Messianic hopes already current among the first hearers of the gospel were unquestionably of apocalyptic colour. And though the contents of Christian hope, were new, and expressed themselves in a revival of prophetic gifts (1 Cor. xii. 10; Acts xi. 27, &c.), it was not a matter of course that apocalyptic forms should be at once dropped, especially as Old Testament prophecy itself had inclined in its later stages towards an increasing concreteness in delineating the Messianic kingdom, and so had at least formed the basis for many apocalyptic conceptions. The apocalyptic books continued to be read, as appears from the influence of the book of Enoch on the epistle of Jude; and after the new spirit of prophecy had died away a Christian apocalyptic followed the Jewish models. But the way in which a genuine Christian prophecy, full of “the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. xix. 10), retained not a little of the apocalyptic manner (mainly, it is true, in dependence on the book of Daniel), appears clearly in the Revelation of John, which, whether we accept the prevalent tradition of its apostolic authorship, or, with some ancients and many moderns, ascribe it to a different John, is at least an undisputed monument of the prophecy of the apostolic age (according to modern critics, earlier than the fall of Jerusalem).

The influence on Christianity of Hellenistic philosophy, and, in general, of that floating spirit of speculation which circulated at the time in the meeting-places of Eastern and Western thought, was for the most part later than the New Testament period. Yet the Alexandrian education of a man like Apollos could not fail to give some colour to his preaching, and in the epistle to the Hebrews, whose author, a man closely akin to Paul, is not a direct disciple of Jesus (Heb. ii. 3), the theological reflection natural to the second generation, which no longer stood so immediately under the overpowering influence of the manifestation of Christ, is plainly affected in some points by Alexandrian views. In the case of other books the assertion of foreign speculative influences is generally bound up with the denial of the authenticity of the book in question. That the gospel of John presents a view of the person of Christ dependent on Philonic speculation is not exegetically obvious, but is simply one side of the assertion that this gospel is an unhistorical product of abstract reflection. In the same way other attacks on the genuineness of New Testament writings are backed up by the supposed detection of Orphic elements in the epistle of James, and so forth.

Motives and Origin of the first Christian Literature.— We have seen that the earliest currents of Christian life and thought stood in a very secondary relation to the intellectual activity of the period. The only books from which the Apostolic Church drew largely and freely were those of the Old Testament, and the Christian task of proclaiming the gospel was not in the first instance a literary task at all. The first writings of Christianity, therefore, were of an occasional kind. The care of so many churches compelled Paul to supplement his personal efforts by epistles, in which the discussion of incidental questions and the energetic defence of his gospel against the Judaizers is interwoven with broad applications of the fundamental principles of the gospel to the whole theory and practice of Christian life. In these epistles, and generally in the teaching of Paul and his associates, Christian thought first shaped for itself a suitable literary vehicle. It was in Greek that the mission to the Gentiles was earned on, for that language was everywhere understood. Already in the mouths of Hellenistic Jews and in the translation of the Old Testament the κo<,vη, or current Greek of the Macedonian period, had been tinctured with Semitic elements, and adapted to express the ideas of the old dispensation. Now a new modification was necessary, and soon in the circle of the Pauline churches specifically Christian ideas became inseparably bound up with words which to the heathen had a very different sense. Whether the epistolary way of teaching was used upon occasion by the older apostles before the labours of Paul is not clear; for most scholars have declined to accept the. ingenious view which sees in the epistle of James the earliest writing of the New Testament. The other epistles are certainly later, and the way in which several of them are addressed, not to a special community in reference to a special need but to a wide circle of readers, seems to presuppose a formed custom of teaching by letter which extended from Paul not only to so likeminded a writer as the author of Hebrews (Apollos or Barnabas Î) but to the old apostles and their associates.

Besides epistles we have in the New Testament a solitary book of Christian prophecy and a fourfold account of the gospel history, with a continuation of the third gospel in the Acts of the Apostles. The origin and mutual relations of the gospels form at the present moment the field of numerous controversies which can only be dealt with in separate articles. We must here confine ourselves to one or two points of general bearing.

Jewish disciples were accustomed to retain the oral teaching of their masters with extraordinary tenacity and verbal exactness of memory (Mishna, Aboth, iii. 8; Edaioth, i. 3), and so the words of Jesus might for some time be handed down by merely oral tradition. But did the gospel continue to be taught orally alone up to the time when the extant gospels were written? or must we assume the existence of earlier evangelical writings forming a link between oral tradition and the narratives we now possess Î The earliest external evidence on this point is given in the prologue to Luke’s gospel, which speaks of many previous essays towards a regularly digested evangelical history on the basis of the tradition (whether exclusively oral or partly written is not expressed) of eyewitnesses who had followed the whole course of Christ’s ministry. It seems to be implied that if the eye-witnesses wrote at all, they, at least so far as was known to Luke, did not compose a regular narrative but simply threw together a mass of reminiscences. This understanding of the words of the evangelist agrees very well with the uniform tradition of the old church as to the second gospel, viz., that it was composed by Mark from material furnished by Peter. This tradition goes back to Papias of Hierapolis, about 150 a.d., but it is a fair question whether the second gospel as we have it is not an enlarged edition of Mark’s original work. On the other hand ecclesiastical tradition recognizes the apostle Matthew as the author of the first gospel, but does so in a way that really bears out the statements of Luke. For the tradition that Matthew wrote the first gospel is always combined with the statement that he wrote in Hebrew (Aramaic). But from the time of Erasmus the best Greek scholars have been convinced that the gospel is not a translation. Either, then, the whole tradition of a directly apostolic Aramaic gospel is a mistake, caused by the existence among the Judaizing Christians in Palestine of an apocryphal “Gospel according to the Hebrews,” which was by them ascribed to Matthew, but was, in fact, a corrupt edition of our Greek gospel; or, on the other hand, what Matthew really wrote in Aramaic was different from the book that now bears his name, and only formed an important part of the material from which it draws. The latter solution is naturally suggested by the oldest form of the tradition; for what Papias says of Matthew is that he wrote τot λoγtα, the oracles,— an expression which, though much disputed, seems to be most fairly understood not of a complete gospel but of a collection of the words of Christ. And if so, all the earliest external evidence points to the conclusion that the synoptical gospels are non-apostolic digests of spoken and written apostolic tradition, and that the arrangement of the earlier material in orderly form took place only gradually and by many essays. With this the internal evidence agrees. The three first gospels are often in such remarkable accord even in minute and accidental points of expression, that it is certain either that they copied one another or that all have some sources in common. The first explanation is inadequate, both from the nature of the discrepancies that accompany the agreement of the three narratives, and from the impossibility of assigning absolute priority to any one gospel. For example, even if we suppose that the gospel of Mark was used by the other two authors, or conversely that Mark was made up mainly from Matthew and Luke, it is still necessary to postulate one or more earlier sources to explain residuary phenomena. And the longer the problem is studied the more general is the conviction of critics, that these sources cannot possibly have been merely oral.

