set all allegiance to the Received, or any other, text, and apply themselves at once to documentary evidence, "no account being taken of any printed edition."

The student of the New Testament can never sufficiently marvel at the enduring importance attached to the Received Text, and the slenderness of the claims upon which it is founded. Its origines are to be found in the two earliest printed texts, the Erasmian and the Complutensian. The latter, printed in 1514, was not issued until 1520; it waited for the issue of the great Polyglot of Cardinal Ximenes, of which it formed the fifth volume. Meanwhile, in 1516, Erasmus's first edition appeared at Basel, the result of ten months of literary hack-work, undertaken by contract with Frobenius, the printer, and of which its editor said that it was "shot headlong from the press, rather than edited." It was, in spite of its defects and typographical errors, a great commercial success; four more editions were called for within the lifetime of Erasmus, the later freely amended from the Complutensian.

An Erasmian text with Complutensian modifications, varied by occasional adoptions of "fresh readings from MSS. chiefly of a common late type," such, in the judgment of Drs. Westcott and Hort, is the character of the text issued from the press for three or four generations:

After a while this arbitrary and uncritical variation gave way to a comparative fixity equally fortuitous, having no more trustworthy basis than the external beauty of two editions brought out by famous printers, a Paris folio of 1550, edited and printed by R. Estienne, and an Elzevir (Leyden) 24mo, of 1624, 1633, &c., repeating an unsatisfactory revision of Estienne's mainly Erasmian text made by the reformer Beza † (II. p. 12).

* 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535. Erasmus died 1536. It is said that of the first edition, 3,300 copies were printed. Dr. Scrivener, however, makes this the total of the first and second editions together. (Introd. p. 384.)

The intermediate text of Beza is estimated to differ from that of Stephens in more than fifty places, while between the Elzevir of 1624 and that of Stephens, Dr. Scrivener has noted 287 variations. (Introd. 392.)

The brothers Elzevir contributed to this fortuitous fixity by the declaration that their edition presented the "text now received by all" (textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum, in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus). The Elzevir Text has consequently become the Received Text on the Continent, though in England the name is applied to that of Stephens's Editio Regia of 1550, which maintained its position as a standard in this country. The importance of the Received Text depends on no intrinsic merits of its own, but upon the fact that, for the sake of convenience, freshly-discovered MSS. have been generally collated with it, and their characteristic readings displayed as variations from it.*

This will be obvious when we glance at the MS. authorities which underlie the Received Text. The great uncials, the manuscripts which by their age and excellence command the respect of the critic, whose symbols stud the page of the most rudimentary modern critical edition of the New Testament, are conspicuous by their absence. Money for the purchase of MSS. was not wanting to Ximenes, as it was to Erasmus. We hear of Hebrew MSS. obtained at a cost of 4,000 ducats; of Latin MSS. of the seventh or eighth century; but at present it seems impossible to suppose that even the further researches of Prof. F. Delitzsch will greatly add to the authority of the Complutensian Greek Text. t A Codex Rhodianus of the Epistles, the only one mentioned by Stunica, who appears to have had most to do with the later portions of the New Testament, has disappeared, or has not been identified. It was long

To this may be added, as an element of its influence, its relation to our Authorised Version, which, however, from its reference to former translations, probably represents in some degree almost every Greek Text from Erasmus to Beza.

+ F. DELITZSCH: Studies in the Complutensian Polyglot. I. S. BERGER: La Bible au 16ième Siècle, p. 51. It seems to be anticipated that further research may prove a connection between the Complutensian Text and uncials S and U, and cursives Evv. 51 and 234.

supposed that Ximenes had received valuable assistance from the Vatican Library, and possibly that the great Vatican Codex (B) had been lent him for the purposes of his edition. But Vercellone declares that the only parchments that went to Alcala from Rome were two MSS. of the Septuagint. It is possible that collations of many MSS., including B, may have been sent to the Cardinal or to Stunica; just possible, too, that the Vatican Ottobonian MS. (Actt. 162) of the fifteenth century, "the only unsuspected witness among the Greek MSS. for the celebrated text, 1 John v. 7,"* may at least have furnished the Complutensian scholars with the Greek of the "Three Heavenly Witnesses."

