James ΜΟΕΕΑΤΙ, D.D.
Longsuffering toward us here is the Most High:
He hath shown us that which is to be,
And hath not hidden from us what befalleth at the end. For the youth of the world is over,
Long since hath the strength of creation tatied,
And the advent of the times is at hand_ The pitcher is nigh to the cistern,
The ship to the haven, The caravan to the city,
And life to its consummation.
—The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (lxxxv. 8, το), A.D. 70-T0@,
§ 1. The Text.—The exceptionally corrupt state of the Textus Receptus in the Apocalypse is due to the fact that for this book Erasmus (to whose text it goes back) had access to only a single cursive! (numbered 1) of the twelfth or thirteenth century. Even that was inferior and incomplete. The MSS. which have become available since his day are neither ample nor faultless. Throughout the five uncials (two of which, i.e., C and P, are defective palimp- sests), over 1600 variants have been counted—excluding merely orthographical differences—in the 400 verses of the book; this proportion is considerably higher than in the Catholic epistles, for example, where 432 verses only yield about 1100 variants. The earliest uncial goes back to the fourth century (8); A and C, the most weighty, to the fifth; Q? to the eighth; and P to the ninth. Of these, NAQ are complete, while the Apocalypse in Q is bound up with the writings of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa—‘ one of many instances in which the Apocalypse was bound up with ordinary theological treatises instead of with the other N.T. writings” (Gregory i. 121). C lacks i. 1, iii. 19-v. 14, vii. 14-17, viii. 5-ix. 16, x. 10-xi. 3, xiv. 13-xvili. 2, xix. 5-end. P is defective in xvi. 12-xvii. 1, xix. 21-xx. 9, xxii. 6-end.
NAC reflect a fairly uniform text, which seems to have been influenced by an older uncorrected text allied to that underlying the vulgate. Hence, as N in the Apocalypse, owing to its eccentric element, is not of exceptional value by itself (though supported by the cursives 95 and 36), AC vg. form an important group of witnesses, to which the minuscule 95 (like 68 and 38) and Syr. seem allied. The relation of P and Q is less obvious. Their differences (they agree
1 Relatively high among the secondary documents, but woefully inferior to the uncials. On the performance of Erasmus, see Delitzsch’s Handschrifte Funde, i. (1861), pp. 17 f., with A. Bludau’s essay on the Erasmus editions of the N.T. in Bardenhewer’s Biblische Studien, vii. 5.
2To avoid confusion with the B of Codex Vaticanus, it is better to cite this codex Vaticanus as Q (so, after Tregelles, Weiss, Haussleiter, Bousset, Swetc) than as B (Tisch.) or B4 (WH, Simcox).