It appears from what we have already seen, that a considerable portion of the New Testament is made up of writings not directly apostolical, and a main problem of criticism is to determine the relation of these writings, especially of the gospels, to apostolic teaching and tradition. But behind all such questions as the relative priority of Matthew or of Mark, the weight to be assigned to the testimony of Papias, and so forth, lies a series of questions much more radical in character by which the whole theological world is at present agitated. Can we say of all the New Testament books that they are either directly apostolic, or at least stand in immediate dependence on genuine apostolic teaching which they honestly represent? or must we hold, with an influential school of modern critics, that a large proportion of the books are direct forgeries, written in the interest of theological tendencies, to which they sacrifice without hesitation the genuine history and teaching of Christ and his apostles? There are, of course, positions intermediate to these two views, and the doctrine of tendencies is not held by many critics even of the Tübingen school in its extreme form. Yet, as a matter of fact, every book in the New Testament, with the exception of the four great epistles of St Paul, is at present more or less the subject of controversy, and interpolations are asserted even in these. The details of such a controversy can only be handled in separate articles, but a few general remarks may be useful here.

The arguments directed by modern critics against the genuineness or credibility of New Testament books do not for the most part rely much on external evidence. Except in one or two cases (particularly that of 2d Peter) the external evidence in favour of the books is as strong as one can fairly expect, even where not altogether decisive. We shall see when we come to speak of the canon that, towards the close of the 2d century, the four gospels, the Acts, thirteen epistles of Paul, the first epistles of Peter and John, and the book of Revelation, were received in the most widely separated churches with remarkable unanimity. Before this time the chain of evidence is less complete. All our knowledge of the period that lies between the apostles and the great teachers of the Old Catholic Church towards the close of the 2d century is fragmentary. We possess but scanty remains of the literature, and the same criticism which seeks to bring down many New Testament books into this period questions the genuineness of many of the writings which claim to date from the first half of the 2d century, and so are appealed to by conservative writers. But on the whole, what evidence does exist is of a kind to push back all the more important writings to an early date. The gospel of John, for example, is one of the books which negative critics are most determined in rejecting. Yet the fairest writers of the school (Hilgenfeld, Keim) admit that it was known to Justin Martyr in the middle of the 2d century, though they think that besides our four gospels he had a fifth of apocryphal character. But references of an earlier date can hardly be denied; and the gospel may be traced almost to the beginning of the century by the aid of fragments of the Gnostic Basilides and of the epistles of Ignatius. The Tübingen school, indeed, maintain that the fragments preserved by Hippolytus are not from Basilides, but from a later writer of his school, and utterly reject the Ignatian epistles. But it cannot be said that they have proved their case beyond dispute. They have at most shown that, if the gospel must on other grounds be taken as spurious, the external evidence may be pushed aside as not absolutely insuperable. On the other hand they try to bring positive proof that certain books were unknown in circles where, if genuine, they must have circulated. But such a negative is in its very nature difficult to prove. Probably the strongest argument of the kind is that brought to show that Papias did not know the gospel of John. But we know Papias only through Eusebius; and though the latter is careful to mention all references to disputed books, it does not appear that it was part of his design to cite testimony to a book so universally allowed as John’s gospel. Aild Papias does give testimony to the first epistle of John, which is hardly separable from the gospel. On the whole, then, we repeat that, on the most cardinal points, the external evidence for the New Testament booksis as strong as can fairly be looked for, though not, of course, strong enough to convince a man who is sure a priori that this or that book is unhistorical and must be of late date.

