THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Marcus Eugenicus of Ephesus, a strictly orthodox anti-unionist. According to his own account, he detested the whole journey, did not expect success, became involved in conflict with the patriarch and even the emperor, and obstinately refused his assent to the agreement; only the demand and threat of the emperor induced him to sign, and this he counted a weakness. After his return to Constantinople his concessions at the synod occasioned bitter attacks. He then retired from his activity and gave an account of this important experience in a work bearing perhaps the title as " Recollections of the Council of Florence." It is of great value as a source, being the work of a participant in the events. Though partizan, it reveals a series of relationships and developments which otherwise would have remained unknown. The author tries to prove that a real harmony could not be attained, but that the leading personalities, the pope, Bessarion, the patriarch, and the emperor, together with some other spokesmen, approached each other more closely until the urgent position of the Greeks decided the issue. Syropulus justly calls the result a mediating pact, instead of a union.
In 1642 Claudius Serrarius, the learned senator in Paris, had the work of Syropulus copied from a codex of the Bibliotheca regia (N. 1247) and sent the manuscript to Isaak Vossius for publication. The English minister, Robert Creighton, chaplain at the court of Charles II. and subsequently bishop of Bath, was entrusted with the work; he undertook the publication of the Greek text together with a Latin translation under the title, Vera historia unionis non verce inter Grcecos et Latinos, sive Concilii Florentini exactissima narratio grace scripta per Sylvestrum Sguropulum (The Hague, 1660). Unfortunately the edition is incomplete since the whole of the first book was missing in the Paris codex, but the beginning may perhaps still be supplied from manuscript. (Philipp Meyer.)
Bibliography: L. Allatius, In R. Creyghtoni apparatum ad historiam concilii Florentini, part i., Rome, 1665, also 1674; Fabricius-Harles, Bibliotheca Grceca, xi. 711, Hamburg, 1808; Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, vol. vii. passim; idem, in TQ, xxix (1847); O. T. Frommann, Kritische Beitrage zur Geschichte der Florentiner Kircheneinigung, Halle, 1872; A. C. Demetracopulos, Grcecia orthodoxa, p. 109, Leipsic, 1872; KL, xi. 1154-55.
SZEGEDINUS. See Kis, Stephanus.
TABERNACLE: The term used in the Middle Ages for the outer vessel in which the host is preserved, the inner being named the pyx (see Vessels, Sacred). The word also designates the baldaquin above the altar, and the ciborium (see Altar, II, 1, § 1).
TABERNACLE CONNECTION. See Methodists, I., 2.
TABERNACLE, THE MOSAIC.
The Tent (§ 1).
The Curtains (§ 2).
The Interior and its Furnishing (§ 3).
The Court and its Furnishing (§ 4).
Historicity of the Account (§ 5).
Conclusion; Later History (§ 6).
" labernacle " is the term used in the English versions of the Biblical account of the exodus to name the structure serving in the wilderness wanderings as the dwelling-place of God, to which the people assembled. It represents several Hebrew phrases — 'ohel mo'edh, 'ohel Ha'edhuth, mishkan, mishkan ha'edhuth, which, translated literally, mean "tent of meeting," " tent of testimony," but it is not to be taken as a place in which men met. In structure it was a temple in the form of a tent.
The tent itself consisted of a wooden structure of
acacia boards covered with curtains. The boards
were forty-eight in number, each one ten cubits
long and one and a half wide. They
i. The were distributed in such a way that
Tent there were twenty boards each on the
north side and the south side, eight
boards at the west or rear; the front, on the east,
remained open. Inasmuch as the boards were
closely joined to make a real wall, the length of the
structure was thirty cubits, the width twelve
cubits, and the height, corresponding to the length
of the boards, ten cubits. The boards were connected with each other and with the floor by tenons and sockets. The sockets were of silver, and each board had two such sockets, i.e., probably holes into which the tenons were put. The rear wall had, besides the six boards that were like the others, two corner boards of a different kind, but it is not clear from Ex. xxvi. 24 wherein their peculiarity consisted. The boards were fastened together with five bars for each side that were thrust through rings of gold; the boards were covered with gold, as were the bars, which were made of acacia wood.
This wooden structure became a " tabernacle "
or " tent " only through the curtains spread over
it (Ex. xxvi. 1 sqq, xxxvi. 8 sqq.) which were so
essential to it that one of them, the byssus curtain,
could be called the tabernacle (xxvi. 1,
2. The 6, etc.). The lowest covering, the so-
Curtains. called byssus curtain, consisted of ten pieces each twenty-eight cubits long and four wide, of twined byssus, therefore probably of white as the ground-color, interwoven with patterns of blue, purple, and scarlet cherubim. Five of these ten pieces were fastened together so as to make two large curtains twenty-eight cubits long and twenty cubits broad. Each of these curtains had fifty loops of purple yarn through which were thrust golden taches, fastening the whole into one covering. Over this curtain, to which the name " tabernacle " was given, there was spread for its protection a curtain of goats' hair, called "tent." It consisted of eleven pieces, each thirty cubits long and four wide, so connected as to make two curtains, one of five, the other of six of the smaller pieces. In the larger of these two the sixth piece was to be doubled in the forefront of the tabernacle These were coupled together by the fifty loops on