CHAPTER VII. ON THE CRITICISM OF THE TEXT. § 115. Necessity of the Criticism of the Text. Since the editions very often differ from each other, and many contain also spurious readings, and other readings of great number are extant; the exhibition of a correct text should be the first object of the careful attention of those who desire to understand the sacred scriptures ;* in other words, the interpreter and divine stand in need of the art of criticism, by the aid of which, a proper judgment may be formed of various readings, the spurious may be discerned, and the genuine, or at least the most probable, may be restored. This subject, which involves an inquiry respecting fact, namely, what the author wrote, may be compared to a judicial procedure, in which the critic. sits on the bench, and the charge of corruption in the reading is brought against the text. The witnesses, from whom evidence is to be obtained respecting what the author wrote, are manuscript copies, ancient editions, old versions, and other books of antiquity, the authors of which quoted the text from manuscripts. But since these witnesses are often at variance with one another, and very frequently it is impossible to ascertain the truth from their evidence; it is necessary, as is usual in judicial causes, to call in also the aid of arguments, drawn from the very nature of the cause, or internal. Such are, the facility or the difficulty of a more modern origin, the absence of any sense, or at least of one that is suitable, the agreement or disagreement of a reading with the series and scope of the discourse, the * [Codicibus emendandis primitus debet invigilare solertia eorum, qui scripturas divinas nosse desiderant. AUGUSTIN. de doct. Christ. L. II.] probability or improbability of any particular word or expression having arisen from the author, and the correspondence or discrepancy of parallel places. Lastly, the laws by which, on such evidence, the critic is guided in pronouncing sentence, are the rules of criticism. § 116. Age of Manuscripts." In order to form a proper estimate of manuscripts as witnesses to readings, their age and their goodness, or freedom from corruption, must be examined; or, which rather than others can exhibit the true reading, and intend faithfully to convey it. The first point depends principally on the age; for the older the manuscript is, the more readily can it exhibit the truth, because it is free from the errors which have crept into the text during subsequent ages; unless indeed a more modern manuscript should happen to have been written immediately from one of very great antiquity. In very many manuscripts the age is added; the years being generally reckoned from the creation of the world, omitting the thousands. This method of reckoning is designated by pa, that is pop, according to the קטון smaller computation. But as the Jewish chronology is deficient 240, or as some say, 242 years, these as well as 5000 years are to be added to the date, and 4000 being taken away from the whole sum, the year of our present era will be left. In a few manuscripts the date is reckoned according to the era of contracts, nih, or of the Seleucida,* beginning 311 years before Christ. In some manuscripts the subscription is erroneous. It is difficult to ascertain the age of manuscripts which have no subscription determining the date. For the indications on which a conjecture respecting the age is to be founded are equivocal; for instance, the paleness of the ink, and the retouching of the letters by a later hand; the yellowish colour of a thick, soft and much worn parchment; the want of vowel points, of the Masora and of the K'ri K'tib ; the difference of ink in the consonants and vowels; the shape of the letters, &c.; all which particulars may very well arise from causes which have no necessary connexion with the date.[a] KENNICOTT, [Comp. PRID. Connex. Part I. Book VIII. sub. anno. 312. Vol, I. p. 539. s. Tr.] however, Diss. Gen. p. 330–334.) and DE ROSSI, (Var. Lec. V. T. T. I. Prol. § 13.) maintain, that when all these indications meet,[b] they afford proof of a very remote age of the manuscript. Comp. SCHNURRER de Codd. Heb. ætate difficulter determinanda, § 10-16. By way of making a general division of the manuscripts, De Rossi calls those anterior to the twelfth century the most ancient; those of the twelfth and thirteenth, and to the middle of the fourteenth, ancient ; and others, to the end of the fifteenth, modern. [a) This opinion is elaborately maintained by TYCHSEN in his Tentamen de variis codicum Hebraicorum Vet. Test. MSS. generibus, &c. 8vo. Rostochii. 1772. pp. 258-322. So DE WETTE, Einleit. § 112. Tr.] [b) These supposed marks of age, &c. are enumerated by JABLONSKI, Praef. ad Bibl. Heb. § 35, 36, 37, and briefly by HORNE, Introd. II. p. 37, 38. Tr.] § 117. Goodness of Manuscripts.