Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/895

 and in the meantime it was enacted that “such canons, institutions, ordinances, synodal or provincial or other ecclesiastical laws or jurisdictions spiritual as be yet accustomed and used here in the Church of England, which necessarily and conveniently are requisite to be put in ure and execution for the time, not being repugnant, contrarient, or derogatory to the laws or statutes of the realm, nor to the prerogatives of the royal crown of the same, or any of them, shall be occupied, exercised, and put in ure for the time with this realm” (35 Henry VIII. c. 16, 25 c. 19, 27 c. 8).

The work was actually undertaken and finished in the reign of Edward VI. by a sub-committee of eight persons, under the name of the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, which, however, never obtained the royal assent. Although the powers of the 25 Henry VIII. c. 1 were revived by the 1 Elizabeth c. 1, the scheme was never executed, and the ecclesiastical laws remained on the footing assigned to them in that statute—so much of the old ecclesiastical laws might be used as had been actually in use, and was not repugnant to the laws of the realm.

The statement is, indeed, made by Sir R. Phillimore (Ecclesiastical Law, 2nd ed., 1895) that the “Church of England has at all times, before and since the Reformation, claimed the right of an independent Church in an independent kingdom, to be governed by the laws which she has deemed it expedient to adopt.” This position can only be accepted if it is confined, as the authorities cited for it are confined, to the resistance of interference from abroad. If it mean that the Church, as distinguished from the kingdom, has claimed to be governed by laws of her own making, all that can be said is that the claim has been singularly unsuccessful. From the time of the Reformation no change has been made in the law of the Church which has not been made by the king and parliament, sometimes indirectly, as by confirming the resolutions of convocation, but for the most part by statute. The list of statutes cited in Sir R. Phillimore’s Ecclesiastical Law fills eleven pages. It is only by a kind of legal fiction akin to the “collegial” theory mentioned above, that the Church can be said to have deemed it expedient to adopt these laws.

The terms on which the Church Establishment of Ireland was abolished, by the Irish Council Act of 1869, may be mentioned. By sect. 20 the present ecclesiastical law was made binding on the members for the time being of the Church, “as if they had mutually contracted and agreed to abide by and observe the same”; and by section 21 it was enacted that the ecclesiastical courts should cease after the 1st of January 1871, and that the ecclesiastical laws of Ireland, except so far as relates to matrimonial causes and matters, should cease to exist as law. (See also ; ; &c.)

 ECCLESIASTICUS (abbreviated to Ecclus.), the alternative title given in the English Bible to the apocryphal book otherwise called “The Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach.” The Latin word ecclesiasticus is, properly speaking, not a name, but an epithet meaning “churchly,” so that it would serve as a designation of any book which was read in church or received ecclesiastical sanction, but in practice Ecclesiasticus has become a by-name for the Wisdom of Sirach. The true name of the book appears in the authorities in a variety of forms, the variation affecting both the author’s name and the description of his book. The writer’s full name is given in l. 27 (Heb. text) as “Simeon the son of Jeshua (i.e. Jesus) the son of Eleazar the son of Sira.” In the Greek text this name appears as “Jesus son of Sirach Eleazar” (probably a corruption of the Hebrew reading), and the epithet “of Jerusalem” is added, the translator himself being resident in Egypt. The whole name is shortened sometimes to “Son of Sira,” Ben Sira in Hebrew, Bar Sira in Aramaic, and sometimes (as in the title prefixed in the Greek cod. B) to Sirach. The work is variously described as the Words (Heb. text), the Book (Talmud), the Proverbs (Jerome), or the Wisdom of the son of Sira (or Sirach).

Of the date of the book we have only one certain indication. It was translated by a person who says that he “came into Egypt in the 38th year of Euergetes the king” (Ptolemy VII.), i.e. in 132, and that he executed the work some time later. The translator believed that the writer of the original was his own grandfather (or ancestor,  ). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the book was composed not later than the first half of the 2nd century, or (if we give the looser meaning to  ) even before the beginning of the century. Arguments for a pre-Maccabean date may be derived (a) from the fact that the book contains apparently no reference to the Maccabean struggles, (b) from the eulogy of the priestly house of Zadok which fell into disrepute during these wars for independence.

In the Jewish Church Ecclesiasticus hovered on the border of the canon; in the Christian Church it crossed and recrossed the border. The book contains much which attracted and also much which repelled Jewish feeling, and it appears that it was necessary to pronounce against its canonicity. In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 100 b) Rabbi Joseph says that it is forbidden to read (i.e. in the synagogue) the book of ben Sira, and further that “if our masters had not hidden the book (i.e. declared it uncanonical), we might interpret the good things which are in it” (Schechter, J. Q. Review, iii. 691-692). In the Christian Church it was largely used by Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) and by St Augustine. The lists of the Hebrew canon, however, given by Melito (c. 180) and by Origen (c.  230) rightly exclude Ecclesiasticus, and Jerome (c.  390–400) writes: “Let the Church read these two volumes (Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus) for the instruction of the people, not for establishing the authority of the dogmas of the Church” (Praefatio in libros Salomonis). In the chief MS. of the Septuagint, cod. B, Ecclesiasticus comes between Wisdom and Esther, no distinction being drawn between canonical and uncanonical. In the Vulgate it immediately precedes Isaiah. The council of Trent declared this book and the rest of the books reckoned in the Thirty-nine Articles as apocryphal to be canonical.

The text of the book raises intricate problems which are still far from solution. The original Hebrew (rediscovered in fragments and published between 1896 and 1900) has come down to us in a mutilated and corrupt form. The beginning as far as iii. 7 is lost. There is a gap from xvi. 26 to xxx. 11. There are marginal readings which show that two different recensions existed once in Hebrew. The Greek version exists in two forms—(a) that preserved in cod. B and in the other uncial MSS., (b) that preserved in the cursive codex 248 (Holmes and Parsons). The former has a somewhat briefer text, the latter agrees more closely with the Hebrew text. The majority of Greek cursives agree generally with the Latin Vulgate, and offer the fuller text in a corrupt form. The Syriac (Peshitta) version is paraphrastic, but on the whole it follows the Hebrew text. Owing to the mutilation of the Hebrew by the accidents of time the Greek version retains its place as the chief authority for the text, and references by chapter and verse are usually made to it.

Bickell and D. S. Margoliouth have supposed that the Hebrew text preserved in the fragments is not original, but a retranslation from the Greek or the Syriac or both. This view has not commended itself to the majority of scholars, but there is at least a residuum of truth in it. The Hebrew text, as we have it, has a history of progressive corruption behind it, and its readings can often be emended from the Septuagint, e.g. xxxvii. 11 (read for the meaningless  ). The Hebrew marginal readings occasionally seem to be translations from the Greek or Syriac, e.g. xxxviii. 4 ( for  ). More frequently, however, strange readings of the Greek and Syriac