The strength of the negative critics lies in internal evidence. And in this connection they have certainly directed attention to real difficulties, many of which still await their explanation. Some of these difficulties are not properly connected with the Tübingen position. The genuineness of 2d Peter, which, indeed, is very weakly attested by external evidence, was suspicious even to Erasmus and Calvin, and no one will assert that the Pauline authorship of 1st Timothy is as palpable as that of the epistle to the Romans. So, again, it is undeniable that the epistle to the Colossians and the so-called epistle to the Ephesians differ considerably in language and thought from other Pauline epistles, and that their relation to one another demands explanation. But in the Tübingen school all minor difficulties, each of which might be solved in detail without any very radical procedure, are brought together as phases of a single extremely radical theory of the growth of the New Testament. The theory has two bases, one philosophical or dogmatical, the other historical; and it cannot be pretended that the latter basis is adequate if the former is struck away. Philosophically the Tübingen school starts from the position so clearly laid down by Strauss, that a miraculous interruption of the laws of nature stamps the narrative in which it occurs as unhistorical, or, at least, as more cautious writers put the case, hampers the narrative with such extreme improbability that the positive evidence in favour of its truth would require to be much stronger than it is in the case of the New Testament history. The application of this proposition makes a great part of the narrative of the Gospels and Acts appear as unhistorical, and therefore late; and the origin of this late literature is sought by regarding the New Testament as the monument of a long struggle, in the course of which an original sharp antagonism between the gospel of Paul and the Judaizing gospel of the old apostles was gradually softened down and harmonized. The analysis of the New Testament is the resurrection of early parties in the church, each pursuing its own tendency by the aid of literary fiction. In the genuine epistles of Paul on the one hand, and in the Revelation and some parts of Matthew on the other, the original hostility of ethnic and Jewish Christianity is sharply defined; while after a series of intermediate stages the Johannine writings present the final transition in the 2d century from the contests of primitive Christianity to the uniformity of the Old Catholic Church. This general position has been developed in a variety of forms, more or less drastic, and is supported by a vast mass of speculation and research; but the turning points of the controversy may, perhaps, be narrowed to four questions—(1.) Whether in view of Paul’s undoubted conviction that miraculous powers were exercised by himself and other Christians (1 Cor. xii. 9,/.; 2 Cor. xii. 12) the miracle criterion of a secondary narrative can be maintained 1 (2.) Whether the book of Acts is radically inconsistent with Paul’s own account of his relations to the church at Jerusalem, and whether the antithesis of Peter and Paul is proved from the epistles of the latter, or postulated in accordance with the Hegelian law of advance by antagonism! (3.) Whether the gospel of John is necessarily a late fiction, or does not rather supply in its ideal delineation of Jesus a necessary supplement to the synoptical gospels which can only be understood as resting on true apostolic reminiscence! (4.) Whether the external evidence for the several books and the known facts of church history leave time for the successive evolution of all the stages of early Christianity which the theory postulates 1 The Christian Canon of the Old and N^ezv Testaments.— We have already seen that the Apostolic Church continued to use as sacred the Hebrew Scriptures, whose authority derived fresh confirmation from the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ. The idea that the Old Testament revelation must now fall back into a secondary position as compared with inspired apostolic teaching was not for a moment entertained. Still less could the notion of a body of New Testament Scriptures, of a collection of Christian writings, to be read like the Old Testament in public worship and appealed to as authoritative in matters of faith, take shape so long as the church was conscious that she had in her midst a living voice of inspiration. The first apostolic writings were, as we have seen, occasional, and it was not even matter of course that every epistle of an apostle should be carefully preserved, much less that it should be prized above his oral teaching. Paul certainly wrote more than two epistles to the Corinthians, and even Papias is still of opinon, when he collects reminiscences of apostolic sayings from the mouths of the elders, that what he reads in books cannot do him so much good as what he receives “.from a living and abiding voice.” Nay, the very writers who are the first to put Old and New Testament books on a precisely similar footing (e.g., Tertullian) attach equal importance to the tradition of churches which had been directly taught by apostles, and so were presumed to possess the “rule of faith” in a form free from the difficulties of exposition that encumber the written word. In the first instance, then, the authoritative books of the Christian church were those of the Old Testament; and in the time of the apostles and their immediate successors it was the Hebrew canon that was received. But as most churches had no knowledge of the Old Testament except through the Greek translation and the Alexandrian canon, the Apocrypha soon began to be quoted as Scripture. The feeling of uncertainty as to the proper number of Old Testament books which prevailed in the 2d century is illustrated by an epistle of Melito of Sardis, who journeyed to Palestine in quest of light, and brought back the present Hebrew canon, with the omission of the book of Esther. In the 3d century Origen knew the Hebrew canon, but accepted the Alexandrian additions, apparently because he considered that a special providence had watched over both forms of the collection. Subsequent teachers in the Eastern Church gradually went back to the Hebrew canon (Esther being still excluded from full canonicity by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus), distinguishing the Alexandrian additions as αναγιγνωσκόμενα — books used for ecclesiastical lessons. In the Western Church the same distinction was made by scholars like Jerome, who introduced for merely ecclesiastical books the somewhat incorrect name of Apocrypha; but a laxer view was very prevalent and gained ground during the Middle Ages, till at length, in opposition to the Protestants, the Council of Trent accepted every book in the Vulgate translation as canonical.

We turn now to the New Testament collection. The idea of canonicity—the right of a book to be cited as Scripture—was closely connected with regular use in public worship, and so the first step towards a New Testament canon was doubtless the establishment of a custom of reading in the churches individual epistles or gospels. The first beginnings of this custom must have been very early. The reference to Luke in 1 Tim. v. 18 is disputed, and 2 Pet. iii. 16 i≡ usually taken as one of many arguments against the genuineness of that epistle; but a citation from Matthew is certainly referred to as Scripture in the epistle of Barnabas. But such recognition of an individual gospel is a long way removed from the recognition of an apostolic canon. The apostolic writings continued to be very partially diffused, and readers used such books as they had access to, often failing to distinguish between books of genuine value and worthless forgeries. For most readers were very uncritical, and there was an enormous floating mass of spurious and apocalyptic literature, including recensions of the gospel altered by heretical parties to suit their own views. It was perhaps in contest with the heretics of the 2d century that the necessity of forming a strict list of really authoritative writings came to be clearly felt; and it is remarkable that heretics, generally hostile to the Old Testament, seem to have been among the first to form collections of Christian writings for themselves. Thus Marcion, in the middle of the 2d century, selected for himself on dogmatical grounds ten Pauline epistles, and a goβpel which seems to have been based on Luke. Up to this time perhaps no formal canon of sacred writings had been put forth by the Catholic Church. But in the second half of the century the notion of an authoritative New Testament collection appears in full development, and there is an amount of agreement as to the contents of the canon, which implies that, in spite of the loose way in which apocryphal books circulated side by side with genuine works, the church had no great difficulty in drawing a sharp line between the two classes when this was felt to be necessary. At the time of the great teachers of the close of the 2d century (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement) we find a twofold collection, the Gospel and the Apostles. The Gospel comprises the four evangelists; and this number was already so absolutely fixed as to admit of no further doubt.

