Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 27 - CHI-ELD.pdf/157

 CODEX Codex Bezse.—The MS. which is known by the name of Codex Bezee, after the great Reformer, and which is marked amongst the MSS. of the New Testament by the sign D (or rather by the two signs D, d, according as its Greek or Latin side is under discussion), is a bilingual [Grseco-Latin] codex, containing, with some lacunae, the text of the Four Gospels and the Acts, in an uncial hand which is commonly ascribed to the sixth century. From the fact that a fragment of the 3rd Epistle of John precedes the Acts, it has been inferred that it at one time contained the Catholic Epistles, though not in the common order, and from a study of the ancient numbering of the quires, it appears that the missing matter was not confined to the Catholic Epistles, and that some other book was also included, but no satisfactory conjecture has yet been made as to the character of the missing portion.. The order of the Gospels is that which was once common in the West, in which the Apostolic Evangelists come first, namely, Mt, Joh, Lu, Me, the whole book being denoted by Mt -f- J oh + Lu + Me + X -j- Cath -t- Acts, where X stands for the unknown missing matter, and Caih for the portions of the Catholic Epistles which it once contained (the three epistles of John, at the least). The MS. was presented by Beza to the University of Cambridge, in whose public library it has since been preserved, in the year 1582. If Beza’s own account can be trusted, it was brought to him from the monastery of St Irenseus at Lyons, where it had been lying mutilated and covered with dust, the time of its discovery being the sack of Lyons in 1562. Some superficial grounds for doubting the exactness of this statement are found in the facts (1) that Beza in his latest Greek Testament (1598) calls it Claromontanus, and not Lugdunensis (a term he never seems to apply, using instead the colourless vetustissimus) ; (2) that it was in Italy shortly before 1550, for this is undoubtedly the MS. marked [3' from which readings are given on the margin of Robert Stephen’s edition of the N.T. in that year, and which is expressly stated by him to have been collated by ‘ ‘ our friends in Italy. ” But these statements can be reconciled by adding the further evidence of Marianus Victorius as to the production at the Council of Trent (in 1546 ?)22of an ancient Greek MS. confirming the Latin reading of John 21. This MS. was produced by William a Prato, bishop of Clermont in the Auvergne, and the neighbourhood of Clermont Ferrand to Lyons may be thought sufficient to explain at once the presence of the hook in Italy and the fluctuation as to its title in the last Bezan N.T. It should be remarked, however, that there has recently been a recrudescence of suspicions as to the accuracy of Beza’s statements concerning the Codex, and that some modern scholars, becoming sceptical as to its connexion with Lyons at all, are looking for a home for the Codex in Italy, previous to its passing into Beza’s hands. Whatever may be the outcome of this demand for re-examination of the Bezan statements, it should be noted that Beza had not the slightest suspicion that his beloved vetustissimus was the same as the /3' of Stephen ; for he quotes them as if they were two separate authorities, even in places where the Bezan Codex is most singular. Perhaps we must not be too severe on him in this, for the very same doubling of: the authorities is found in Bianchini, Ev. Quadruplex, p. 483 (‘ Lucse, c. 6, v. 4, extat hie et in Steph. /3' insignis pericope de homine operante die sabbati”), where the reading discussed is the most conspicuous singularity in the whole MS., the passage at which the MS. usually stands open in the University Library at Cambridge. If Bianchini fell into the same trap, we must not judge Beza too hardly. In any case he cannot have known that his MS. had been collated for Robert Stephen in Italy. One would like to know something more about this collation. Who were the friends that collated ? The term seems too vague for his son Henry, who probably was in Italy just at the right time for making the collation. Was there another hand ? Perhaps that of Vatablus? And was the collating done at Trent? On these points some further information may be accessible. Meanwhile we adhere provisionally, but with some hesitation, to the belief that it is a Lyons MS. We have already alluded, in passing, to two singular readings of the MS. in which 22it appears to be unique, namely, the reading in Joh 21, eav avrov doYw //.eveiv odtcos ews epyo/xat (“ if I wish him to remain thus until I come ”), and the unique interpolation in Lu 64 (tt; avri] yfj.epa 6ea<jafxevo<s riva epya^o/uevov tot aafi/SaTco enrev aimo, av#paj7r€, et /xev oiSas rt Trotets, /uaKapLos et‘ et Se p.r] oiSas,

