in the 9tli cent Hieronymi transUitione nunc
ubigiic utitur tota Romann ecclcsia licet non in ovinibus libris. It is clear from what has been said in regard to revisions which may have been made by private persons without any liistorical notice of tne fact, that they constitute the main ditticulty of the student in his attempt to recover the text of the Version in its original form. But it is obvious that the amount of success attained in surmount- ing this ditliculty will be the measuie of the cer- tainty with which arg\iments may be built on the data aftbrded by the texts contained in the MSS of Versions. And it is to this end that these MSS have to be grouped as far as possible into families, which often indicate the nature and extent of the revision, and show that some MSS contain an un- revised, others a revised, form of the Version. J
3. Printed Editions. — It is necessary to warn the student against the indiscriminate use of printed editions as evidence of the true text, and also au'ainst statements which rest only on such editions. In days gone by it was often accident rather than choice which determined what MS or MSS should be u.sed ; nor had the editor the ideas which prevail at present either as to the minute accuracy required for a critical edition, or as to the collection of material necessary for it. Thus Usran, the first editor of the Armenian Version (166S), admits that ho introduced several passages from the Latin without any MS authority. Again, in the Roman edition of the Ethiopic of 1548, the lacuna: in the Kthiopic MS used were translated from Greek MSS and the Vulgate. Similar un- favourable criticisms must be made of most of the older editions of the Versions as deficient in regard to the MSS used, or to the way in which they were used, or both. This makes it necessary to accept with caution the evidence of the Versions even as quoted by Tischendorf in the apparatus criticus of
• Augustine (Ep. 71, ed. Benedict, vol. II. p. 161) writes to Jerome u( to the uproar cnuacU by Jerome'B Verwion reiuling hedera instead of tlie familiar cucurbita in Jon 4''. Anottier c»8e is tliat of tbe con^jregation which ptTeistcd in chanting florift loT Jlorebit. This false conservatism in ptTpetualirtj,' mis- takes is not o))6oIete, as may be seen by ttie n-fimat to correct the obvious mistakes (e.g. Is 9^) of the English Bible of 1011.
t llijftoire de la VuUjate, p. 74.
! This division of the M.S.S of a Version against each other may he seen in any critical e<iition of a Version, f.<i. that of tbe Vulgate ; and in rcgarrl to some of the less accessible, tn Dr. Sanday's ApperidieeM ad Novum Test iii.
his KovumTcstamenttim, for he relied in many cums on such imperfect editions.* The more critical use, and the danger of quoting vajniely, may be seen from a reference to the second and tliird appcn- dirc'^ to Lloyd's Greek J'e.stament, edited by Ur. Sunday, and referred to in the note below. Much has been done, and is being done, in preparing adequate and accurate critical editions of the most important Versions such as the LXX, tlie Latin, the Syriac, the Egyptian, and others. ^Yllen tlicso are complete, the student will bo able to handle the material with confidence. The editors will probably in no case formulate any text as that of the original Version, but will print the text of some one MS, and leave the student to draw liLs own conclusion from the apparatus criticus. They will, as a rule, not attempt to give the readings of all the known MSS, as Holmes and Parsons did in their monumental work on the Septuagint, but only the evidence of those MSS the texts of which are in any sense im])ortant for the reconstruction of the history of the Version.
ii. Method of Use, and Precautions to be on.SERVED.^l"iom what has been said as to the general characteristics of the history of Versions, and the state in which their evidence is available for the student, it is clear that their accurate use depends on the observance of certain critical rules, some of which (1) are common to all the autlmri- ties used for recovering an ancient text, while (2) others are peculiar to the use of Versions as evidence.
1. (a) Each MS of the Version has to be carefullv examined with reference to its date, the care with which it has been copied, the text on which it seems to be based, and its relation to other MSS of the Version. Tertullian's canon, id verius quod prius, may be accepted as a starting-point. But it IS often difficult, as we have seen, to determine the date from the evidence of the MS itself, which is often all that is available. Nor is age an invariaMo guide as to the value of the text contained in a MS, for some late MSS may be copied from good early ones. Thus each MS has to be weighed in refer- ence to the degree of accuracy with which it seems to present the text as it left the hand of the trans- lator, and in reference to other MSS containing texts which have been definitely identified with par- ticular dates or localities, (b) It has further to be remembered that the ditlerent parts of the Bible, and in many cases even the separate books, though they have come to be united in one MS, may have had a dill'erent origin and textual history in the case of the Versions, just as in the case of Greek MSS of the NT. The earliest Versions were made when the books of the Bible circulated either separately or in small collections, and at no time till tbe 7lli or 8th cent, do we meet with a complete MS of any Version of the whole Bible, and the text, even of such complete MSS, we should expect to have been derived from MSS which contained only parts of the Bible, and therefore had not an identical history. It is possible, to take one instance, that the ditflculties in reducing Tertullian's quotations to a system may be in part due to his having used separate MSS, say, of St. Paul's Epistles. Again, within a group of books, such as the Pentateuch,