Quite beyond dispute were also the main books of the Apostolicon, the Acts, thirteen epistles of Paul, 1st Peter, 1st John, and the Apocalypse. The Muratorian fragment which contains a list twenty or thirty years older than the 3d century omits 1st Peter, but adds Jude, 2d and 3d John (Î), and (as a disputed book) the Apocalypse of Peter. The Shepherd of Hermas might also be read, but it is pointed out that it is of quite recent date and not of prophetic or apostolic authority. From this time forward, then, the controversy is narrowed to a few books, occupying a middle position between the large mass of our present New Testament, which w as already beyond dispute, and the spurious literature which was quite excluded from ecclesiastical use. Absolute uniformity was not at once attainable, for various churches had quite independent usages; and, as we see from the Muratorian canon, a book might receive a certain ecclesiastical recognition without being, therefore, viewed as strictly canonical. This dubious margin to the canon was of very uncertain limits, and Clement of Alexandria still uses many apocryphal books which found no acknowledgment in other parts of the church. Gradually the list of books which have even a disputed claim to authority is cut down. In the time of Eusebius the Shepherd of Hermas was still read in some churches, and several other books—the Epistle of Barnabas, the Acts of Paul, the Revelation of Peter, the Teachings of the Apostles— appear as controverted writings. But all these are plainly on the verge of rejection, while, on the other hand, 2d and ∣ 3d John, Jude, James, and 2d Peter are gradually gaining ground. This process continued to go on without interruption till at length the whole class of disputed books i (μntilegomena) melted away, and only our present canon was left on the one hand, and books of no authority or repute upon the other. Thus the Council of Laodicea was able wholly to forbid the ecclesiastical use of uncanonical books (3G0 A.D.) and the only uncertain point remaining in the tradition of the Eastern Church was the position of the Apocalypse, which had gradually fallen into suspicion, and was not fully reinstated till the 5th century. The Western Church, on the other hand, was long dubious as to the epistle to the Hebrews, which was received without hesitation in the East, as the Apocalypse continued to be in the West. The age of Augustine and Jerome saw the close of the Western canon.

T∕ λ‰p∙ i -sion and Diffusion of the Bible in the Christian Church before the Invention of Printing.

Under this head we have to speak—1st, of the transmission of the original text; 2d, of the ancient versions.

1. Tue Original Text— Old Testament.— The rapid spread of Christianity among the Gentiles of the West made Greek the sacred language of Christendom. Not only is Greek the language of the New Testament, but it was in the Septuagint version that the Old Testament was first circulated in the most important Gentile churches. Hebrew was almost unknown even to learned Christians, and in fact the current (Jewish as well as Christian) doctrine of the inspiration of the Septuagint, and a suspicion that the Hebrew text had been falsified by the Jews, made the study of the original appear unprofitable. A juster view of the value of Hebrew studies was formed by the two greatest scholars of the patristic period, Origen and Jerome. But the Septuagint continued to enjoy an authoritative place in the Eastern Church; and the Latin Church, though it finally adopted Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew in place of the older translation from the Greek, was not led by this change to take any interest in further study of the original. The Hebrew Bible continued to be the peculiar possession of the Jews, of whose labours in fixing and transmitting a standard text we have already spoken. It was not till the beginning of the 16th century that Christian scholars began to take a lively interest in the “Hebrew verity;” and what has been done since that time to repair so many centuries of neglect belongs to the history of the printed text or of exegesis.

New Testament.— The original copies of the New Testament writings were probably written on papyrus rolls, and were so soon worn out by frequent use, that w≡ do not even possess any historical notice of their existence. They must, however, have been written in uncial or large capital letters, without division of words or punctuation, without accents, breathings, &c., and probably without any titles or subscriptions whatever. The earliest transcripts comprised only portions of the New Testament, the gospels being oftenest copied, and the Pauline offener than the catholic epistles. Even after the canon became fixed, MSS. of the whole New Testament, or of the whole Greek Bible, were comparatively rare. The order of the several books was not quite fixed; but the catholic epistles generally followed the book of Acts. It may also be noted that in the oldest MSS. the epistle to the Hebrews precedes the pastoral epistles. In course of time various changes were introduced in the externals of the written text. Parchment and vellum took the place of papyrus, and form the material of the oldest extant copies. The uncial character held its ground till about the 10th century, when the use of a cursive or running hand became general. Attempts to indicate the punctuation go back as far as the 4th or 5th century. The oldest MSS. use for this purpose an occasional simple point, or a small blank space in the line. Another system was to write the text in short lines (στίχοι) accommodated to the sense. The author of this stichometry was Euthalius of Alexandria in the second half of the 5th century, who applied it to the epistles and Acts. The same plan was afterwards extended to the gospels; but vellum was too costly to allow of its general adoption. The present system of punctuation was first used in printed books. Breathings and accents were not in common use down to the end of the 7th century; but occasional traces of them seem to occur considerably earlier.

Another device for the more convenient use of the New Testament was the division of the text into sections of various kinds. The gospels were divided by Ammonius of Alexandria (220 a.d.) into short chapters (Ammonian sections, κεφάλαια), constructed to facilitate the comparison of corresponding passages of the several gospels. These sections are marked on the margin of most MSS. from the 5th century onwards; and in general a reference is also given to the so-called canons of Eusebius, which are a kind of index to the sections, enabling the reader to find the parallel passages. Another division of the gospels into larger sections (τίτλο», breves) is also found in MSS. of the 5th century, and a .similar division of the other books into chapters (κe<pi ∖ aιa) came into use not much later. The chapters of the Acts and the catholic epistles were the work of Euthalins. Our present chapters are much later. They were invented by Cardinal Hugo of S. Carus in the 13th century, were first applied to the Latin Bible, and are still unknown in th®

V'astem Church. The present system of verses first appears in the edition printed by Robert Stephens in the year 1551.

The titles and subscriptions of the New Testament books are another point on which a succession of changes has taken place. The oldest MSS. have much shorter titles than those which the English version adopted from the later Greek text; and the subscriptions, with their would-be historical information, are not only late, but worthless. Those appended to the epistles of St Paul are attributed to Euthalius.

; More important than these external matters are the variations which in course of time crept into the text itself. Many of these variations are mere slips of eye, ear, memory, or judgment cn the part of a copyist, who had no intention to do otherwise C.. l ., iυilow what lay before him. But transcribers, and espe^ i . .y early transcribers, by no means aimed at that minute accu ∙∣ >y which is expected of a modern critical editor. Corrections were made in the interests of grammar or of style, slight changes were adopted in order to remove difficulties, additions came in, especially from parallel narratives in the gospels, citations from the Old Testament were made more exact or more complete. That all this was done in perfect good faith, and simply because no strict conception of the duty of a copyist existed, is especially clear from the almost entire absence of deliberate falsification of the text in the interests of doctrinal controversy. To detail all the sources of various readings would be out of place; it may suffice to mention, in addition to what has been already said, that glosses, or notes originally written on the margin, very often ended by being taken into the text, and that the custom of reading the Scriptures in public worship naturally brought in liturgical additions, such as the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer; while the commencement of an ecclesiastical lesson torn from its proper context had often to be supplemented by a few explanatory words, which soon came to be regarded as part of the original.