B E Z jE

129

eTrtKaraparos kcu TrapafiaTTjs et tov vopov = “ on the same day having observed one working on the Sabbath he said to him, Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, blessed art thou; but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor of the law ”). These singular readings and interpolations are characteristic of the Codex Bezie, and apparently Beza himself, though he quotes many of the most surprising readings, felt some alarm at them, for he explained to the University of Cambridge that the MS. ought not to be published, for fear of giving oftence (asservandum potius quam publicandum). At the same time he was alive to its critical value, and appears to have recognized its relation to the old Latin and Syriac texts of the New Testament. The MS. was not long in the possession of the university before its text was transcribed, more or less completely. It was transcribed in 1583 for Archbishop Whitgift, and partly collated by Patrick Young. Archbishop Usher collated it for Walton’s Polyglot (1657), and Wetstein studied it closely in 1716. In 1732 it was collated by John Dickinson, with a view to remedy the errors in the critical apparatus of Mill. However imperfect these and other collations may be, they have an occasional scientific value at the present day in cases where the MS. has become illegible or damaged, e.g., Ac 2116, where Whitgift’s transcript should be consulted, along with the other early readers and collators. Whitgift’s copy is in the Trinity College Library, Dickinson’s in Jesus College Library, tlm others are to be consulted in the several New Testaments to which* they belong. In 1793 the first great attempt was made by the University of Cambridge to publish an accurate transcript of the whole text. The work was entrusted to Dr Thomas Kipling, and splendidly issued in two folio volumes. The prolegomena were poor, but the transcript was fairly accurate ; the work was, however, fiercely attacked on two sides on which it was singularly vulnerable, the Latin of the preface and its logic. Thomas Edwards, of Clare Hall, produced a tract on Kipling’s work, which was written in the liveliest style of 18th century polemic. The tract is, however, hardly intelligible without a knowledge of contemporary university politics into which Edwards frequently diverges, and which have little interest at the present day. A more serious defect was the use of a single fount of type, both for the text and the marginal annotations, which are centuries later than the body of the text, a fault which led Credner, and in our own time Resch, into serious errors with regard to the origin of the text. The next great step in the knowledge of the text was taken when the MS. was edited by the Rev. F. H. Scrivener, in 1864, with a very complete series of annotations and prolegomena, in which everything was done, or almost everything that an editor could do, to furnish the student with an exact representation, in ordinary type, of the contents of the MS., and to supply at the same time criteria for discriminating the various hands by which the MS. had experienced correction or annotation, and generally recording the fortunes and the history both of the MS. and the peculiar text which it transmits. Facsimiles were engraved of two corresponding pages of the Greek and Latin, and of a number of places where correcting or annotating hands had been at work ; and, on the whole, a notable advance was made in the materials for the history of the Codex. In 1900 the whole MS. was photographically reproduced for the university by the hands of Dujardin of Paris, the very fragile and much worn book being thus rendered the secure possession of scholars everywhere. The use of the photolithograph may sometimes mislead the reader, in cases where the shades of colour of the inks employed are no longer discriminated, and where the extreme tenuity of the vellum has allowed both the obverse and reverse of a leaf to appear at once in the transcript. A word should be said at this point with regard to the text and its annotators and correctors. Naturally, after Kipling and Scrivener there is not much to be added in the way of readings to the text; but it should be observed that Blass (to whom we shall presently refer) has read several places in the text where Scrivener had to resort to conjecture, e.g., the reading of Scrivener in Acts 187 is peTa/Sas [Se airo auv Aa [etO-]7/A^€V €15 TOV [o t[/c]oV TIVOS, where Blass reads pera/Sas [utto tow] auvXa in the first line, and Harris reads KOLL r]X6ev €t5 tov [o]t[/c]ov rtvos in the second line. The importance of the correction lies in the explanation S. III. — 17