OUR BIBLE & THE ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS
by SIR FREDERIC KENYON
formerly Director of the British Museum
Copyright Sir F Kenyon 1895. First published Eyre & Spottiswoode 1895.
fourth edition 1939.
Prepared for katapi by Paul Ingram 2003.
Chapter III: Contents
THE AUTHORITIES FOR THE BIBLE TEXT
HOME | Contents | Manuscripts | Versions | The Early Fathers
WE have seen that the Bible has been
preserved to us, for many centuries previous to the invention of printing, by means of copies written by hand; and we have seen
that in such copies mistakes are certain to arise and multiply.
Now if a scholar at this present day were to take in hand the task
of correcting these mistakes and recovering the true text, how would he set about it?
Of course, as a matter of fact, he would find that very much of the work had already
been done for him by earlier scholars;
but we will suppose that nothing has been done, and see how he must go to work.
That will
show us the way in which scholars for the last four centuries have laboured on the text of the Bible.
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1. Manuscripts.
In the first place he will examine as many as possible of the manuscripts of the Bible in the original
languages in which it was written, Hebrew and Greek.
These are scattered about in all the great libraries of the world, and must
be visited and carefully studied.
He will note which are the oldest, he will use his judgment to determine which are the best.
Where all the manuscripts are agreed, he has nothing more to do, and those parts of the text are put down at once as certain.
Where there are differences between the manuscripts, he will have to decide which of the various readings is the more probable.
In
some cases the reading of a manuscript will be obviously wrong;
in many it will be easy to see that the one reading is a
perversion of the other—
that the copyist has inadvertently dropped out a word or misread the word in the original from which he
was copying,
or has fallen into some other of the classes of error described in the preceding chapter.
In this way a correct
representation of the greater part of the text will be obtained.
Still there will remain a considerable number of passages about
which the manuscripts differ,
but in which it is not possible to decide at once what reading is right.
Then it will be necessary
to discriminate between the manuscripts.
Our scholar's earlier investigations will have shown him which manuscripts are generally
trustworthy,
and which are most full of mistakes.
As a general rule he will prefer the reading which is supported by the oldest
manuscripts,
as being nearest to the time of the original work;
and if all the oldest manuscripts are on one side,
and all the
later on the other, the reading of the former will certainly be adopted.
Where the older manuscripts are divided, his task becomes
harder;
he has to consider whether either of the alternative readings is likely to have been derived from the other,
or if one
of them is more likely than the other to have been invented at a later time.
For instance, there is a tendency among scribes,
when
they do not understand a phrase,
to substitute one more easy of comprehension;
and hence it is a rule of criticism that a harder
reading is generally to be preferred to an easier one,
since the latter is more likely to have been substituted for the former
than vice versa.
This rule must be applied with discretion, however,
for the unintentional alterations of scribes
will often produce a harder reading than the true one.
Another principle is to try to classify the manuscripts in groups,
those
which habitually agree with one another being probably descended from some common ancestor;
and a reading which is supported by
two or more groups is more likely to be right than one which is supported by one only,
even though that one may be a very large
and numerous group.
By the time our scholar has proceeded so far in his work,
he will have formed a pretty confident opinion as to
which manuscripts are the most worthy of trust;
and then, when other methods fail to determine the true reading in a doubtful
passage,
he will be inclined to accept that reading which is supported by the manuscripts which he believes to be the best.
He
will, however, if he is wise, recognise that a margin of doubt remains.
The best manuscript is not always right,
and the balance
of probability may be changed by the discovery of fresh evidence.
The soundest scholar is not always the most dogmatic as to the
certainty of his results.
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2. Versions.
So far our scholar has confined himself entirely to the manuscripts of the sacred books in their original
languages;
but he will be making a great mistake if he stops there.
He will remember that the Bible has been translated into many
different languages,
and he will bethink himself that a translation,
which has been made with any care and accuracy,
will
generally show what was the Hebrew or Greek text that the translator had before him.
Now several of the translations of the Bible—
such
as the Samaritan and Greek versions of the Old Testament,
the Syriac and Latin versions of the New—
were certainly made at a date
much earlier than that at which any of the manuscripts which we now possess of the original Hebrew and Greek were written.
The
oldest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament now in existence (except one tiny fragment) can hardly be earlier than AD 200, and most of them are much later;
but the earliest Syriac and Latin translations of
the New Testament were made somewhere about AD 150.
Hence, if we can gather from the
existing copies of these translations what were the Greek words which their authors were translating, we know what was read in
that particular passage in a Greek manuscript current about the year 150, when these translations were made;
and this brings us
back very near to the time when the originals of the New Testament books were themselves written.
The versions are also valuable
for telling us in what part of the world a particular type of text was current.
As will be seen later, different types of text can
be associated with different parts of the world—
Syria, Egypt, Roman Africa, and so on;
and the evidence for this is largely
derived from the translations in these languages. It is true that we have not the original copies of the Latin and Syriac
versions,
A (Original Text)
any more than we have the originals of the Greek itself,
and that a
similar process of comparison of copies to that described in the last paragraph must be gone through if we are to discover the
original readings of the translations;
but in many cases this can be done with certainty,
and then we have a very early testimony
indeed to the original Greek text.
We talk sometimes of the "stream of tradition" by which the text of the Bible has
been borne down to us from the fountain-head in the original manuscripts;
well, the service of the Versions (as the translations
of the Bible into other languages are technically called) is that they tap the stream near the fountain-head.
They are unaffected
by any corruptions that may have crept into the Greek text after the translations were made;
they may have corruptions of
their own,
but they will not generally be the same as the corruptions in the Greek text,
and they will serve mutually to correct
one another.
To alter the comparison, we get several groups of evidence converging on the same spot,
as the above diagram shows.
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