§ 8. HISTORY 01!' THE PRINTED TEXT. The Greek text of the Book of Revelation was first printed, together with the other books of the New Testament, in the fifth volume of the Com- plutensian Polyglot Bible, at Alcala or Complntum, in Spain, in the year 1514. The promoter of the undertaking was Cardinal Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo; the chief editor was James Lopez de Stunica; and the master printer was Arnald William de Brocario. W etstein, Matthrei, and other scholars consider it certain that the Complutensian editors only used one Greek manuscript for the Apocalypse; this manuscript has not yet been identified with any in the foregoing lists, but it was decidedly 3uperior in many respects to the one used by Erasmus two years later.1 Erasmus, in 1516, edited the earliest-published Greek Testament, printed by Frobenius of Basle. He had but one manuscript of the Revelation, that now numbered 1 ; it was not quite perfect at the end of the book, J.D.d contained .A.ndreas's commentary written in such a way as not to be always clearly distinguishable from the sacred text. Moreover, Erasmus prepared his edition with great rapidity, and hurried it through the press without due revision and correction. Hence his text, although substantially correct, is full of errors and imperfections in detail. While writers on textual criticism are justified in denouncing this edition as extremely had, based on one mutilated manuscript, and that one not represented with the scrupulous accuracy required by modern scholarship, it must yet be borne in mind, and cannot be too often repeated, that as regards doctrine and general dri,jt and practical value, there is no serious difference between the earliest and latest editions, the worst and the best. 1 Internal evidence is very strongly in support of the tl1eory that number 87 was the
man118Cript from which the Complutensian editora derived their text of this book; but I.here ls no e:rternal evidence whatever iu its fu.vo11r. THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. xxi
It is quite true that Erasmus supplied the deficiencies (real or supposed) o:l' his single copy by Greek of his own composition, taking the V ulgate Latin version as his guide; and that words and phrases which originated in this way, unsupported by any known Greek manuscript, cling to the received text at the present day. But the importance of these errors of judgment has been greatly exaggerated, and unmerited censure has been heaped upon an editor whose achievements, fairly considered, rather deserve our grateful praise. Three editions of Erasm:a.s's Greek Testament were published before he saw a copy of the Complutensian. He soon recognized the superiority of the text of the Apocalypse in the Spanish Bible, and in his fourth (and fifth) edition he amended from it at least ninety readings in this one book. Thus the later editions of Erasmus may be said to have been based upon two Greek manuscripts, besides a few readings which he found in the Annotations of Lorenzo Valla. upon forty-three scattered verses of the book. The famous French printer, Robert Stephen of Paris, used two other manuscripts, now called 2 and 3, of the Apocalypse, but still his text is in the main a mere reprint of the later Erasmian text. Matters stood thus when the English Authorized Version was made in 1611, and when the famous T611Jtus Reeeptus of the Greek was published at Leyden in 1638, by the brothers Elzevir. Indeed, it was not until a hundred and forty-three years after the first printing of the Apocalypse that the readings of a fifth manuscript were made available for the improvement of the text. In 1657 Walton's monumental Polyglot Bible was published, and therein were given all the variants of the Alexandrian manuscript, the excellent uncial in our British Museum. Exactly half a century afterwards, in 1707, Mill's Greek Testament came from the Oxford press, and astonished the learned world. Besides some readings of foreign manuscripts at present unknown, it contains full collations of six English cursives of the Apocalypse. Kuster, in 1710, added the readings of the uncial C at Paris, and of one other cursive. To the great Cambridge scholar, Bentley, belongs the credit of making the first attempt to apply all the then available materials to the formation of a more accurate Greek text. In 1720 he made public his Proposals for Printing, which contained the twenty-second chapter of. the Book of Revelation in Greek and Latin, by way of specimen; but no further portion of his proposed edition was ever printed. In 1734 John Albert Bengel published a new Greek text of the whole New Testament, which was very greatly in advance of anything of the kind that had previously appeared. He paid special attention to the Apocalypse, and wrote a valuable essay on the textual criticism relating thereto ; he was also a very laborious commentator on the same. He reckons the number of Greek manuscripts of the book1 known directly or indirectly to himself, as twenty. u:ii INTRODUCTION TO