(c) The use which may be made of the Versions in re-'ard to the history of the Bible, the Canon, etc., may be illustrated both from the Old and the New Testament. The importance of their evidence, as in the case of their use for textual criticism, consists in our being able by this means to localize the phenomena with which we meet.
The most obvious instance is the evidence which Is afforded by the Versions in regard to the inclusion or exclusion of the Apocah-pse. Both the Svriacand the Bohairic Versions indicate that that book was not included in the Canon of the NT when they were made. Another instance — and this affects the arrange- ment of the books of the Bible — may be found in the so-called Western order of the Gospels found in the MSS of the Latin
• Introd. tothtOT in Greek {p. 467). Dr. Swete sums up the question as follows: 'On the one hand, the inter^jreter [i.e. of the NT] ought not to be led astray by visions of the solidarity of "Biblical Greek." ... On the other hand, the student of the NT will make the LXX his starting-point in examining the sense of all words and phrases which . . . piuised into I'alea- tinian use through the Greek OT, and in their passage received the impress of Semitic thought and life.'
t Swete, I.e. p. 446.
t Liveg o/Twetve Good Hen, pp. 78, 77.
5 Walton, however, in his Frolegomejui, S 6. ;J, sa.vs, gcnsum clariun explicant ita ut pro pturibuB commeiifariis pernio uniea iiuiercire posgit.
I See I'esh. (Ao IS"*) »nd Jerome's words, quoted abova p. S63I', note t.
VERSIONS
VERSIOXS, ENGLISH
855
Version and elsewhere.* Again, the var>nng position of tho Epistle to the Hebrews whioli is found in the Bohairic between SXhess. and 1 Tim., in the.Sahiilicbi'twcen 2 Cor. and Gal,, affords evidence a» to early uncertainty about the Tauline authorship. From the OT, illustrations may be found in the %'ariations be- tween the Canon of the Hebrew, LXX, and Vult.'at€, and the liirht thrown on the history of the OT Canon. t While the order of books in ' the Law ' was fixed at the time the LXX translation was made, that of the hooka contained in the groups of * the Prophet*' and * the Writings' was not ; and evidence of this is found in tiie variations in ordar b**tween the LXX and Hebrew. A^ain, within certain hooks, suc» us Exodus and Jeremiah, we find a ditlerence in the arrangement of material between the LX.\ and ilebreWi and in 1 Sam. a soinewbaC similar phenoiue* non meets ua.
Tliese facts take us back behind the formation of the Canon, on whicli the facts already mentioned atibrd evidence, and can be used for tlie light they throw on the composition of the separate books. Of course it is only in the very earliest Versions that such a use of the Versions as is here referred to can be made. And, conversely, these jilieno- mena, as we have already noticed, are ittfort^nt in helping us to date those Versions in which they occur.
{d) It would be out of place in a Bible dictionary to go at any length into the lifr.rrny and philologi- cal interest of the Versions, but this part of the subject cannot be wholly omitted. It will be obvious how great this interest must be when we call to mind that in nearly every language the earliest raonunienta preserved to us consist of translations of the Bible. In many cases {e.g. Gothic, Armenian, Slavonic, etc.) we are told that alphabets were deviseti for the express purpose of these translations. Translations of the Bible, then, take us to the cradle of nearly every written modern language, and they not only give us our earliest information as to written languages, but they have exercised an important influence on their subsequent history by fixing the dialect which was to prevail as the literary dialect. As instances of this, the inlluence of the translations of Wydif and Luther on the literary development of English and (IcruKin may be mentioned ; and of a somewhat similar kind was the influence of Hus's Bible in fixing the orthography of Bohemian or Chekh.
Again, when we pass to the early history of printing in any language, the importance of the V'ersioiis as evidence is clearly seen from the fact that the earliest printed books were often transla- tions of the Bible. Thus the earliest Uussian printed book was the Psalter of 1564, and the first
{jrinted book in Hungarian was Komjathy's trans- ation of St. Paul's Epistles of 1533.
In eraphasizin" the philological importance of Versions of the Isible, we may point to tjothic and Basque, in which almost the only monuments of the language consist of translations of the Bible. The first of these, scanty as its fragments are, is by some centuries the oldest monument of the Teutonic family. Again, the MSS of tlie Latin Bible illustrate many steps in the process by which Latin developed into the later Uomance languages in their separate forms.
LiTERATDHi!. — Besides the special literature mentioned in connexion with the separate Versions (which see), the following books dealing (generally, .with the subject will be found indis- pensable i—f/rffK u?i<i UhrrgeUungm (Ur i'i*c( (Leipzig, 181(7), a reprint of the art ' Bitieltext ' in PRE*, is indispensable both for \\A outline of the whole subject and its references to litera- ture. For eflitions of the Bible in dilfercnt translations the parts of the British Museum Catalot.'ue on Bibles will give the titles and some idea of the size of the subject.