Up to a certain point the various readings due to so many different causes constantly became more and more numerous; but the number of independent readings which could arise and be perpetuated was limited by various circumstances. A general similarity necessarily prevailed in associated groups of copies, which were either derived from the same archetype, or written by the same copyist, or corrected by comparison with a single celebrated MS. Causes such as these, combined with local peculiarities of style and taste, and with the fact that the New Testament, like Christianity itself, was sent forth from central mother churches to newly-formed communities all around, gave a decided local colouring to the text current in certain regions; so that wc are still able to speak in a general way of an Alexandrian, a Western, a Byzantine, and perhaps also (with Tischendorf) of an Asiatic text. But of course no ancient local text remained uninfluenced by copies from other regions. The comparison of copies became more and more extended in range as the church grew and consolidated into a homogeneous form; and though old readings, which had obtained a firm hold in certain communities, were not easily eradicated, it at length became almost impossible for any important new error to escape detection. Most variations of any consequence which are found in existing MSS. are known to be as old as the 4th century, and other readings existed then which no MS. is known to contain.

The variations of early copies were most completely smoothed into uniformity in the later Byzantine MSS., after the Mahometan conquest had overthrown Greek learning in Syria and Egypt. The scribes of Constantinople spent great pains on the text in accordance with their own notions of what was proper, and gave it a form which is certainly smoother, correcter, and more uniform than that of older MSS. But precisely these peculiarities show that this late recension is remote from the original shape of the New Testament writings, and compel us to seek the true text by study of early MSS., especially of the still existing uncial copies.

The manuscripts are of six classes, containing respectively the gospels, the Acts with the catholic epistles, the Pauline epistles, the Apocalypse, the ecclesiastical lessons from the gospels, the lessons from the Acts and epistles. Copies belonging tu the last two classes are called lectionaries, and lectionaries of the gospels are called evangelistaria. Each MS. is refeιτed to by critics by a special mark. Uncial MSS. are denoted by a capital letter, A standing for the Codex Alexandrinus, B for the Vaticanus, and so on. Cursives and lectionaries are denoted by Arabic numerals. It is to be observed that the same letter in a different part of the New Testament does not necessarily refer to the same MS. Thus Cod. D of the gospels and Acts is the Codex Bezae, but D of the Pauline epistles is the Claromontanus. If we reckon fragments the number of uncial MSS. is 56 of the gospels, 14 of the Acts, 6 of the catholic epistles, 15 of the Pauline epistles, 5 of the Apocalypse. But many of these are extremely short fragments. The number of cursives and lectionaries is enormous, so that altogether there are nearly a thousand MSS. for the gospels, and as many more for the rest of the New Testament. Not nearly all the cursive copies have been thoroughly examined, and most of them have small value, though some comparatively recent MSS. are important from the fact that they represent an ancient text. Lectionaries, even when uncial, are little esteemed by most critics. Graeco-Latin codices which have the Greek and Latin in parallel columns were formerly suspected of correcting the Greek text by the Latin, but their value is now generally recognized.

The oldest copies of the Greek Testament are the Codex Sinaiticus (N) and the Codex Vaticanus (B), both of the 4th century. Next in age come the Alexandrian manuscript (A) and the Codex Ephraemi (C), both of which are referred to the 5th century. All of these copies were originally complete Bibles, with the Old as well as the New Testament. S is still complete as regards the New Testament; A and B have lacunae; C is very imperfect, and barely legible, the ancient writing having been almost removed by a mediaeval scribe to make way for the writings of Ephraem Syrus. S, A, B, C, are the four great first-rate uncials, and will be found more fully described in separate articles. Besides these there are one or two fragments as old as the 5th century (I, I b , T).

A quite peculiar place is held by the Graeco-Latin Codex Bezae at Cambridge (D), which date3 from the 6th century, but presents a text full of the most singular interpolations. The other uncials of the gospels are less important, either from their fragmentary state or from the character of their text. The later uncials are hardly more valuable than good cursives.

The most important MS. of the Acts, in addition to those already mentioned, is E, the Codex Laudianus, Graeco-Latin of the 6th century, in the Bodleian at Oxford. For the Pauline epistles we may mention D, or Codex Claromontanus, at Paris, also Graeco-Latin of the 6th century, and II, or Codex Coislinianus, of the same century, of which there are 12 leaves at Paris and 2 at St Petersburg. Uncial authority is most scanty for the Apocalypse, for which the Vaticanus is defective. B of the Apocalypse is an uncial of the 8th century.

2. The Christian Versions.— We have seen that the early church adopted the LXX., not so much in the character of a version, as in that of an authoritative original. Although several attempts were made in the 2d century of our era to produce a better Greek rendering of the Old Testament, not one of these seems to have had its origin in the Catholic Church. Aquila was a Jew, whose closely verbal rendering was designed to serve the subtilties of Rabbinic exegesis. Symmachus and Theodotion were probably Ebionites. The former was an excellent master of Greek, who happily corrected many clumsy renderings of the LXX., but inclined too much to paraphrase, and to the obliteration of characteristic figures and bold expressions. Theodotion made less extensive changes, and aimed only at necessary corrections. His rendering of Daniel was so manifest an improvement that it entirely displaced the old version, and is still regularly printed as part of the LXX.

