The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels: Being the Sequel to The Traditional Text of the Holy GospelsBurgon, John William
Religion
The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels: Being the Sequel to The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels
Burgon, John William
Bible. Gospels -- Criticism, Textual
On the other hand, the inference from a careful survey of so many
Oriental liturgies is inevitable. The universal prevalence of a doxology
of some sort at the end of the Lord's Prayer; the general prefix 'for
thine'; the prevailing mention therein of 'the kingdom and the power and
the glory'; the invariable reference to Eternity:--all this constitutes
a weighty corroboration of the genuineness of the form in St. Matthew.
Eked out with a confession of faith in the Trinity, and otherwise
amplified as piety or zeal for doctrinal purity suggested, every
liturgical formula of the kind is clearly derivable from the form of
words in St. Matt. vi. 13. In no conceivable way, on the other hand,
could that briefer formula have resulted from the practice of the
ancient Church. The thing, I repeat, is simply impossible.
What need to point out in conclusion that the Church's peculiar method
of reciting the Lord's Prayer in the public liturgy does notwithstanding
supply the obvious and sufficient explanation of all the adverse
phenomena of the case? It was the invariable practice from the earliest
time for the Choir to break off at the words 'But deliver us from evil.'
They never pronounced the doxology. The doxology must for that reason
have been omitted by the critical owner of the archetypal copy of St.
Matthew from which nine extant Evangelia, Origen, and the Old Latin
version originally derived their text. This is the sum of the matter.
There can be no simpler solution of the alleged difficulty. That
Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose recognize no more of the Lord's Prayer than
they found in their Latin copies, cannot create surprise. The wonder
would have been if they did.
Much stress has been laid on the silence of certain of the Greek Fathers
concerning the doxology although they wrote expressly on the Lord's
Prayer; as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa[171], Cyril of Jerusalem, Maximus.
Those who have attended most to such subjects will however bear me most
ready witness, that it is never safe to draw inferences of the kind
proposed from the silence of the ancients. What if they regarded a
doxology, wherever found, as hardly a fitting subject for exegetical
comment? But however their silence is to be explained, it is at least
quite certain that the reason of it is not because their copies of St.
Matthew were unfurnished with the doxology. Does any one seriously
imagine that in A.D. 650, when Maximus wrote, Evangelia were, in this
respect, in a different state from what they are at present?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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