APPROXIMATE DATE, A. D. 160-200. NAME. REMARKS. Tertullian of Car- A disciple of Polycarp, who was A disciple of Justin Martyr, a A disciple of St. John the Evan- A disciple of St. John the Evangelist. Bishop of Rome A. D. 91-1CO. Miller (No. 53), with reference to the great number of the writers alluded to, says: "The wealth of MSS. to which the Fathers introduce us at second hand can only be understood by those who may go through the writings of many of them with this view; and outnumbers over and over again before the year 1000 all the contemporaneous Greek MSS. which have come down to us, not to speak of the years to which no MSS. that are now extant are in the opinion of experts found to belong." Origen. Of this writer Flournoy (No. 67) says: "He became the greatest living Hebraist and his monumental work, the 'Hexapla,' the Old Testament in six versions arranged in parallel columns, has been of incalculable help in ascertaining and preserving a pure text of this part of the Word of God." Irenaeus and Polycarp. Eusebius has a letter from Irenaeus addressed to Florinus, in which he speaks in detail of his own personal acquaintance and intercourse with Polycarp, who often spoke to him of St. John the Evangelist and of others who had seen the Lord, relating "their discourses and what things he had heard from them concerning the Lord," His miracles and His doctrineof all of which Irenaeus says: "All these were told by Polycarp in consistency with Holy Scripture as he had received them from those who had been eye-witnesses of the life of the Word." Irenaeus was the teacher of Hippolytus. He quotes the books of the New Testament as "the Divine Scriptures," "the Divine oracles," "the Scriptures of the Lord." He quotes from all the books of the New Testament except 3 John and Jude, which together only contain thirty-nine verses; and remember that he was the disciple of Polycarp, who was himself the disciple of St. John. Polycarp writes to the Philippians. He quotes in this letter fifteen books of the New Testament, many of them several times, and St. Matthew ten times. The whole letter is "saturated through and through with New Testament thought and actually made up in large part of its very language." Hippolytus, born about fifty years after the death of St. John, and a disciple of Irenaeus (died about A. D. 235), treats of all our twenty-seven books of the New Testament (including 2 Peter and the Revelation) as Canonical, as "The Holy Scriptures," and as "The Word of God." A remarkable passage is given from his writings in "Hippolytus and His Age," Vol. II. page 144: "There is one God, my brother, and Him we know only by the Holy Scriptures. For in like manner as he who wishes to learn the wisdom of this world cannot accomplish it without studying the doctrines of the philosophers, thus all those who wish to practise the Divine Wisdom will not learn it from any other source than from the Word of God. Let us therefore see what the Holy Scriptures pronounce, let us understand what they teach, and let us believe as the Father wishes to be believed, and praise the Son as He wishes to be praised, and accept the Holy Spirit as He wishes to be given,-not according to our own will, nor according to our own reason, nor forcing what God has given; but let us see all this, as He has willed to show it by the Holy Scriptures." Cf. Eusebius, No. 66, Book V. Chapter 20. Flournoy, No. 67, pages 94, 99, 100, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114. If the various books quoted as Scripture were the same in the year A. D. 250 as in the year A. D. 1907; if their arrangement and number were then the same as now; if their titles were the same; if a quotation from St. Matthew's Gospel or from any other of the Canonical Books then, can be verified as a quotation from the same book now [and all this is so], then we can be sure that the Sacred Books of Scripture cannot have been changed or mutilated between the year 250 and our present date of 1907. In the Diatessaron of Tatian, we find the same Gospels then dealt with as we have in our New Testament of to-day. Canon Edmonds bears striking testimony to the wide circulation and great influence of this work. For this testimony I refer to the latter part of the extract from Canon Edmonds given in Chapter VI. There is one caution to be observed in dealing with the quotations they are not always exact, strictly accurate or verbatim. The scholarship and habit of the day did not require this. The Rev. Dr. George Salmon remarks in his Introduction to the New Testament: "When we think it strange that an ancient Father should not quote with perfect accuracy, we forget that in those days when MSS. were scarce and concordances did not exist, the process of finding a passage in a manuscript (written possibly with no spaces between the lines) 18 was not performed with quite as much ease as an English clergyman writing his sermon with a Bible and Concordance by his side, can turn up any text he wishes to refer to, and yet we should be sorry to vouch for the verbal accuracy of all the Scripture quotations we hear in sermons of the present day." In connection with this it may be stated that the great Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down and Connor, who has been termed "The Glory of the English Pulpit," quotes the familiar John iii. 3, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (A. V.) no less than nine times, only twice in the same words, and not even once quite accurately. Burgon (No. 129, page 20), after pointing out the "precarious" nature of the evidence afforded by verbal quotations of Scripture found in the writings of the Fathers, proceeds as follows: "On the other hand, it cannot be too plainly pointed out that when instead of certifying ourselves of the actual words employed by an Evangelist, their precise form and exact sequence, our object is only to ascertain whether a considerable passage of Scripture is genuine or not; is to be rejected or retained; was known or was not known in the earliest ages of the Church; then, instead of supplying the least important evidence, Fathers become, by far, the most valuable witnesses of all." 18. And I may add without our modern divisions into chapters and verses. IX. OUR HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. HERE is a very remarkable difference between the manuscripts of the Old Testament and the manuscripts of the New Testament. The former are comparatively few in number, while the latter are very numerous. The former, so far as copies go, are practically all alike, while the latter are full of important variations. The question arises, how this can be? About B. C. 168, the King of Syria seized and sacked the City of Jerusalem; by his special order, all copies of the Sacred Books that could be obtained were destroyed or hopelessly defiled. In A. D. 70 came the Roman destruction of City and Temple when Scribes and manuscripts were flung by hundreds into the flames. With their city destroyed, their Temple in ruins, their State and Government broken up, the Sacred Books were all the Jews had left. For the study, teaching and copying of the Sacred Books, leges were formed at Jamnia near Mount Carmel, and at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, which were later transferred to Babylon. schools and col From about A. D. 270 to about A. D. 500 the Talmud was compiled. From about A. D. 500 to about A. D. 1000 the schools of the Massoretes took charge of, and with great care examined and revised the Old Testament MSS., counting verses, words and letters, and when they had got all in order they appear to have destroyed all the MSS. or copies that did not agree with the result of their labours. In our Hebrew MSS. of A. D. 916 (about) we have the Hebrew text of the Old Testament |