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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



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, on 

 the part of a copyist, who had no intention to do 

 otherwise than follow what lay before him. But 

 transcribers, and especially early transcribers, 

 by no means aimed at that minute accuracy which 

 is expected of a modern critical editor. Correc- 

 tions 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 per- 

 fect good faith, and simply because no strict con- 

 ception of the duty of a copyist existed, is es- : 

 pecially clear from the almost entire absence of 

 deliberate falsification of the text in the interets ' 

 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 read- 

 ing the Scriptures in public worship naturally 

 brought in liturgical additions, such as the dox- 

 ology of the Lord's Prayer, while the commence- 

 ment 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 be- 

 came more and more numerous ; but the number 

 of independent readings which could arise and 

 be perpetuated was limited by various circum- 

 stances. A general similarity necessarily pre- 

 vailed in associated groups of copies, which were 

 either derived from the same archetype, or writ- 

 ten by the same copyist, or corrected by compari- 

 son with a single celebrated MS. Causes such as 

 these, combined with local peculiarities of style 

 and taste, and with the fact that the New Testa- 

 ment, like Christianity itself, was sent forth from 

 central mother-churches to newly-formed com- 

 munities all around, gave a decided local color- 

 ing to the text current in certain regions ; so 

 that we 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 re- 

 mained uninfluenced by copies from other re- 

 gions. The comparison of copies became more 

 and more extended in range as the Church grew 

 and consolidated into an 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 fourth century, and other readings existed 

 then which no MS. is known to contain. 



The variations of early copies were most com- 

 pletely smoothed into uniformity in the later By- 

 zantine MSS., after the Mohammedan 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 w r as proper, and gave it a form which is 

 certainly smoother, correcter, and more uniform, 

 than that of older MSS. But precisely these pe- 

 culiarities 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-exist- 

 ing uncial copies. 



The manuscripts are of six classes, containing 

 respectively the gospels, the Acts with the catho- 

 lic epistles, the Pauline epistles, the Apocalypse, 

 the ecclesiastical lessons from the gospels, the 

 lessons from the Acts and epistles. Copies be- 

 longing to the last two classes are called lection- 

 aries, and lectionarics of the gospels are called 

 evangelistaria. Each MS. is referred to by critics 

 by a special mark. Uncial MSS. are denoted by 

 a capital letter, A standing for the Codex Alcx- 

 andrinus, B for the Vaticanus, and so on. Cur- 

 sives and lectionarics 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 fifty-six of the gos- 

 pels, fourteen of the Acts, six of the catholic 

 epistles, fifteen of the Pauline epistles, five of 

 the Apocalypse. But many of them are ex- 

 tremely short fragments. The number of cur- 

 sives and lectionanes is enormous, so that al- 

 together 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 