However poor, from our point of view, were the resources of Alcala, those of Basel were far scantier. Erasmus had to borrow what MSS. he could find on the spot. Three were lent him by the Dominicans, one by a local printer; and his array of authorities stood, at best, as follows:-Two MSS. of the gospels-of these he unfortunately made most use of the worse, a fifteenth century copy, for which the monks had paid only two Rhenish florins," and dear enough too," said J. D. Michaelis; the other was a beautiful little illuminated MS. of at least two or three centuries earlier. This latter also contained the Acts and Epistles; but of these, two other MSS. were at hand (Actt. 2 and 4), and perhaps a fourth (Paul 7), for the Epistles of Paul, none of them older than the thirteenth century. Of the Apocalypse, Erasmus had but one MS., which he had borrowed of Reuchlin, a writing probably of the tenth century, in which the text is almost undistinguishably intermingled with the commentary of Andreas. It was (or is, for the MS. was rediscovered by Delitzsch in 1861) mutilated in the last page, and comes to a stop in the middle of the word David, in ch. xxii. 16. Erasmus completed the text

* Scrivener, Introd., p. 233.

for his edition by turning the Vulgate Latin of the remaining verses into Greek; even when the Complutensian furnished the means of displacing this makeshift, he did not avail himself of it, and his extemporised readings still affect the Received Text.

*

So far we have noted a scant employment of cursive MSS. only, and none of greater antiquity than the tenth century. As we approach the texts of Stephens, Beza, and the Elzevirs, the great uncials gradually come into view.† Of the five, which now occupy the front rank, the last (D) is the first to appear. A collation of this MS., then in Italy, was supplied to R. Stephens, and used by him in his edition of 1550, the only other uncial employed by him being L of the Gospels, then, as now, in Paris. In 1562, Codex D came into the possession of Theodore Beza, and was used in his editions of the Greek Testament, though but sparingly. Beza was alarmed at the peculiarities of his MS., especially in the Gospel of Luke; and when he presented it to the University of Cambridge, it was with a warning that it should be kept safe rather than made public. It was, however, collated by Archbishop Usher for Walton's Polyglot (1657), a work whose appearance marks the beginning of "the preparation for effectual criticism," and the first result of an impulse given to New Testament study in England by the arrival of the Alexandrian MS. (A).

Though he inserted 1 John v. 7, under pressure from the advocates of the Complutensian, in his edition of 1522; but he was particularly sensitive to any charge of heresy on the Doctrine of the Trinity. He was subsequently accused, as M. Bonet-Maury has recently pointed out, of being the source of the Antitrinitarianism which made its appearance among the Dutch Anabaptists.

It may be useful to remind the reader that the uncial (separate capitals) writing was employed down to the tenth century; cursive, or running hand, came into use a century earlier. So that the use of uncials, especially for Church books, overlaps the use of cursive character.

Viz.:. (Aleph) Sinaiticus [IV. cent.]. A. Alexandrinus [V. cent.], in the Brit. Mus. B. Vaticanus [IV. cent.]. C. Ephraemi [V. cent.]. D. Bezae [VI. cent.], Cambridge.

This was sent as a present to Charles I. by Cyril Lucar, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1628. Its readings appear at the foot of the Greek text on Walton's page, and his critical apparatus includes readings from at least a dozen new sources, almost exclusively cursives. In 1707, a fortnight before his decease, Dr. Mill gave to the world his edition, which embodied the results of a lifetime spent in careful study. A surprising advance in the number of manuscripts used is made manifest by the list of Mill's authorities furnished by Dr. Scrivener,* which enumerates at least seventy cursives, besides A, D, three new uncials, and a collation of B. Four years later, Küster (Neocorus) republished Mill's Testament at Rotterdam, with additional readings from twelve fresh MSS., including the great Paris palimpsest (C). In 1730, Wetstein published his Prolegomena, followed in 1751-2 by his Testament. He gave to the MSS., a vast proportion of which he had collated himself, the notation by which they are now cited; his list includes (if we count separately the four parts into which the New Testament is divided)† 33 uncials, and 258 cursives.

To give even a similarly brief summary of the labours of Matthaei, Alter, Birch, and Scholz in the same field would lead us too far into details of discovery and collation. Within the present century this labour has been prosecuted with remarkable diligence and success by Tischendorf and Tregelles, both deceased, and by Dr. Scrivener, our greatest living authority on New Testament MSS., especially cursives. The romance of discovery was restored to this department of study by the adventurous, and finally triumphant, efforts of Tischendorf to obtain possession of the great Manuscript which for fifteen years he believed to * Introduction, p. 398.

† Viz.:-(1) Gospels; (2) Acts and Catholic Epistles; (3) Paulin Epistles; (4) Apocalypse. This order, which is general in MSS., is retained by W. and H.