Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 15.djvu/579

 VULGATE

517

VULGATE

One hundred copies were printed on the best hand- made paper to be used in the collation of the most important manuscripts, two hundred on ordinary book paper for the less important, and one hundred upon thin pajjcr for taking about to various libraries with greater ease than would have been the case with Bibles printed upon the heavier papers.

These sheets for collation have been in use since the early part of 1909, and already the collated copies, which have been returned to St. Anselm's, Rome, form a considerable collection of some sixty-five vol- umes. When the finished sheets have been received they are strongly bound into volumes containing portions of the Bible occupying perhaps six or seven volumes. Thus, when the full collation of the manu- script already begim is finished, there will be over a hundred Ijound volumes on the shelves of the working room in Rome.

For determining the importance of any text it is obviously of value to be able to settle the place or country from which the manuscript originally came. This is sometimes very difficult; and any help in settling this question is of considerable use, as it frequently shows the influence to which the manu- script was subject in the process of making. It is now understood that "capitula" or "breves", or, as we might call them, "tables of contents", which in most ancient Bibles are to be found before each Book of Sacred Scripture, are of great value in determining the place or country of origin. As these "capitula" were no part of the sacred text, they frequently varied in number and in form of expres- sion, according to the desire of the authority en- gaged upon copjnng a manuscript. The ordinary scribe would, no doubt, copy exactly what was be- fore him, even the "capitula" of the particular volume. But any specially learned man, or one interested in the sacred text for some reason or other, would not hesitate to make his own divisions and express the contents in his ovm way. These probably would be copied subsequently by local scribes, and the variations would now very possibly determine the locality wtiere the manuscript was made. For the purpose of collecting and arranging the various versions of these "capitula", tables were drawn up, in which the changes can easily be noted. Already the collection of these ex-tra-bibhcal portions of the older manuscripts is so considerable that it has be- come possible to arrange them provisionally in a volume, which is being printed to assist searchers in the various libraries to classify, at least in the first instance, the manuscripts that pass under their hands.

.Vnother work that it has been found necessary to undertake immediately, in order to assist the worker in the libraries of Europe, is a provisional hand-Ust of Latin Biblical MSS., entire Bibles, portions of Bibles, or fragments. In this it is hoped to give in- dications of where, if at all, the.se ^ISS. have been noted or published, and gradually that the Commis- sion nnll be able to collect and publish a corpus of all early Latin Biblical MSS. and fragments. The preparation of this hand-li.st is now well advanced.

In the course of researches for MSS. of the Vulgate many fragments of the older Latin version and other important documents were likely to come to light. As, moreover, it was necessary, in order to determine the text of St. Jerome, to know the versions of .Scrip- ture which he had to work upon, the commission determined to publish from time to time the most, important of these under the general title of "Col- lectanea Biblica Latina". In this collection will appear two old Ca-ssinese Psalters, edited by Abbot Amalle; fragments of the old Latin Bible, from the margin of the I>eon Bible; and a MS. found by Dom Donatien de Bniyne in Spain: the Tours Pentateuch, edited by Dom Henri Quentin, etc. It

soon became apparent to the Commission that it was necessary to use photography in the work of collating. The utility of a great collection of photographic representations of Biblical manuscripts is obvious. No one is absolutely exact in collating, and when the various collations are being compared, doubt as to the correct reading must sometimes arise. If the collation is one that has been made of a transcript in some far distant library, it is impossible at the moment and without great difficulty and the ex- penditure of much time and trouble to resolve the doubt. The possession of a photographic copy of the MS. allows the reading to be verified in a few minutes.

Moreover, photographic copies assist the process of collation very considerably. If the photograph is really good it is easier work to deal with it than with a manuscript, and the worker is not bound to the hours and days of the library in which it is pre- served. Moreover, photographs can be sent to people willing and able to do the work, who are unable to go to the place where the manuscript is.

It was resolved to procure the best possible ap- paratus, and Dom Henri Quentin charged himself with watching over the department for the com- mission. Mgr Graffin, who had long experience with the black-and-white process in the copying of Oriental MSS., placed his knowledge at the com- mission's disposal, and the results achieved have been even better than was anticipated. The machine used is capable of producing copies in any size that may be desired, and there are now bound volumes of photographs from foho size to small octavo. Copies of many of the most important Bibhcal MSS. have already been taken in Paris, London, Rome, and elsewhere, and an entire photograph reproduction of the Codex Amiatinus, with its many hundred folios, has lately been added to the commission's ever- growing collection. The fist made in November, 1911, gives some hundred bound volumes of photo- graphs. Many of these have already been coOated, and others are waiting to be dispatched to collabora- tors to undergo the process.

Owing to defects in the manuscripts themselves, and sometimes of course in the photographs, it has been found necessarj' to collate the copy with the original text. Where there is any defect or place for doubt as to the reading of the photograph, the reading is entered in the margin of the mounted photograph. When this has been done the result is that the copy is as perfect a reproduction of the original text as it is possible to obtain, and the collections of photo-copies and MSS. collated with printed texts of the com- mission's prepared Bible, form as good a mass of ma- terial for working pui-poses as it is possible to procure.

Besides the material for the revision of the present text, the Commi-ssion has been endeavouring during the past two years to amass a collection of all the Bibhcal texts already in print. This has been a difficult and costly process, but considerable progress has been made with this branch of the work, and the collection at the present moment upon the shelves of the working-room in Rome has already shown how useful anfl indeed necessary it is to have all these texts at hand for reference.

The process of gat hering the variant s of the different MSS. for the purjiose of comparison will be com- menced almost immediately. A trial volume of one book of the Old Testament, with columns for some thirty manuscrij)t readings, was jjrejiared at the be- ginning of 1911. and by the experience gained in this trial collection large registers have been made to continue and extend the process. The experience gained by the trial volume shows that by this method it will be possible to divide the collated manuscripts into families, and otherwise to determine the best readings.