Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/558

 CRITICISM

498

CRITICISM

ghenizah. This explains why the Hebrew Bibles are, comparatively speaking, not very ancient, although the Jews always made a practice of writing the Holy Books on skin or parchment. In the first centuries of the Christian era the Greeks and Latins generally used papyrus, a material that quickly wears out and falls to pieces. It was not until the fourth century that parchment was commonly used, and it is also from that time that our oldest manuscripts of the Septua- gint and the New Testament date. Nothing short of a continuous miracle could have brought the text of the inspired writers dowTi to us without alteration or corruption, and Divine Providence, who exercises, as it were, an economy of the supernatural, and never needlessly multiplies prodigies, did not will such a miracle. Indeed it is a material impossibility to transcribe absolutely without error the whole of a long work; and a priori one may be sure, that no two copies of the same original will be alike in every de- tail. A typical example of this is furnished by the Augsburg Confession, presented to the Emperor Charles V on the evening of 25 Jime, 1530, in both Latin and German. It was printed in September of the same year and published two months later by its author, Melanchthon; thirty-five copies of it are known to have been made in the second half of the year 1530, nine of them by signers of the Confession. But, as the two originals are lost, and the copies do not agree either with one another or with the first editions, we are not sure of having the authentic text in its minutest details. From which example it is easy to appreciate the necessity of textual criticism in the case of works so ancient and so often tran- scribed as the books of the Bible.

Corruptions introduced by copyists may be di\'ided into two classes: involuntary errors, and those which are either wholly or partly intentional. To these dif- ferent causes are due the observed variations between maunscripts.

(a) Involuntary Errors may be distinguished as those of sight, hearing, and memory, respectively. Sight readily confounds similar letters and worc&. Thus it is that the T and the T are easily interchanged in square Hebrew writing, E and S and 6 and in Greek imcial writing, and v and v in Cireek cursives, etc. When the exemplar is written stichometrically, the eye of the copyist is apt to skip one or several lines. To this class of errors belongs the verj- frequent phenomenon of homwoteleuton (o/wiorfKevrov), i. e. omission of a passage which has an ending exactly like another passage which comes ne.xt before or after it. A similar thing happens when several phrases beginning with the same words come together. Sec- ondly, errors of hearing are of common occurrence when one writes from dictation. But even with the exemplar before him, a copyist gets into the habit of pronouncing in a low tone, or to himself, the phrase he is transcribing, and thus is likely to mistake one word for another which soimds like it. This explains numberless cases of "itacism" met with in Greek manuscripts, especially the continual interchange of viiett and ijfieh. Lastly, an error of memory oc- curs when, instead of writing down the passage just read to him, the copyist unconsciously substitutes some other, familiar, text which he knows by heart, or when he is influenced by the remembrance of a parallel passage. Errors of this kind are most fre- quent in the transcription of the Gospels.

(b) Errors Wholly or Partly Intentional. — Deliber- ate corruption of the Sacred Text has always been rather rare, Marcion's case being exceptional. Ilort [Introduction (lS!t(l), p. 2S'_'] is of the opinion that "even uinniiiT the uni|uesti(inably spurious readings of the New Ti-stanient there arc no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purixises." Nevertheless it is true that the scribe often selects from various readings that which favours either his

own individual opinion or the doctrine that is just then more generally accepted. It also happens that, in perfectly good faith, he changes passages which seem to him corrupt because he fails to understand them, that he adds a word which he deems necessary for the elucidation of the meaning, that he substitutes a more correct grammatical form, or what he con- siders a more exact expression, and that he harmon- izes parallel passages. Thus it is that the shorter form of the Lord's Prayer in Luke, xi, 2-4, is in al- most all Greek manuscripts lengthened out in accord- ance with Matthew, vi, 9-13. Most errors of this kintl proceed from inserting in the text marginal notes which, in the copy to be transcribed, were but vari- ants, explanations, parallel passages, simple remarks, or perhaps the conjectures of some studious reader. All critics have observed the predilection of copyists for the most verbose texts and their tendency to com- plete citations that are too brief; hence it is that an interpolation stands a far better chance of being per- petuated than an omission.

From the foregoing it is easy to imderstand how numerous would be the readings of a text transcribed as often as the Bible, and, as only one reading of any given passage can represent the original, it follows that all the others are necessarily faulty. Mill esti- mated the variants of the New Testament at 30,000, and since the discovery of so many manuscripts un- knomi to Mill this number has greatly increased. Of course by far the greater number of these variants are in tmimportant details, as, for instance, ortho- graphic peculiarities, inverted words, and the like. Again, many others are totally improbable, or else have such slight warrant as not to deser\'e even cur- sory notice. Hort (Introduction, 2) estimates that a reasonable doubt does not affect more than the six- tieth part, of the words: "In this second estimate the proportion of comparatively trivial variations is be- yond measure larger than in the former; so that the amoimt of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thou- sandth part of the entire text." Perhaps the same thing might be said of the Vulgate; but in regard to the primitive Hebrew text and the Septuagint version there is a great deal more doubt.

We have said that the object of textual criticism is to restore a work to what it was upon leaving the hands of its author. But it is, absolutely speaking, possible that the author himself may have issued more than one edition of his work. This hj'pothesis was made for Jeremias, in order to explain the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts; for St. Luke, so as to account for the variations between the "Codex Bezae" and other Greek manuscripts in the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles; and for other writers. These hypotheses may be insufficiently founded, but, as they are neither absurd nor inapos- sible, they are not to be rejected a priori.

B. General principles of textual criticism. — In order to re-establish a text in all its purity, or at least to eliminate as far as possible, its successive falsifica- tions, it is necessary to consult and weigh all the evi- dence. And this may be divided into: external, or that furnished by documents reproducing the text in whole or in part, in the original or in a translation — diplomatic evidence — and intcj-nal, or that resulting from the examination of the text itself independently of its extrinsic attestation — paradiplomatic evidence. We shall consider them separately.

1. External (Diplomatic) Evidence. — The evidence for a work of which the original manuscript is lost is furnished by (a) copies, (b) vei-sions, and (c") quo- tations. Tlie.se three do not always exi.st simultane- ously, and the order in which they are here enumerated does not indicate their relative authority.

(a) Manuscripts, — In regard to the copies of an-