Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/338

 EDITIONS

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EDITIONS

eighth volume reappears in a number of editions: Antwerp, 1573-S4 (four editions, Christopher Plan- tin); Leyden, 1591-1613 (four editions, Rapheleng); Paris, 1584 (SjTiac, Latin, and Greek text; Prevos- teau); Heidelberg, 1599, 1602 (Commelin); Lyons, 1599 (Vincent); Geneva, 1599; Geneva, 1609-27 (eight very different editions; Pierre de la Rouiere, Sam. Crispin, James Stoer); Leipzig, 1657 (with the inter- linear version of Arias Montanus; Kirchner); Vienna, 1740 (edited by Debiel, published by Kaliwoda); Mainz, 1753 (edited by Goldhagen; published by Var- rentrapp); Liege, 1839 (Kersten). To these editions, containing the Plantinian, or the modified Complu- tensian, text, the following may be ailded, which repre- sent a mixture of the text of Plantin and that of Stephanus: Cologne, 1592 (Arnold Mylius; Greek and Latin text); Nuremberg, 1599-1600' (Hutter's Poly- glot, tw'elve languages) ; 1602 (the same, four lan- guages); Amsterdam, 1615 (the same, Welschaert); Geneva, 1628 (Jean de Toiu-nes; one edition gives only the Greek text, another gives Beza's Latin ver- sion and a French translation).

2. The Erasmian Text.— On 17 April, 1515, the well- known humanist, Beatus Rhenanus, invited Desiderius Erasmus, who lived at the time in England, to edit the Greek New Testament which John Froben, a cele- brated printer of Basle, was anxious to publish before Pope Leo X should give his permission to put forth the Complutensian text printed more than a year be- fore. Erasmus hastened to Basle, and printed almost bodily the text of the manuscripts that hap- pened to fall into his hands: the Gospels according to a manuscript of Basle (Evv. 2); the Book of Acts and the Epistles according to another man- uscript of Basle (Act. 2); the Apocalypse according to a manuscript named after Reuchlin " Codex Reuch- lini" (Apoc. 1). He made a few corrections after superficially collating some other Basle mainiscripts, Evv. 1 among the rest. Since Reuchlin 's manu- script did not contain the end of the Apocalj-pse, Erasmus translated Apoc, xxii, 16b-21, from the Vulgate. The printing began in Sept., 1515, and the whole New Testament text was finished in the begin- ning of March, 1516. Under these circumstances sat- isfactory work could hardly be expected; Erasmus himself, in a letter to Pirkheimer, confesses that the first New Testament edition is " prijecipitatum verius quam editum". In 1519 appeared the second Eras- mus edition, in which the text of the first was almost entirely repeated, though several hundred mistakes were corrected. Luther followed this edition in his German translation of the New Testament. Urged by the importunities of his critics, Erasmus admitted into his third edition (1522) the passage I John, v, 7, according to the reading of the Codex Montfort. (Evv. 61). In his fourth edition (1527) he changed his text, especially in Apoc, in -several passages ac- cording to the readings of the Complutensian Poly- glot ; in the fifth edition (1535) he repeated the text of the fourth with very few changes.

The Erasmian text was frequentlv reprinted: Ven- ice, 1518; Hagenau, 1521 ; Basle, 1524, 31, etc ; Stras- burg, 1524; Antwerp, 1571, etc; Paris, 1546 and 1549 (Robertus Stephanus introduced corrections from the Complutensian Polyglot); in his third edition, R. Stephanus repeats the fifth Erasmian with variants from fifteen manuscripts and the Complutensian Polyglot (Paris, 1550). This edition is called Kegia, and is the basis of the English .\uthorized Version (1611). Stephanus's fourth edition (Geneva, 1551) adds the Latin to the Greek text, the latter of which is for the first time di\ided into verses, a contrivance which was introduced into the Latin Vulgate in 1555, and then became general. The last edition of R. Steplianus was reprinted with slight modifications a great number of times; its principal repetitions were those supervised by Theodore Beza (Geneva, 1505,

1582, 1589, 1598 in folio; 1565, 1567, 1580, 1590, 1604 in octavo) and the brothers Bonaventure and Abra- ham Elzevir (Leyden, 1624, 1633, 1641; Amsterdam, 1656, 1662, 1670, 1678). In the preface of the second Elzevir edition (Leyden, 1633) we read the words: "Textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum." Hence this Elzevir text became known as the textus reccptus, or the Received Text.

3. The Rcceired Text. — From what has been said it follows that the Received Text is that of the second Elzevir edition, which is practically identical with the text of Theodore Beza, or the fourth edition of Rober- tus Stephanus corrected in about one hundred and fifty passages according to the readings of the Codex Claromontanus, the Codex Cantabrigiensis, the Latin, SjTiac, and Arabic versions, and certain critical notes of Henry Stephanus. In its turn, the fourth edition of Robertus Stephanus is almost identical with the fifth Erasmian edition which exhibits the text of five rather recent manuscripts corrected in about a hun- dred passages according to the reading of the Complu- tensian Polj'glot. Still, it can hardly be denied that the readings peculiar to the text can be traced at least as far back as the fourth century. For about a cen- tury the Received Text held undisputed sway; its edi- tions numbered about one huntlretl and seventy, some of the more important being the following: (1) The fifth volume of Brian Walton's "Biblia Polyglotta" (London, 1657) contains the New Testament in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic; a learned apparatus is added in the sixth volume. (2) John Fell edited the text anonymously (Oxford, 1675) with variants collected "ex plus centum mss. codicibus et antiquis versionibus". (3) John Mill reprinted the text of Stephanus, 1550, together with valuable prolegomena and a critical apparatus (Oxford, 1707), and L. Kuster published an enlarged and corrected edition of Mill's work (.Amsterdam, 1710). (4) Not to speak of Rich- ard Bentley's "Proposals for Printing", published in 1720, we must mention Wetstein's edition, the prole- gomena to which appeared anonpnously in 173(3, and were followed by the body of the work in two folios (Amsterdam, 1751-1752) with an apparatus collected from codices, versions, readings of the Fathers, printed editions, and works of Biblical scholars. He also laid down principles for the use of variants, but did not put them into practice consistently enough. (5) The principles advocated by Wetstein were more faithfully followed in W. Bowyer's edition of the Greek New Testament (London, 1763). (6) When the foregoing scholars had collected an almost umnanageable num- ber of variants, John Albert Bengel endeavoured to simplify their use by dividing them into two families, an Asiatic and an African; besides, he constructed a Greek text based on the readings of previous editions, excepting that of the Apocalypse, which was based also on the readings of manuscripts (Tubingen, 1734). (7) This edition was enlarged and emended by Burck (Tiibingen, 1763).

4. The Critical Text. — In the last paragraph we have enumerated a list of editions of the Greek New Testa- ment which contain, besides the text, a more or less complete apparatus for the critical reconstruction of the true reading. We shall now mention a number of editions in which such a reconstruction was attempted.

(1) Griesbach developed Bengel's method of group- ing the variants into a formal system. He admitted three textual recensions: the Occidental, the Alexan- drian (or Oriental), and the Constantinopolitan (or Byzantine). The first two he derived from the middle of the second century, and the third he considered as a mixture of the two, belonging to the fourth century, though subsequently modified. After laying down his priiu-ii)lcs of textual criticism, he tried to recon- struct the text best known in the ancient Church of both East and West. In 1774 he published the text of the synoptic Gospels; in 1796-1806, the text of the