Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 9.djvu/678

 BCANUSORIPTS

627

UAinJSORIPTS

Bible de Charlea le Chauve (Paris. 1883); BRimBR. La Bible hidori^e de Clermont in Etudes archiol, (Clermont, 1010); Vm- THUM, Die Parieer Miniqiurmalerei (Leipsig, 1007); Delulk. Fac-eimUee de livrea copiie et enluminde pour le rot Charlea V (Paris, 1003); dk LAanrrRiB, Lee tniniatttrea d Andri Beaw neveu et de Jacquemart de Heedin in Monumente pict.. Ill; DuRBZEU, Heuree de Turin (Paris, 1002); Lee Trie Richee Heures du due de Berry (Paris, 1004); Rsznach, MinitUurea dee Orandee Chroniquea de Philippe le Ban in Monumente pict., XI; DE Laborde, Lee Manueerita h peinture de la CiU de Dxeu (Paris, 1010); Omont. Reproduction rMuite dee manueerita et minxaiurea de la Bibliolh^ue Nationale (Paris, s. d.), contains Psalter of St. Louis, Book of Hours of Anne of Brittany, Grande CThroniques de France «f Jean Fouquet, etc.

Louis BRismEB.

ManuBCiipts of the Bible are written, as opposed to printed, copies of the original text or of a version either of the whole Bible or of a part thereof. After introductory remarks on MSS. in general^ we shall take up in detail the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic MSS. of the Bible; MSS. of other versions are not important enough to come within the scope of this article.

1. In General. — ^MSS. may be conveniently di- vided into papyrus and vellum MSS. (1) Papyrus MSS. — In the Roman Empire of the first three cen- turies of our era, papyrus was the ordinary writing n^terial. Made out of strips of pith taken from the stem of the Egyptian water-plant of the same name, papyrus was very fragile, became brittle in air, crum- olecl with use, could not resist the disintegrating force of moisture, and was quite impracticable for book-form. All papyrus MSS. of every sort are lost to' us save such as were buried in exceedingly dry soil, like that of Upper and Middle Eg>'pt. Here the igno- rant fellaheen at one time wantonly destroyed vast quantities of papyrus MSS. Egyptian excavators now prevent such destruction and keep on adding to our very considerable collections of papyri. It is more than likely that the New Testament sacred writers or their scribes used ink and rolls of fragile papyrus for their autoarapha (II (Dor., iii. 3; II John, 12). These original BASS, probablv perisned towards the end of the first or opemng of the second century. We find no trace of them in either the Apostolic or the apologetic Fathers, — unless we except TertuUian's words, the authentic letters of the Apostles them- selves, which are now generally set aside as rhetori- cal. A si^ficant proof of the early loss of the*auto- graph copies of the New Testament is the fact that Irenseus never appeals to the original writings but only to all the painstaking and ancient copies (ip ira^c rocs ffirovSalois Kal dpxalois dmypdiftois), to the witness of those that saw John face to face {Kal fiapTvpoirrav aihOv iKtltwv tOp Kardrf/iw rhv 'Itad^niP iopaicSTUfp)^ and to the internal evidence of the written word (imU roO \brfOv diddffKOPTOS ^/xas).

(2) Vellum MSS. — Egypt clung to her papyrus rolls until the eighth century and even later. VeUum had been used before the time of Christ (cf. PKny, "Historia Naturalis", xiii^ 11), and during the time of the Apostles (II Tim., iv, 13). Itf the third cen- tury, it began, outside of Egypt, to supersede papyrus; in the early part of the fourth century vellum and the codex, or book-form, gained complete victory over papyrus and the roll-form. When Constantine founded his capital of the Byzantine Empire, he ordered Eusebius to have fifty MSS. of the Bible made on vellum ((rcu^ria ip dt^ipats) for use in the churches of Byzantium (Vita Constant., IV, 36). To the fourth century belong the earliest extant Biblical MSS. of anything but fragmentary size.

