Four of them are in Great Britain, four in Rome, and two in Paris. No critical collation of any of them has yet been pu blished,1 and consequently we cannot att.ach much importance to the testimony of this version as hitherto cited in textual criticism. The first use of it is found in Bishop Fell's Greek Testament, 1675, and Mill, in 1707, quite recognized its im- portance. The second great Egyptian version is the Thebaic, in the dialect of Upper Egypt round a'bbnt ancient Thebes, the district known to the Arabs as Sahid. The extant materials for a good edition of this version of the Apocalypse are much less abundant, or at all events are not so well known to ordinary scholars. We have been assured in conversation by Mons. Ameliheau, who has made exte:i:isive literary researches in Egypt, that he knows of manu- scripia whioli would enable him to publish a continuous and complete oditiol). of the Thebaic version of this ,book ; but from printed sources we have qnly been able. to obtain information respecting four manuscripts that contain any of it : three are in the Library of the Propaganda, at Rome, and one is at Paris ; and all four together do not contain one-fourth of the bQok. Add to these some detached quotations in Tnki's 'Coptic Rudiments,' And pa.rt,,r of ;wnr verses (not one in full) printed in Ford's .Appendix to Woide, and you have all the available material for a. knowledge of the Theba.ic version of the Book of Revelation. The book seems to have been excluded from the Thebaic canon of the New Testament, as it was from the M.emphitic. · Since we at present know nothing of the date -0f the Thebaio ma.nnsoripts; nor even at what time the version of this book was made, we oannot a.ttach any importance whatever to its testimony as regards the Apocalypse; Portions of it were published, for the first time, in 1778, by Tnki; &'Dd others in 1810, in Zoega.'s 'Catalogue.' 4,. Armenian. The Apocalypse is included in th-e Armenian version of the New Testament, whi.oh was proba.bly executed in the fifth century; and made directly from the Greek original. The best printed edition is that ~dited by Zohrab at V enioe; in 1789, and many manuseripts of it are in existence, But they are all recent in date, and the original form of the version has certainly been tampered with and corrupted (partly under the influence of the Latin Vulgate) in the intervening centuries. -'.Phe ,value of the. Armenian version is therefore not great. 5. &tkiopio. The 1Ethiopic was the earliest printed of all the Oriental versions, our book having been published by some natives of Abyssinia at Rome ·in 1548. It was reprinted in Walton's Polyglot with many errors of the press, and with " an unusually bad Latin translation." The beat critical edition is ea.id to be Bode's (Brunswick, 1753). The .lllltbiopic is a. feeble version, and the extant manuscripts of it are even later in date than those of the M.emphitic or Armenian. No other version of the Apocalypse is worth mentioning. The Arabic, 1 Although it is known that Paul Boettichcr (who in 1854 took the name of Lagarde)
blUI collated one, and that Tattam possessed another. THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. xix
ae best edited by Erpenins at Leyden, in 1616, seems to have been derived from the Memphitic. The Sla.vonic, in its present form, cannot be earlier than the sixteenth century.
§ 7. QUOTATIONS,
It is well known that all the available aids for the restoration of the trne form of the original text of the New Testament are usually grouped under three divisions, viz. Greek manuscripts, versions, and patristic quotations. Having briefly treated of the first and second, we now Ctlme to the con- sideration of the third of these groups. The Apocalypse is' only seldom qiioted by the Greek or Latin Fathers, with the exception of such as have written special commentaries upon this peculiar book. It happens, however, that the commentators are someW'bat numerouB', and for this rea.son we have a much greater abundance of Apocalyptic quotations than would otherwise have been the case. Moreover, the extant manuscript copies of some of the commentaries give the text of the book itself in a complete, or almost complete, form. We have already mentioned the groups of cursives which Delitzsch terms the Andreas-texts and the .A.rethas-texts; and in the Old-Latin version (African form) we have alluded to the continuous text that is furnished in the commentary of Primasius . .Among writers of the second century, Irenreus is remarkable for citing the Apocalypse by name, although he does not specifically mention any other book of the New Testament; and Te'rtullian makes quotations from, or allusions to, almost every chapter in this book. The following list includes all the most famous Fathers whose writings give important testimony to the language of the Book of Revelation. The Roman numerals indicate the century to which their evidence may most fairly be reckoned to belong ; and the names marked with an asterisk are those of Fathers who have written cofrl.mentaries on this book:-
LIST 01' FATHEBS. Greek. Latin. Clement of Alexandria, n. and IIL Cyprian, m. •Hippolytus, m. *Tichonius, IV, Origen, m. *Viotorinus of Pettan, IV, '.Methodius, IV. Ambrose, IV, · Eusebius, IV, Jerome, v. Gregory.of Nuianzum, IV, Augustine, v. Gregory of Nyssa, IV. *Primasius, vr. Cyril of Alexandria, v. "'Cassiodorus, VI. • Andreas of Cresarea in Cappadooia, v1. *Breda, vm. • Arethas of the .same, x. • A.nsbertus (Ambrose), VIIL •CEoumenius, L *Berengaudus, IX. *Raymo, IX,
Import.ant quotations of the Apocalypse also occur in a Latin work of unknown authorship, entitled' De Promissionibus' Qr 'Dimidinm Temporis,' INTRODUCTION TO
often appended to the writings of Prosper of Aquitaine, and sometimes printed with the works of St. Augustine. It is generally believed to belong to the fourth century. The earliest Apocalyptic commentaries are almost completely lost. That of Hippolytus is only known from an obscure .Arabic summary, in which it is mixed up with later views; and that of Tichonius principally from notices in Augustine and Breda. The work of Victorinus of Pettau is extant in two forms, a longer and a shorter, but both have been undeniably interpolated, a.nd it is impossible to pronounce to what extent. Our nex_t interpretations belong to the sixth century, and there are grave difficulties in ascertaining the true form of the original commentary of .A.ndreaB. Nevertheless, there are. very many instances where we can feel quite certain as to the text of the Apocalypse used by a commentator, although we may be uncertain about his comment upon it; and the sacred text is, after all, the chief thing we wish to ascertain.