In the Christian Church the importance of these new versions, and the unsatisfactory condition of the LXX.—which, apart from its original defects, had been much corrupted in successive transcriptions— λvere first clearly set forth by Origen in his Hexaplar edition of the Old Testament. This great work takes its name from the six columns in which it was arranged, containing respectively the Hebrew in the proper character, the same in Greek letters, the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and a text of the LXX., partly corrected by comparison of MSS., partly emended by recourse to the Hebrew. The variations of several less important versions were also noted. The complete Hexapla was too huge a work to be transcribed and circulated as a whole. It lay in the libraι∙y at Caesarea, and was only occasionally consulted by scholars; but the column containing Origen’s emended text of the IXX. was published in separate transcripts by Eusebius and Pamphilus, and attained so great a circulation that in the Palestinian churches, as we learn from Jerome, it quite displaced the older text. In composing his Hexaplar text, Origen was careful to distinguish his own improvements from the original LXX. by the use of asterisks and other marks. In later copies these marks were unfortunately often omitted. The Hexaplar text became mixed up with the true LXX., and the modern critic is sometimes tempted to forget how much the Eastern Church owed to this first attempt to go back to the Hebrew Old Testament, in his impatience at the obliteration by the adoption of Hexaplar corrections of important divergences of the LXX. from the Massoretic text. Our knowledge of the other columns of Origen’s great edition is fragmentary, and is derived partly from citations in ancient authors, partly from notes in MSS. of the Hexaplar LXX., or of the Syriac translation of it composed by Paul of Tela (616 A.D.) The best collection of these fragments is that edited by Field {Oτigcnis Hcxaplorwm quoe supersunt, Oxford, 1867-1875).

The first origin of translations of the Christian Scriptures into the vernacular of non-Hellenic churches is involved in much obscurity. Apart from the probable existence of early Aramaic gospels, there is no sure trace of a Christian literature in any other tongue than Greek till late in the 2d century. Even in the churches of Gaul, Greek was the recognized language of Christian authorship. In Rome the literary use of Greek extended into the 3d century; and in the earliest days of the Roman Church, Greek was the language of public worship. Even in remoter districts the demand for a vernacular Bible can hardly have come from the educated and reading classes, but arose rather from the custom of reading lessons from Scripture in the congregation. The earliest Christian translations are the Peshito or “Simple” version in Syria, and the Old Latin in Africa, monuments of the early vigour of two great churches on the eastern and western outskirts of Hellenic culture.

It is scarcely probable that either of these versions is older than the middle of the 2d century. The Syriac, which claims to be first considered, was already an old version, containing obsolete expressions, in the time of S. Ephraem, who died 373 a.d. Internal marks of antiquity are found in the relation of the Old Testament to a very early Jewish exegesis, and especially in the omission from the New Testament of 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. On the other hand, there is no certain reference to this version by authors earlier than Ephraem; and the data afforded by the history of the canon, and by a comparison of the earliest remains of Syriac literature—the hymns of Bardesanes, who died about 225—are not sufficient to supply the lack of direct information. Some critics still date the version from the beginning of the 2d century, while others would bring it down into the 3d. Even the close of the 3d century has been named; but this view rests on the unlikely supposition that the omission of five New Testament books was due to later theological influences, and was not an original peculiarity of the version. The translation is, on the whole, excellent. The Old Testament is taken from the Hebrew, and, though sometimes dependent on Jewish exegesis, and in other parts strongly influenced by the LXX., is decidedly superior to the Targums. The Peshito was the received version in all branches of the much-divided Syrian churches. But it did not stand alone. The Hexaplar version of Paul of Tela, and the slavishly literal Philoxenian (508 a.d. —revised a century later by Thomas of Hharkel), were presumably designed in the service of Biblical criticism. More obscure is ⅛he origin and purpose of the fragmentary version of the gospels published by Cureton in 1858, and by him supposed to be older than the Peshito.

In the history of the Old Latin version almost nothing is certain, save that it originated in Africa, before the time of Tertullian, and that it assumed such Protean shapes in the hands of transcribers that it is to this day uncertain whether several distinct versions are not included in the general name of the Old Latin. Jerome, indeed, speaks only of great variations between copy and copy; but Augustine tells us that the ∙ ft Itala” is to be preferred to the other Latin interpretations. Hence MSS. of the Old Latin are often called copies of the Itala; but in truth no one knows what the Itala is, for it is mentioned only by Augustine, and by him only once.

A version which at best was a rude and over-literal rendering of the Greek Bible, in an unpolished provincial dialect, and which had not even that fixed form which is so necessary in a Bible for ecclesiastical use, could not continue to serve the needs of the great Latin Church; andtow’ards the close of the 4th century a work of revision was undertaken at the instance of Damasus, bishop of Rome, by Jerome, the most learned of the Western doctors. Jerome began by correcting the New Testament, making only such changes as seemed absolutely imperative. In the Old Testament he first revised the Psalter after the LXX., producing the version known as the Roman Psalter from its adoption in the Roman liturgy. A second revision, based on the Hexaplar text, forms the Gallican Psalter, long used in Gaul and other churches beyond the Alps. Then Jerome proceeded to revise other books on the basis of the Hexaplar Greek; but, finding this half-measure unsatisfactory, he finally rendered the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. The work was completed 405 A.D., and though often dependent on Aquila, and especially on Symmachus, it bears high witness to the scholarship of the author, and is perhaps the best of the ancient versions. I n spite of its merits the new version was much attacked, and made waj’ in public estimation by very slow degrees. It was not till the 9th century that the Old Latin was entirely superseded in the Roman Church, and the circulation of the old and new versions side by side was long a fertile source of corruptions in the text of both. At length the complete supremacy of Jerome’s Latin was marked by the transference to it of the name of the Vulgate Version, which in older times was given to the LXX.

The Egyptian versions (Memphitic in the dialect of lower Egypt, Thebaic or Sahidic for upper Egypt) supplied the needs of the only great Christian population of the early church which was not able to use the Greek, the Latin, or the Syriac. The most recent inquirers are disposed to believe that Egypt received the Bible in the vernacular almost as soon as Syria. The version was taken from the Greek, which was also the source of various later translations—the Ethiopie, the Armenian (5th century), the Georgian (6th century), the Slavonic (9th century)—fruits of the gradual diffusion of Christianity in the remotest regions of the ancient world. The Gothic version of Ulfilas—the earliest written monument of the Teutonic languages—is of the 4th century, and was also from the Greek. Only fragments of this translation remain to us, mainly in the famous silver-lettered MS. of the 5th or 6th century {Codex Argenteus) in the library of UpsaL

Thus far the history of the versions records the triumphs of Christianity. The Arabic versions, on the contrary, owe tlιeir origin to the spread of Islam, when the language of the conquering Saracens displaced the ancient dialects of Syria and Egypt. This change did not diminish the authority of the old ecclesiastical versions, or displace them from their position in the services of the church. The edification of the unlearned was secured by reading the lessons in the vulgar tongue, as well as in Syriac or Coptic; and, accordingly, the numerous Christian Arabic versions are mainly taken not from the original tongues, but from the versions whose use they were designed to supplement. In like manner the rise of the New-Persian language and literature produced a Persian version of the Syriac New Testament. Of parts of the Old Testament there are Arabic and Persian translations directly from the Hebrew, but these are the work of Jewish scholars. The Arabic versions of the Pentateuch and Isaiah, by R. Saadias Gaon, in the 10th century, are among the most important monuments of ancient Jewish learning.

