EDITIONS
289
EDITIONS
manual texts extant. More recently the apparatus
has been used to better advantage in the edition of
Ginsburg (The New Massoretico-Critical Text of the
Hebrew Bible, 1S94) and in that of Baer and De-
htzsch. The last-named appeared in single books, be-
ginning with the year 1S61. The Books of Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are still want-
ing; both editors are dead, so that their work will have
to be completed by other hands.
(2) Critical Editions of the Pre-Massoretic Text. — The editors whose work we have thus far noticed en- deavoured to restore as far as possible the text of the Massorah. However valuable such an edition may be in itself, it cannot pretend to be the last word which textual criticism has to say concerning the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. After all, the Massoretic text attained to its fixed form in the early centuries of the Christian Era; before that period there were found many text-forms which differed considerably from the Massoretic, and which nevertheless may represent the original text with fair accuracy. The most ancient and reliable witness for the pre-Massoretic text-form of the Hebrew Bible is found in the Septuagint. But it is practically certain that, even at the time of the Sep- tuagint, the original text had suffered considerable corruptions; these can be corrected only by comparing parallel passages of the context, or again by conjec- tural criticism; a critical edition of this kind presup- poses, therefore, a critical edition of the Septuagint text.
Various attempts have been made to restore the pre- Massoretic text of single books of the Old Testament: thus Olshausen worked at the reconstruction of the Book of Genesis (Beitriige zur Kritik des iiberlieferten Textes im Buche Genesis, 1S70); Wellhausen (Text der Biicher Samuelis, 1871), Driver (Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Samuel, 1890), and Klostermann (Die Biicher Samuelis und der Konige, 1887) at the correction of the Books of Samuel; Cor- nill at the correction of the Book of Ezechiel (Das Buch des Propheten Ezechiel, 1886). To these might be added various other publications; e. g., several recent commentaries, some of the works published by Bickell, etc. But all these works concern only part of the Old Testament text. "The Sacred Books of the Old Testament", edited by Paul Haupt (see Criti- cism, Biblical, s. v. Textual), is a series intended to embrace the whole Hebrew text, though the value of its criticism is in many instances questionable; Kittel's "Biblia Hebraica" (Leipzig, 1905), too, deserves a mention among the critical editions which attempt to restore the pre-Massoretic Hebrew text.
n. Edition's of the Greek Text of the Bible. — Before speaking of the Greek text of the New Testa- ment, we shall have to give a brief account of the edi- tions of the Greek books of the Old Testament. They appear partly in separate editions, partly in conjunc- tion with the Septuagint.
1. Separate Editions. — The principal separate edi- tions of the deuterocanonical books appeared at Ant- werp, 156G (Plantin), 1584, and with Latin text taken from Ximenes' Polyglot, 1612; at Frankfort, 1694; Halle, 1749, 1766 (Kircher); Leipzig, 1757 (Reinec- cius), 1804 (Augusti), 18.37 (Apel), 1871 (Fritzsche); Oxford, 1805; London, 1871 (Greek and English); Frankfort and Leipzig, 1691 (partial edition); Book of Tobias, Franeker, 1591 (Drusius), and Freiburg, 1870 (Reu-sch); Book of Judith, Wiirzburg, 1887 (Scholz, Commentar); Book of \\isdom, 1586 (Hol- koth's "Pra;lectiones" edited bv Rj-terus); Coburg, 1601 (Faber); Venice, 1827 (Greek, Latin, and Ar- menian); Freiburg, 1858 (Reusch); Oxford, 1881 (Deane); Ecclesiasticus, 1551, '55, '68, '70, '89, '90 (Drusius), 1804 (Bretschneider); Books of Macha- bees, Franeker, 1600 (Drusius); I Alach., Helmstadt, 1784 (Bruns).
2. Editions Joined to the Septuagint. — The history of
v.— 19
these editions of the deuterocanonical books of the
Old Testament is connected with that of the Septua-
gint editions. The reader will find full information on
this question in the article Septuagint.
SwETE, .\n Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cam- bridge, 1902), 171 sqq.; Vrtext und Vebersetsungen der Bibet (Leipzig, 1S97), 64 sqq.; Nestle in Hast., Dictionary of the Bible (New York. 1903). IV, 437 sqq.; Kaulex in Kirchenlez., II, 596 sq.; Masch, Bibliotheca sacra (Halle, 1778). I, 427-436.
The newly invented art of printing had flourisbed for more than half a century before an attempt was made to publish an edition of the Greek New Testa- ment. The Canticles, Magnificat , and Benedict us were printed at Milan, 1481; at Venice, 1486 and 1496, as an appendix to the Greek Psalter; John, i, 1, to vi, 58, appeared in Venice, 1495 and 1504, together with the poems of St. Gregory Nazianzen ; the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, John, i, 1-14, was published at Venice, 1495, and at Tilbingen, 1511. Not that the reading public of that age did not feel interested in the other parts of the New Testament ; but it did not show any desire for the Greek text of the Bible. After the be- ginnmg of the sixteenth century the world's attitude with regard to the Greek text of the New Testament changed considerably. Not counting the publication of codices, mere stereotype reprints, or the issue of parts of the Testament, the number of editions of the complete Greek text has been estimated at about 550; in other words, since the beginning of the sixteenth century, every year has witnessed the publication of, roughly speaking, two new editions of the complete Greek text. For our present purpose, we may con- sider the principal editions under the four headings of the Complutensian, the Erasmian, the Received, and the Critical text.
1. The Complutensian Text. — It was the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, who began at Alcala, in 1502, the preparation of the edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and of the New Testament in Greek and Latin. It has been thus far impossible to ascertain what codices served as the basis of the work called the Compluten- sian Polyglot. Though Leo X sent from the Vatican Library some manuscripts venerandce retustatis for the use of the scholars engaged in the work at AlcalA, it is quite certain that the well-known Codex Vaticanus was not among them. It appears that the Greek New Testament text of the Polyglot rests on the read- ings of a few manuscripts only, belonging to the so- called Byzantine family (see Criticism, Biblical, s. v. Textual). The charge that the Complutensian text was corrected according to the evidence of the Latin Vulgate, is now generally abandoned, excepting with regard to I John, v, 7. The New-Testament text is contained in the fifth or, according to other arrange- ments, in the last of the six folios of the Polyglot ; it was finished 10 Jan., 1514, and though the rest of the work was ready 10 July, 1517, four months before the great cardinal's death (8 Nov., 1517), it was not pub- lished until Leo X had given his permission propria motu, 22 March, 1520.
The Complutensian te.xt, corrected according to certain readings of the Erasmian and of that of Ste- phanus, was repeated in the Antwerp Polyglot pub- lished, under the auspices of King Philip II, by the Spanish theologian Benedict Arias Montanus and his companions, and printed by the celebrated typo- grapher, Christopher Plantin, of Antwerp, 1569-72. The Greek New Testament text occurs in the fifth and in the last of the eight folios which make up the Ant- werp Polyglot; in the fifth it is accompanied by the Syriac te.xt (both in Hebrew and SjTiac letters), its Latin version, and the Latin Vulgate; in the eighth volume, the Greek text has been corrected in a few passages, and is accompanied by the interlinear Latin Vulgate text. The text of the fifth volume of the Antwerp Polyglot was repeated only in the fifth vol- ume of the Paris Polyglot, 1630-33, while that of the
