THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOC,
urdays, and finally for every day in the week, with special commemoration of saints and martyrs. Euthalius marked, in the Acts, 16 of these "lessons"; in the Catholic Epistles, 10; in the Pauline Epistles, 31; in all, 57 He was probably not, as many have supposed, their inventor. The system of lessons which ultimately prevailed in the Greek Church appears in our evangelistaries and lectionaries (more properly praxapostoli), containing the lessons from the Gospels and the Acts and Epistles respectively. The ordinary manuscripts of the Greek Testament were often adapted for church service by marking the beginning and end of each lesson, with a note in the margin of the time or occasion for reading it, and by prefixing to them a Synaxarion, or table of the lessons in their order; sometimes also a Menologion, or calendar of the immovable festivals and the saints' days, with their appropriate lessons.
Turning to the internal history of the New Testament text, it is evident that its original purity was early lost. The quotations of the latter half ■of the second century contain readings which agree with later texts, but are not apostolic. Irenseus alludes (Hcer., V, xxx, 1) to the difference between the copies; and Origen, early in the third century, expressly declares that matters were growing worse (in Matt., xix, 19, vol. iii, p. 671, ed. De la Rue, Paris, 1733-59), as is proved by the quotations of the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries. From this time onward we have the manuscript text of each century, the writings of the Fathers, and the various Oriental and Occidental versions, all testifying to varieties of reading for almost every verse, which undoubtedly occasioned many more or less important departures from the 7. Early sense of the original text. How came tioTof" this ? The early Church did not know the Text, anything of that anxious clinging to the letter which characterizes the scientific rigor and the piety of modern times, and therefore was not so bent upon preserving the exact words. Moreover, the first copies were made rather for private than for public use; copyists were careless, often wrote from dictation, and were liable to misunderstand. Attempted improvements of the text in grammar and style; proposed corrections in history and geography; efforts to harmonize the quotations in the New Testament with the Greek of the Septuagint, but especially to harmonize the Gospels; the writing out of abbreviations; incorporation of marginal notes in the text; the embellishing of the Gospel narratives with stories drawn from non-apostolic though trustworthy sources, e.g., John vii, 53 to viii, 11, and Mark xvi, 9 to end, — it is to these causes that we must attribute the very numerous " readings," or textual variations. It is true that the copyists were sometimes learned men; but their zeal in making corrections may have obscured the true text as much as the ignorance of the unlearned. The copies, indeed, came under the eye of an official reviser; but he may have sometimes exceeded his functions, and done more harm than good by his changes.
Attempts were made by learned Fathers to get
the original text; and three men of the third century— Origen, the Egyptian Bishop Hesychius, and the Presbyter Lucian of Antioch — deserve mention for their devotion to this object. The last two undertook a sort of recension of the New Testament (cf. Jerome, Epist. ad Damasum); but it is not known exactly what they did, and their influence was small. In regard to Origen, while he did not make a formal recension of the New Testament text, his critical work was of the highest importance. Notwithstanding these diversities, there were, as early as the fourth and fifth centuries, affinities between manuscripts prepared in the same district, which seem to betray certain tendencies, as is proved by the Fathers, the versions, and the Greek manuscripts themselves. Thus critics are justified in speaking of an Oriental and Occidental, or, more correctly, an Alexandrian or Egyptian, and a Latin, as also of an Asiatic or Greek, and a Byzantine or Constantinopolitan text. According to this theory, the Alexandrian was used by those Jewish Christians of the East who already used the Septuagint; particularly was this text preserved and spread by the
8. Varie- learned Alexandrian school. The ties of Latin text characterizes not onlv the
duoed by manuscripts prepared by Latins, but Early the Greek manuscripts they used.
Criticism. The Asiatic manuscripts were used chiefly by native Greeks in Greece, or in the Asiatic provinces having intercourse with Greece. The Byzantine manuscripts belonged to the Church of that empire. The latter alone had a certain official uniformity, and were, in the latter centuries, almost the only manuscripts circulated in the empire. This class of manuscripts is also the only one perfectly represented in existing documents, and is the result of the gradual mixture of older recensions under the predominance of the Asiatic or Greek. Each of these recensions is more or less altered and corrupted; so that it is often more difficult to assign a particular reading to its proper class than to find out the original . Finally, the differences and relationships are by far most strongly marked in the Gospels, least so in the Apocalypse, and again are more distinct in the Pauline Epistles and the Acts than in the Catholic Epistles. (Cf. C. Tischendorf, Novum Testamentum Grwce, editio academica viii, Leipsic, 1875, pp. xxiv sqq.)
The number of uncial manuscripts of the New
Testament, ranging in date from the fourth to the
tenth century, is 114. This does not include eight
psalters containing the text of the
cia^Manu-" hymnS in Luke J> 46~55' 68~79' "' scripts. 29-32, designated by Tischendorf
O a-h, nor the lectionaries, evangelistaries, and praxapostoli. About half of these 11-1 are mere fragments, containing but a few verses or at most a few chapters. They may be arranged as follows with reference to their probable date:
Cent. IV, 2: N with the whole New Testament; B, Gospels, Acts, Catholic, and Pauline Epistles (mutilated).
Cent. V, 15: A C I1 2-3 lb Q, (}., T"B Twoi 3., T io.m.
(Vnt. VI, 24: D, D, E, H2 IV N, Na Oa Cb„ P, Rj T',ceh Z fe>c"'K 2 *-\>i.