In the West as in the East the disintegration of the Roman empire was associated with the rise of new national dialects, and Latin ceased to bo understood by the laity. But the Roman Church was too intent on the preservation of her homogeneous organization, her visible unity of worship, to allow the vulgar tongues to supplant the old liturgical language, or even to introduce a bilingual service. The use of the Bible in a form intelligible to the illiterate was sldfted from the sphere of public worship to that of private edification and instruction; and for the latter purpose the necessities of a barbarous age seemed to demand explanatory paraphrases, Bible narratives in metre, and the like, rather than literal renderings of the whole Scriptures. Thus, in the Anglo-Saxon Church, Caedmon’s poetical version of the Bible history dates from 664 a.d., while the earliest prose translations of parts of the Latin Bible (gospels, psalms, Ac.) do not seem to be older than the 8th century. In Germany, in like manner, metrical versions of the gospel are among the earliest attempts to convey the Bible to the people. Ottfrid’s harmony of the gospels in High German, and the poem called HΑiand (Saviour), in Old Saxon, date from the 9th century; and the prose translation of the so-called Gospel Harmony of Tatian —from the Latin of Victor of Capua—belongs to the same age. A complete and literal translation of the Vulgate existed in Germany perhaps as early as the beginning of the 14th century. Among natio s whose speech was descended from the vulgar Latin, the work of translation naturally began later. The earliest remains of Romance versions are thought to be as old as the 11th centuryj but the work of translation assumed important dimensions mainly in connection with the spirit of revolt against the Church of Rome which rose in the 12th and 13th centuries. The study of the Bible in the vulgar tongue was a characteristic of the Cathari and Waldenses, and the whole weight of the church’s authority was turned against the use of the Scriptures by the laity. The prohibition of the Bible in the vulgar tongue, put forth at the Council of Toulouse in 1229, was repeated by other councils in various parts of the church, but failed to quell the rising interest in the Scriptures. In England and in Bohemia the Bible was translated by the reforming parties of Wyclif and Huss; and the early presses of the 15th century sent forth Bibles, not only in Latin, but in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Dutch.

The Printed Text.

Though the Latin Bible was the first book printed, the original text was for sometime neglected. The Jews of Italy led the way with several editions of parts of the Old Testament, commencing with the Psalter of 1475. The beautiful edition of Soncino (1488) was the first complete Hebrew Bible, and was soon followed by the edition of Brescia, used by Luther (1494). At length Christians interested themselves in the work. The Antwerp printer, Daniel Bomberg, established a Hebrew press in Venice, from which he sent forth a series of Bibles and other books. The famous Rabbinical Bible of 1517, edited by Felix Pratensis, a converted Jew, is known as the first Bomberg Bible, and is especially valuable for the text of the Targums, which it prints in parallel columns with the Hebrew. Tho second Rabbinical Bible of Bomberg was edited by R. Jacob C'hayim (who also became a Christian), and contains the first printed edition of the Massora, with a text carefully corrected in accordance with Massoretic precepts. This edition at once attained a great reputation. It was several times reprinted, and most subsequent editions are directly or indirectly dependent on it. The only early edition which rivals its fame is the Complutensian Polyglott, published at Alcala in 1517, at the expense of Cardinal Ximenes. The Hebrew of this polyglott exhibits a peculiar text, independent of the Italian editions. Later editions of the Hebrew Bible present little or no advance on the early prints; and most recent editions are decidedly inferior. Of Hebrew Bibles, with various readings from MS. authority, the best known are Kennicott’s (Oxford, 17/6, 1780) and De Rossi’s (Parma, 1784-1798). The latter collection is by far the best, but neither has done much for the improvement of the text. In fact the differences between really good MSS. are generally very minute; and where the current text is corrupt it is not from MSS., but from the versions, or from conjecture, that help must be sought. On the other hand, a more accurate edition of the Massoretic text is certainly wanted. But such an edition must ειy special regard to vowel points and accents, which Kennicott and e Rossi neglect, and must consult MSS. of the Massora as well as of the text. The most valuable edition which notes variations not affecting the consonantal text is tho Mantuan Bible of 1742, 1744, with the notes of Norzi (R. Jedidiah Solomon of Norcia). The best recent texts are S. Baer’s Leipsic editions of Genesis (1869), Psalms (1861), and Isaiah (1872). Among easily accessible editions of the whole Old Testament, those of Jablonsky (Berlin, 1699) and J. II. Michaelis (Halle, 1720) have the best reputation.

