By the late John William Burgon, B.D. Edited by Edward Miller, M.A. London: George Bell & Sons; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1896.
The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels. By the late John William Burgon, B.D. Edited by Edward Miller, M.A. London: George Bell & Sons; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1896.
Some Thoughts on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. By George Salmon, D.D. London: John Murray. 1897.
Adversaria Critica Sacra. By Frederick H. A. Scrivener, M. A., D.C.L., LL.D. Cambridge: University Press; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
The Old Syriac Element in the Text of Codex Bezae. By Frederic Henry Chase, B.D. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
The Syro-Latin Text of the Gospels. By Frederic Henry Chase, B.D., D.D. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1895.
Four Lectures on the Western Text of the New Testament. By J. Rendel Harris, M.A., D.Litt. (Dubl.). London: C. J. Clay & Sons; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1894.1
The most solid and immediately effective work done of late years on the text of the New Testament is doubtless that which the veteran New Testament scholar, Dr. B. Weiss, has lavished upon the determination of the actual text, the first fruits of which he gave us in his study of the text of the Apocalypse published in 1891 (see this Review, iii. 1892, p. 543), followed by similar studies of the text of the Catholic Epistles (1892), Acts (1893), and Paul (1896). The thoroughness of these studies is what would be expected from their distinguished author; and it is satisfactory to observe that, though he proceeds by a method of his own and exhibits a rare independence in both processes and conclusions, the results at which he arrives are in general confirmatory of those reached by the great editors of the text who have immediately preceded him (cf. Dr. C. R. Gregory’s extended paper on Weiss’s labors, published in the initial number of The American Journal of Theology, i. 1897, pp. 16 ff.). But though to this extent it must needs be said that the center of gravity of textual study of the New Testament has once more “left the shores of England,” this is in no other sense true. The impulse given by the epoch-making publication of Dr. Hort’s “Introduction,” so far from having expended itself, may be said to be only now issuing in its natural results: and the list of titles given above bears witness to the facts not only that textual problems still engage the attention of British scholars, but also that recent English work on textual criticism is largely devoted to questions which have been raised by Dr. Hort’s theories.
Dr. Scrivener’s final volume is the only one of the list the whole contents of which are not in this sense the outgrowth of Dr. Hort’s work. Its object is rather to preserve, for the benefit of the public, the critical collections of one of the most painstaking and deservedly honored of the scholars of our generation, accumulated, as he pathetically tells us, “during the broken and scanty leisure of forty years,” and, at length, in weak health and dimness of sight, passed “laboriously through the press.” The very title which he gives them modestly labels them as but the contents of a critic’s “wastebook.” As everybody acquainted with Dr. Scrivener’s work will understand, this modest description in no wise implies that the work he offers to the public is not supremely well done of its kind. The volume is made up of a collation of Evan. 556, by which its affinities with 13, 69, 124, 346 are exhibited; a collation of a number of cursive copies of the Gospels, and of a number of the early printed editions; a collation of some MSS. of the Apocalypse; and the full text of a few fragments of Old and New Testament texts. In all, some sixty-three documents are here reported on; and though the value of the whole may not be very great, it is a welcome addition to our detailed knowledge of the documents.
The two volumes published by Mr. Miller from Dean Burgon’s remains remove us at once from the calm atmosphere of the cloister into the arena where contending theories strive for the mastery. “It seemed like waking up after fifteen years’ sleep,” remarks Dr. Salmon, “to find, on looking at the new theological publications, that the controversy, Burgon versus Westcott and Hort, was still raging” (p. 1). It is inevitable, however, that the controversy should continue to “rage” until it is fought to a finish. The question at issue between the parties to it is the fundamental question of the textual criticism of the New Testament; and it is well that it should not be allowed to pass out of public sight so long as there is a single thing which is even plausible remaining to be said upon either side. Certainly the purity of Dean Burgon’s motives, the enthusiasm of his research, the breadth and accuracy of his scholarship, and the vigor of the style in which he was accustomed to present his views, would make us loath to miss anything he might have had it in mind to say on so fundamental a problem. And it is certainly not those alone who hold with him in this controversy that are the losers by the incompleteness of the great project on which he was employed when death cut him off and added “another name to the … melancholy list of unfinished work.” “He had been engaged,” says Dr. Scrivener (p. vi.), “day and night for years, in making a complete index or view of the manuscripts used by the Nicene (and ante-Nicene) Fathers, by way of showing that they were not identical with those copied in Codd. א and B, and, inasmuch as they were older, they must needs be purer and more authentic than these overvalued uncials.” The accomplished fragment of this uncompleted enterprise, filling sixteen thick volumes, is now in the British Museum, to make us grieve that the mind that directed the work was not spared to see it finished and to estimate its teaching. No doubt, disappointment was in store for him. The problem of the use of such collectanea is something other than Mr. Miller at least conceives it, and would involve work and reach results essentially different from what we have outlined for us in the hopelessly slight chapters in which he attacks the problem of “The Antiquity of the Traditional Text” (I. chaps. v. vi. vii. viii.). Dr. Scrivener appears to have foreseen the difficulty. For though he tells us (p. vi.) that the effect of even this fragmentary collection “on the stability of the opposite system is direct and cannot be shaken,” he adds in a postscript (following p. ci.) the salutary warning: “The Dean’s capital argument arising from the fact that the text used by Patristic writers is often purer than primary manuscripts written one or two centuries younger than they … needs, of course, much care in its application, and can only be insisted on when the context renders it quite clear what the reading before the elder writer actually was.”