(3) Po/impseste .-—Some vellum MSS. of the greatest importance are palimpsests (from Lat. pcXimmestum, Gr. iraXlfjapriffTos^ " scraped again "), — ^that is, they were long ago scraped a second time with pumice-stone and written upon anew. The discovery of palimpsests led to the reckless and bigoted charge ot^wholesale de- struction of Biblical MSS. by the monks of oM. That

there was some such destruction is clear enough from the decree of a Greek synod of a. d. 691, which forbade the use ofpalimpsest manuscripts either of the Bible or of the Fathers, unless they were utterly unservice- able (see Wattenoach, " Das Schriftwesen im Mittel- alter", 1896, p. 299). That such destruction was not wholesale, but had to do with only worn or damaged MSS., is in like manner clear enough from the signifi- cant fact that as yet no complete work of any kind has been found on a palimpsest. The deciphering of a palimpsest may at times be accomplished merely by soaking it in clear water; generally speaking, some chemical rea^nt is required, in order to bring back the original writmg. Such chemical reagents are an in- fusion of nutc^dls, Gioberti's tincture and hvdrosul- E buret of ammonia; all do harm to the MS. Watten- ach, a leading authority on the subject, says: "More precious manuscripts, in proportion to the existing supply, have been destroyed by the learned experi- menters of our time than by the much abused monks of old."

II. Hebrew MSS. — (1) Age. — (a) Pre-Massoretic text. — ^The earliest Hebrew ft®, is the Nash papyrus. There are four fragments, which, when pieced to- gether, give twenty-four lines of a pre-Massoretic text of the Ten 'Commandments and the shema* (Ex., xx, 2-17; Deut., v, 6-19; vi, 4-5). The writing is with- out vowels and seems palseographically to be not later than the second century. This is the oldest extant Bible MS. (see Cook, "A Pre-Massoretic Biblical Papyrus" in "Proceed, of the Soc. of Bib. Aroh.**, Jan., 1903) . It agrees at times with the LXX a^inst the Massorah. Another pre-Massoretic text is the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritan recension is probably pre-exilic; it has come down to us free from Massoretic influences, is written without vowels and in Samaritan characters. The earliest Samaritan MS. extant is that of NablAs, which was formerly rated very much earlier than all Massoretic MSS., but is now assigned to the twelfth or thirteenth century a. p. Here mention should be made of the non-Massoretic Hebrew MSS. of the Book of Ecclesiasticus (q. v.). These fragments, obtained from a Cairo genizah (a box for womout and cast-off MSS.), belong to the tenth or eleventh century of our era. They provide us with more than a haft of Ecclesiasticus and duplicate cer- tain portions of the book. Many scholars deem that the (Jairo fragments prove Hebrew to have been the original language of Ecclesiasticus (see "Facsimiles of the Fragments hitherto recovered of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew", Oxford-find Cambridge, 1901).

(b) Massoretic text. — All other Hebrew MSS. of the Bible are Massoretic (see Massorah), and belong to the tenth century or later. Some of these MSS. are dated earlier. Text-critics consider these dates to be due either to intentional fraud or to uncritical tran- scription of dates of older MSS. For instance, a codex of the Former and Latter Prophets, now in the Karaite synagogue of Cairo, is dated a. d. 895; Neubauer as- signs it to the eleventh or thirteenth century. The Cambridge MS. no. 12, dated a. d. 856, he marks as a thirteenth-century work; the date a. d. 489, attached to the St. Petersburg Pentateuch, he rejects as utterly impossible (see Studia Biblica, IIL 22^. Probably the earliest Massoretic MSS. are: "rrophetarum Pos- teriorum Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus", dated A. D. 916; the St. Petersburg Bible, written by Samuel ben Jacob and dated a. d. 1009; and '^Codex Oriental. 4445" in the British Museum, which Ginsburg (Intro- duction, p. 469) assigns to a. d. 820-50. Tiie text- critics differ very widely in the dates they assign to eertain Hebrew MSS. De Rossi is inclined to think that at most nine or ten Massoretic MSS. are earlier than the twelfth century (Vari® Lectiones, I, p. xv).

(2) Number. — ^Kennicott, the first critical stuuent of the Massoretic text, either examined ot V^s^si^^^^cKc^^ss.*