The Greek New Testament was first printed in the Complutensian Polyglott (1514), but a delay in the publication enabled Froben of Basel to preoccupy the market with an edition hastily prepared by Erasmus from very recent codices. In subsequent editions a good many changes were made, partly after the Complutensian text, and in the third edition (1522) the spurious passage, 1 John v. 7, appeared for the first time. But it was still a recent and therefore an unsatisfactory text that was represented, and this radical defect was not corrected by the editors who followed Erasmus, though some of them, and notably Th. Beza, possessed, and to some extent used, better MSS. than Erasmus consulted. Their beauty and convenience, rather than the merit of their text, procured a great currency for the editions of Robert Stophens (0 mirificam editions, 1546, 1549; royal edition, 1550), and his text of 1550, or the Elzevir text of 1624, which, though mainly based on Beza, is very nearly identical with the other, came to be regarded as the “received text,” which subsequent editors were long afraid to change. But materials for a better text were gradually accumulated by Walton in the London Polyglott (1657), CurceÛaeus (1658), Fell (1675), and above all by John Mill in his great edition of 1707. These labours were viewed with much jealousy by the hyper-orthodox; and even as late as 1751, Wetstein, after long and most valuable studies, could find a publisher only on consideration that his amendments on the received editions should not stand in the text. Some important steps, however, were taken in the interval between Mill and Wetstein. Bentley sketched in 1720 the plan of an edition which should restore the text of the 4th century; and Bengel in 1734 actually published an amended text, though readings which had not been given in any previous edition were admitted only in tho Apocalypse. Bengel was the first who classed MSS. under families, as Asiatic and African respectively. The next great critical editor after Bengel and Wetstein was J. J. Griesbach, whose chief edition appeared 1796, 1806. Griesbach "ave an exaggerated importance to the doctrine of families of MSS.; and his edition was constructed on the principle of adhering to the received text, unless the reasons to the contrary were irresistible; but his industry and critical skill give him a very high place among editors. Griesbach was followed by the Roman Catholic Scholz, whose labours were more pretentious than valuable; and at length the great critic Lachmann (1842, 1850) threw aside all traditional respect for the received text, and sought to restore the text of the 4th century by the aid of a very small number of select MSS., together with the Latin versions as given in the oldest copies, and the citations of the earliest fathers. The idea was fruitful, though the material employed was too scanty. Since Lachmann published his edition our knowledge of the most ancient authorities has been greatly increased. New MSS. have been added, notably Tischendorf’s X; and the MSS. formerly known have been edited or collated with much greater accuracy. The most distinguished labourers in this work were Tischendorf and Tregelles. In addition to numerous editions and collations of ancient copies, Tischendorf put forth a series of critical editions, of which the eighth (Leipsic, 1865-1872) contains the completest critical commentary yet published; The great edition of Tregelles (1857-72) rests exclusively on the most ancient authority, resembling Lachmann’s work in conception, though using much more copious materials. This edition, as well as Tischendorfs VIII., lacks the prolegomena, both editors having been struck down by paralysis before their work was complete.

> The recent versions, subsequent to the invention of printing and the revived study of the original tongues, demand a word in conclusion. New Latin versions naturally accompanied many of the early editions of the original text. Thus Erasmus gave many corrections of the Vulgate in his Greek Testament, the Complutensian gives an interlinear version of the LXX., the Genoa * Polyglott Psalter of 1516 gives renderings both of the Hebrew and of the Chaldee. Even such works as these, designed as they were for scholars, gave offence from their appearance of undermining the authority of the Vulgate; and it was the Reformation, in its revolt against mere human authority, that first demanded open circulation of vernacular versions from the original tongues. From the time of Luther’s version (New Testament, 1522; complete Bible, 1534) we may distinguish four classes of versions.

1st, Versions adopted by Protestant countries or churches. Such are Luther's Bible in Germany; the Dutch Bible of the Commission of the Synod of Dort, 1637; the English Authorized Version ol 1611; the Genevan French Bible, formed by successive revisions of Olivetan’s version of 1535; the Danish of 1550, based on Luther, revised in 1607, 1647; the Swedish, 1541. Most of these national Bibles were preceded by earlier Protestant versions, which they supersede. See especially English Bible. Revisions of the national versions have of late years been undertaken in Norway, Holland, and Germany, as well as in England.

2d, Versions which never held any other place than that of private contributions to Biblical exegesis. Such are—among older works— the Latin Old Testament of Junius and Tremellius, and the New Testament of Beza. These versions belong to the history of exegesis.

3d, Missionary versions.

4th, Roman Catholic versions. The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate version authentic, and forbade interpretations of Scripture not in conformity with the consent of the fathers. Vernacular versions subject to these restrictions were published as the antidote to Protestant Bibles. Such are the Rhemish and Douay versions in English. Other Roman Catholic versions owe their origin to evangelical tendencies within the church. Jansenism, in particular, produced the French version of De Sacy (Mons, 1667), and otherwise stimulated the study of Scripture.

Literature.— Full discussion of some of the topics glanced at in this article must be sought in treatises on individual books or critical problems of the Old and New Testaments. But on most points it will be sufficient to refer to works on Biblical Introduction. The history of this branch of theology with lists of the principal older books—some of which, including the writings of R. Simon, Carpzov, and Eichhorn, are still of value—is given in most recent works on the subject. Of these it may be sufficient to mention for the Old Testament—De Wette’s Einleitung, rewritten by Schrader (Berlin, 1869), full of condensed information; Bleek’s posthumous Einleitung (3d.edition, 1870), less complete in detail and now rather behind date, but very clear and instructive; Keil’s Einleitung (3d edition, 1873), which is strictly conservative. The two last are translated. Kuenen’s Historisch-Kritisch Onder-zoelc, of which there is a French translation, is very full, but the author has considerably changed his views in the History of the Religion of Israel (Haarlem, 1869-70) of which there is an English translation. Ewald’s History of Israel is important, and is also accessible to the English reader; with it must be taken his books on the Prophets and Poets of the Old Covenant. Recent English literature on the Old Testament is not very remarkable, but Dr S. Davidson’s Introduction gives a full account of foreign investigations. The history of the Old Testament in the Christian church has been written by L. Diestel (Geschichte des Alten Testamentes, u.s.w., Jena, 1869). For the New Testament, De Wette, Bleek, and Davidson may again be consulted. A very instructive book is Reuss’s Geschichte der Heiligen Schriften Neuen Testaments (5th edition, Brunswick, 1874). The most recent general work proceeding from the Tübingen school is Hilgenfeld’s Historisch-Kritische Einleitung in das Neue Testament (Leipsic, 1875). On the canon there are several important works by Credner in German, and an English History of the Canon of the New Testament, by Dr Westcott (4th edition, 1875). On the text of the New Testament the English reader may consult Tregelles’s volume, contributed to Horne’s Introdτιction (1856), and Scrivener’s Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament (2d edition, 1874). Le Long’s Bibliotheca Sacra, continued by Masch (Halle, 1778-1790) gives a full account of editions of the original text and versions, which may be supplemented by reference to De Rossi’s Annales llebraeo-typographici (XV. Cent., Parma, 1795; MDI. to MDXL., Parma, 1799), and Reuss’s Bibliotheca Novi Testamenti Groeci (Brunswick, 1872). Detailed references to other recent books will be found in the works already cited. (w. κ, s.)