Abstract
In ancient times, the procedural risks of MS transmission were more numerous with the often repeated copying of Biblical texts. The revolutionary possibilities of the printing revolution in the fifteenth century were dependent on the printers having a good text, but Erasmus’s work was hurried and his sources were flawed. Later editors like Beza had access to older MSS but they followed the textus receptus of Erasmus, which reigned supreme until the nineteenth century. Modern textual criticism began with Mill, Bengel, Griesbach and Bentley but unaware of Lachmann’s precedence, SPT set the bar higher by his principled abandonment of the textus receptus as his starting point.
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Notes
- 1.
For details of the earliest surviving MSS of Caesar’s work, see V. Brown, ‘Manuscripts of Caesar’s Gallic War’, in Scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari dell’Università di Roma [ed.], Palaeographica diplomatica et archivistica: Studi in onore di Giulio Battelli, Vol. 1 (Rome, 1979), 105–57. For The Annals’ slender line of transmission, see C.W. Mendell, Tacitus: The Man and His Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 294–97, 325.
- 2.
It is only in the last 150 years that archaeologists have been acquainted with the considerable corpus of extant New Testament papyri, so this dimension of the subject never confronted SPT. For a fascinating survey of other locations for New Testament texts with which Tregelles would have also been totally unfamiliar, see P.M. Head, ‘Additional Greek Witnesses to the New Testament (Ostraca, Amulets, Inscriptions and Other Sources),’ in Ehrman and Holmes The Text, 429–60.
- 3.
In fact the Complutensian polyglot was printed before Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum Omne) but its publication was delayed for several years.
- 4.
These are now in the Basel University Library.
- 5.
The Reuchlin MS (now in the University Library of Augsburg) was lost for some two hundred and fifty years but its rediscovery in the Œtingen-Wallerstein Library, Mayhingen, Bavaria, by Franz Delitzsch in 1861, was a source of immense excitement to SPT who wrote of the discovery to Newton in January 1862: ‘The one Greek MS of the Revelation which Erasmus used (having borrowed it from Reuchlin) has come to light after having been lost for three centuries … The guesswork use which Erasmus made of the MS, and the false readings which he introduced from the commentary annexed, or from the Vulgate turned into Greek, or from his own supposed correction — and which still hold their place in the common text gives us a most important proof how needful it is to recur to MS authority in that book especially. It is really strange that this had not been done up to my ed[ition] of 1844. I am particularly glad that this MS has come to light: it takes away all possible grounds for defending many false and troublesome readings. We can now say positively that there is nothing known which contains them [Erasmus’s inventions]’ (SPT to B.W. Newton, Plymouth, January 3, 1862, Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [22]). For a similar comment written when he was examining the MS in Erlangen, see below Chapter 12, Footnote 49. For his published account and collation of the MS (25 September 1862), see Tregelles, ‘A Few Notes on Codex Reuchlini of the Apocalypse, Together with a Collation of Its Text with the Common Editions,’ in Handschriftliche Funde von Franz Delitzsch, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 1862), 1–16.
- 6.
Thus in Rev. xxii. 14 Erasmus rejected the older MSS reading which proclaimed as ‘blessed’ πλύνοντες τὰς στολὰς αὐτῶν (they who wash their robes) because the MSS didn’t include the phrase ‘in the blood of the lamb’. Instead he followed the Vulgate and referred to the ‘blessed’ as οἱ ποιοῦντες τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ (they who do his commandments). This was therefore the basis for Luther’s translation in 1522 (‘seine gebote halten’) as also for Tyndale’s (‘that do hys commaundementes’) and the similar translation of the English Authorised Version (1611). Likewise in Rev. xxii. 19b, both Tyndale and the AV translators again followed Erasmus who, translating back from the Clementine Vulgate into Greek, had used the phrase ἀπὸ βίβλου τῆς ζωῆς (out of the book of life) instead of ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου τῆς ζωῆς (from the tree of life). In this instance, however, the AV translators gave ‘from the tree of life’ as a marginal alternative.
- 7.
The Codex Bezae was taken from the monastery of St Irenaeus when the Huguenots sacked Lyons in 1562 and Beza presented it to Cambridge University in 1581. See Robert C. Stone, The Language of the Latin Text of Codex Bezae: With an Index Verborum (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 9.
- 8.
Brian Walton [1600–1661] was consecrated Bishop of Chester by Charles II in 1660 but in the preface to the early copies of his New Testament published during the interregnum, he mentioned the encouragement he had received from Oliver Cromwell—an acknowledgement that was eliminated in copies printed after the restoration of Charles II.
- 9.
The four volumes of this fifth-century uncial MS were given in 1627 to the Stuart monarchy by the patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar, and became part of the Royal Library which George IV gave to the nation in 1823 with the result that in SPT’s day the MS was in the British Museum.
- 10.
John Mill [1645–1707] worked on his Greek New Testament for some thirty years, dying just two weeks after its publication.
- 11.
Bengel’s principle was enunciated as ‘Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua’ [the difficult reading takes precedence over the easy one]. It was to be found in his Prodromus Novi Testamenti recte cauteque ordinandi [‘Preface for a New Testament whose text is to be decided rightly and cautiously’], which was published as a supplement to his edition of St John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio (Stuttgart, 1725), xii. To be fair, it appears that Erasmus had understood the principle some two hundred years earlier, see J.H. Bentley, ‘Erasmus, Jean Le Clerc and the Principle of the Harder Reading’, Renaissance Quarterly 31:3 (1978): 318.
- 12.
During some forty years, Griesbach published three editions of the Greek New Testament as well as other works, in one of which he propounded his own synoptic hypothesis that Matthew’s gospel was written before that of Luke and that Mark’s work was later making use of the first two.
- 13.
For Bentley’s optimistic self-confidence with regard to the text of the New Testament, see J. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: University Press, 2005), 46–49; cf. below Chapter 6, Footnote 6.
- 14.
This tribute to Karl Lachmann is taken from Tregelles, Account, 103.
- 15.
SPT’s lengthy account of his earlier misunderstandings concerning Lachmann’s first edition makes clear his admiration for Lachmann’s pioneering achievement (ibid., 97–117).
- 16.
Ibid., 163–64.
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Stunt, T.C.F. (2020). Textual Criticism and Its Importance for SPT: A Necessary Digression. In: The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_5
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