[a] Although the frequency of errors of the pen and manifest blunders in any manuscript afford sufficient grounds for concluding that it is not to be relied on as an accurate witness of the truth, yet it is by no means to be inferred from the paucity of evident errors of the pen that the manuscript deserves implicit confidence. This only shows the very particular care of the transcriber of that manuscript, but does not at all prove that the manuscript of which it is a copy, and all its predecessors, had been written with equal attention. In order therefore to examine the goodness of a manuscript, its particular readings must be compared with the most ancient witnesses, especially the old versions, and if it be found to agree with them, it may reasonably be concluded, that this manuscript and all its predecessors have been written with skill and attention, and have carefully preserved the ancient readings. But we must not neglect the circumstance, (which has been already stated, § 111, 2.,) that the manuscripts of different countries have from the eleventh century been corrected in almost every province according to some one standard manuscript; and that for this reason those of each province agree in particular readings, and consequently belong to one and the same family or recension, and in relation to critical purposes can only be considered as constituting a single testimony. The families of manuscripts, which are distinguished not only by their readings but also by exterior appearance, are three or four.-1) The Spanish, which were corrected according to the Hillel manuscript, and accurately follow the Masora. They are therefore very highly prized by the Jews, but critics consider them as of little value. Their characters are perfectly square, simple and elegant, very much like those in the editions of Plantin & Stephens; the ink is pale; the pages are seldom divided into three columns; the Psalms are written in hemistichs, and the Chaldee paraphrases are not interlinear, but placed in separate columns, or in small letters in the margin.-2) The Oriental are so similar to the Spanish, that both might be assigned to the same class.-3) The German pay very little regard to the Masora, and therefore they are disesteemed by the Jews and highly valued by the critics. Their letters are rude, round and badly formed, similar to those in Munster's edition, printed in 1536 at Basil; the initial letters are large and ornamented; the matres lectionis frequently occur; the ink is very black and the Chaldee paraphrases interlinear.4) The Italian manuscripts occupy a middle place between the Spanish and German, both as respects conformity to the Masora, and also as to the shape of the letters. Specimens of Spanish, German and Italian characters in copper plates have been published by Bruns in his edition of KENNICOTT's Dissertatio Generalis, printed at Brunswick in 1783; but in manuscripts the shape is by no means always exactly the same, but very frequently, as my own examination has assured me, so various, as to make it impossible to form a decided judgment respecting them. [a) DE WETTE Einleit. § 108-114, is well worth consulting on this subject. TYCHSENI Tentamen, &c. passim, has much curious and valuable matter, with a considerable mixture of fanciful hypothesis. Tr.] § 118. Authority of the ancient editions. The first and fundamental editions are of equal authority with the manuscript copies from which they were derived. Almost all the other editions owe their origin either to that of Soncino, 1488, to that of Brescia, 1494, to the Complutensian Polyglot, 1517, or lastly to the Bomberg edition of 1525, or its reprint, 1547-9; and almost all are masoretical, a few excepted, in which some corrections have been introduced from manuscripts. Among the latter De Rossi reckons all which preceded the second Bomberg edition, that of 1525-6; all the later editions he calls masoretic. Those not masoretic are the more valuable. No manuscripts older than the 11th century remain, to afford evidence of the readings of the period which elapsed between the time of the sacred writers themselves and that age. Versions, however, are extant, the authors of which, agreeably to the practice of their age, made use of ancient and accurate manuscripts, and expressed the readings of them in their versions. The testimony, therefore, of the ancient translators respecting readings is as valuable as that of the ancient manuscripts which they used; that is, provided their translations show with certainty the readings of their manuscripts. If these cannot be traced with certainty, or are completely out of the reach of conjecture, the authority of the versions is diminished, or entirely destroyed. This generally happens in the following instances. 1) When the question is respecting readings which do not alter the sense.-2) When the readings under discussion are very unimportant, which the translator might neglect in his version although he did read them in his manuscript; as in the case of the connecting particle 1. On the other hand if the translator has introduced such readings he may have found them in his manuscript.-3) But a translator might also add, not only a word of little moment, but also a word or phrase of considerable importance, for the sake of explanation, so that his evidence could hardly be admitted in such a case, unless the word were found in some manuscript not under any suspicion of having been altered; or unless some other reason applied, as where the versions of alphabetical Psalms exhibit a member which has been lost from the Hebrew text, as Ps. xxxvii. 28, cxlv. 14. -4) When a translator has made any change in order to accommodate the discourse to the genius of his own language, or to ex |