THE BIBLE. 



391 



TRANSMISSION AND DIFFUSION OF THE ■ 

 BIBLE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

 BEFORE THE INVENTION OF PRINTING. 



Under this head we have to speak — 1. Of 

 the transmission of the original text ; 2. Of the 

 ancient versions : 



1. The 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 Septua- 

 gint 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 in- 

 terest in further study of the original. The Hebrew 

 Bible continued to be the peculiar possession of 

 the Jews, of whose labors in fixing and transmit- 

 ting a standard text we have already spoken. It 

 was not till the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury that Christian scholars began to take a live- 

 ly 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 we 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 punc- 

 tuation, without accents, breathings, etc., 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 oftener 

 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 He- 

 brews 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 tenth 

 century, when the use of a cursive or running 

 hand became general. Attempts to indicate the 

 punctuation go back as far as the fourth or fifth 

 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 (a-rixot), accommodated to the 

 sense. The author of this stiehornetry was Eu- 

 thalius of Alexandria, in the second half of the 

 fifth century, who applied it to the epistles and 

 Acts. The same plan was afterward 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 seventh century, but occa- 

 sional 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, 

 Ke<pdka.ta), constructed to facilitate the comparison 

 of corresponding passages of the several gospels. 

 These sections are marked on the margin of 

 most MSS. from the fifth century onward ; 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 gos- 

 pels into larger sections (rir\oi, breves) is also 

 found in MSS. of the fifth century, and a similar 

 division of the other books into chapters («:e- 

 <pd\oua) came into use not much later. The 

 chapters of the Acts and the catholic epistles 

 were the work of Euthalius. Our present chap- 

 ters are much later. They were invented by 

 Cardinal Hugo of S. Carus in the thirteenth cen- 

 tury, were first applied to the Latin Bible, and are 

 still unknown in the Eastern Church. The pres- 

 ent system of verses first appears in the edition 

 printed by Robert Stephens in the year 1551. 



The titles and subscriptions of the New Tes- 

 tament books are another point on which a suc- 

 cession of changes has taken place. The oldest 

 MSS. have much shorter titles than those which 



