THE ENGLISH BIBLE : I. ITS ANCESTRY
By SIR FREDERIC KENYON
IT has been decided to celebrate in 1938 the four-hundredth anniversary of the preparation of Coverdale's Great Bible, and of the proclamation which prescribed that a copy of it should be placed in every parish church, and the people encouraged to read it. This act, which made the Scriptures accessible to all classes in the incomparable English of Tyndale and Coverdale, laid the foundation of the intimate knowledge and love of the Bible which have so deeply coloured English history, literature and life.
But what was this Bible which Tyndale and Coverdale, and after them the translators of King James in 1611, placed in the hands of their countrymen ? What are its credentials as a trustworthy representation of what prophets and evan- gelists wrote so many centuries before ? It must never be forgotten that before the invention of printing about 145o every copy in every language was separately written by hand, and that there were infinite possibilities of error, of variation, of deliberate alteration, of editorial revision. What do we know of this long period of manuscript tradition ?
Of the early history of the Old Testament books we know little. But after the deletion of the Jews as a nation in Palestine, a synod of Jewish scholars about A.D. Ioo seems to have fixed the canon and text of the official Scriptures which should thenceforward be the centre and rallying-point of their race. From that time there seems to have been no important variation in the text of the Hebrew Bible,,and the translators of our Revised Version in 1885 had before them the same text as the translators of the sixteenth century. For the period before A.D. I00 we have the evidence of the Septuagint, the Greek version produced in Egypt in the third and second centuries B.C. This (besides including a number of books which the synod of A.D. I00 excluded from the canon, and which constitute our Apocrypha) suggests that the text of that period may have varied to a considerable extent from the Hebrew text as eventually fixed ; but it is impossible as yet to determine how much is due to differences of text and how much to laxity of translation, and for the present we must be content to know that our English Old Testament represents the Hebrew Bible as fixed by the Jews themselves after the fall of Jerusalem.
With the New Testament the position is very different. On the one hand the evidence is far more plentiful, and it now goes back in unbroken sequence to a point very little later than the apostles themselves. On the other hand there was never any official stereotyping of an accepted text, and the conditions under which the books were produced and circulated in the earliest days led to an uncontrolled multiplication of copies with little opportunity of comparison and rectification. Only after several generations did a gradual process of editorial revision eventually produce a form of text that was generally accepted throughout the Byzantine Church.
The history of the Greek text before the invention of printing falls into two main periods. From the third century B.c., when the Pentateuch was translated at Alexandria, to the end of the third century after Christ, books in the Graeco-Roman world were written on papyrus. Until, in our own generation, discoveries of papyrus manuscripts in Egypt became plentiful, we knew little of papyrus books, and none were supposed to have survived. The perishable nature of the material seemed to have interposed a gap of some centuries between the authors of the New Testament books and the earliest extant copies. Now we know much of the form of papyrus books, and we have fragments of copies of New Testament books which go back to the second century after Christ, while from the early part of the third century we have substantial remains of nearly every book. Of the Greek Old Testament we have large portions of the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy from the early part of the second century, several manuscripts of the third century, and even (a quite recent discovery) a scrap of Deuteronomy from the second century B.c.
During the early part of the papyrus period (and in the case of pagan books throughout the whole of it) the normal form of book was the papyrus roll, the length of which was usually not greater than would suffice for a single Gospel or a single book of Thucydides. But recent discoveries have shown that at least from the beginning of the second century the Christian community made use by preference of the codex, or modern book form with leaves arranged in quires of various sizes. Among the Chester Beatty papyri, acquired about seven years ago, there are portions of a codex of the four Gospels and Acts, of the first half of the third century ; a nearly complete copy of the Pauline Epistles (except the Pastorals), of about A.D. 200; and one-third of a copy of Revelation, slightly later. Our knowledge of the New Testa- ment text is therefore carried back into the third, and by inference even into the second, century, from the early part of which a tiny fragment of the Fourth Gospel has recently come to light in the Rylands Library.
The second period of the history of the text is that of vellum. Just at the time when Christianity became the accepted religion of the Byzantine Empire, vellum became the accepted material for the writing of books. Vellum being far more durable than papyrus, copies of the Scriptures have thenceforward survived in increasing numbers. The two most famous manuscripts of the Bible, the Codex Vaticanuc and the Codex Sinaiticus, date from this very period ; the Codex Alexandrinus, the first early MS. to attract attention in modem times, and the Codex Bezae, which intrigues ah scholars by its striking variations of text, are of about century later. Thenceforward, throughout the Middle Ages, the Greek text was handed down, with a certain amount of progressive deterioration, in vellum codices, the vast majority of which contain the stereotyped form of text in use in the Eastern Church from about the eighth century onwards.
Meanwhile in the Western Church the Latin version of St. Jerome, which we know as the Vulgate, had become equally dominant. Originally a scholarly revision of the earlier Latin translations with the help of early manuscripts of a type resembling the Sinaiticus, it had become progressively deformed in transmission through the centuries. It was this Latin Bible which was brought to England by the first missionaries, and it was from it that the first partial transla- tions into English by Bede, Alfred and their successors were made, and likewise the first complete English Bible, that of Wycliffe at the end of the fourteenth century. It was not until Tyndale translated the New Testament from the Greek text as printed by Erasmus in 1516, and the Pentateuch and historical books from the Hebrew printed in 1488, that England had a version direct from the original languages.
It must be realised, however, that the first translators had a not wholly satisfactory text, at any rate of the Greek, before them. Erasmus formed his text from a few very late manu- scripts, containing the ecclesiastical Byzantine text in its latest form. This was the text that Tyndale and Coverdale translated ; and Stephanus' text of 155o, which became the Received Text until our own day, and is that which underlies our Authorised Version, was little better. It has been the work of three hundred years of research and study to bring to light the earlier evidence which was utilised in the Greek text of Westcott and Hort and the Revised New Testament of 1881, and which links us so nearly with the age of the apostles themselves. It would be sad if the acquisition of a more accurate text, and of increasing evidence of the authen- ticity of the Scripture tradition, should coincide with a slackening of interest in the contents of the Bible.
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