Introduction to the textual criticism of the Greek New TestamentNestle, Eberhard
Religion
Introduction to the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament
Nestle, Eberhard
Bible. New Testament -- Criticism, Textual
The principles on which Jerome went in his revision of the text have
been already referred to, but what the early Greek manuscripts were that
he employed is not yet clearly made out. The relics of the material he
used are as scanty as those of his own work. He must, however, have been
able to make use of manuscripts that went back to Eusebius, seeing that
he adopted the Eusebian Canons in his New Testament. But there are
certain readings in Jerome which we have not yet been able to discover
in any Greek manuscript that we know. For instance, he gives _docebit
vos omnem veritatem_ in John xvi. 13, where our present Greek editions
read ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πάσῃ, so that he would seem to have
read διηγήσεται ὑμῖν τὴν ἀλήθειαν πᾶσαν. As a matter of fact, this
reading does occur in two passages of Eusebius and in Cyril of
Jerusalem, as well as in the Arabic version of Tatian, but it has not
been discovered in any Greek manuscript.[104] In the other parts of the
New Testament, the revision of which was perhaps completed by the year
386, Jerome inserted hardly any new readings from the Greek, but
contented himself with improving the grammar and diction of the Latin.
His work on the Old Testament was much more comprehensive, but does not
fall to be discussed here.
[Sidenote: History of the Vulgate.]
It was only by degrees that Jerome’s recension gained ground. In Rome,
Gregory the Great (d. 604) for one preferred it to the old, though at
the same time he says expressly: sedes apostolica, cui auctore Deo
praesideo, utraque utitur. [Sidenote: Alcuin.] Owing to the use of both
forms the diversity of copies grew to such an extent that in 797 Charles
the Great ordered =Alcuin= to make a uniformly revised text from the
best Latin manuscripts for use in the Churches of his Empire. For this
purpose Alcuin sent to his native Northumbria for manuscripts, by which
he corrected the text of the Bible, and he was able to present the first
copy to the Emperor at Christmas 801. A good many of the superb
_Carolingian_ manuscripts, as they are called, which are found in our
libraries, contain Alcuin’s Revision, as for instance the Bible of
Grandval near Basel, which was probably written for Charles the Bald,
and which is now in the British Museum (see Plate VII.); the Bible
presented to the same monarch by Vivian, Abbot of St. Martin of Tours,
which was sent by the Chapter of Metz from the Cathedral treasury there
to Colbert in 1675, and is now in Paris (B. N., Lat. 1); another written
in the same monastery of St. Martin, and now at Bamberg; and that in the
Vallicellian Library of the Church of Sta. Maria in Rome, which is
perhaps the best specimen of the Alcuinian Bible.
[Sidenote: Theodulf.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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