"i give ihe/e II oo/ii
for the founding of a Collect in this Colony'

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1910

THE ANGUS LECTURESHIP.

VI.
SIDE-LIGHTS ON NEW TESTAMENT
RESEARCH. 1908.

Side-Light:

s

ON

New Testament Research.

SEVEN LECTURES
Delivered in 1908, at Regent's Park College,
London.

BY
J. RENDEL HARRIS.
M.A., D.LITT., &c..
Director of Studies at the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak,
Near Birmingham.

ILon&on :

THE KINGSGATE PRESS,
4, Southampton Row, W.C.

JAMES CLARKE & Co.,
13 & 14, Fleet Street, E.G.

PKINTED BT
THE KIJSTGSGATE PRESS,
London and Bedford,

PRELIMINARY NOTE.
The Angus Lectureship has its origin in a
Fund raised as a testimonial to the Rev. Joseph
Angus, M.A., D.D., as an expression of the sense
entertained by the subscribers of his character
and services as President of the Baptist Theo
logical College, formerly situated at Stepney and
now at Regent's Park, London. Dr. Angus
having intimated his desire that the Fund should
he devoted to the establishment of a permanent
Lectureship in connection with the College, a
Trust has been constituted for the purpose; its
income to be " administered and applied by the
College Committee for the establishment and
maintenance of a Lectureship, to be called the
¦* Angus Lectureship,' in connection with the said
College, for the delivery of periodic lectures on
great questions connected with Systematic,
Practical, or Pastoral Theology, or the Evidences
and Study of the Bible, or Christian Missions,
or Church History, or Kindred Subjects."

vi. Pfeliminary Note.
It is further provided that the College Com
mittee, in conjunction with the Trustees, shall
once in two years, or oftener (should exceptional
circumstances render it desirable) " appoint and
engage a Lecturer, who shall ordinarily be a
member of the Baptist denomination, but who
may occasionally be a member of any other
body of Evangelical Christians, to deliver a
course of not more than eight Lectures, on some
subject of the nature herein before mentioned."
In accordance with these provisions, the Rev.
Dr. Angus delivered, at Regent's Park College,
in the year 1896, a Course of Six Lectures on
Regeneration, afterwards published.
The sixth course, delivered in the year 1908,
is contained in the present volume.
The sentences above marked as quotations are from
the Deed of Trust, executed March, 1896.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
LECTURE I. — The Rate of Progress in New
Testament Research . . . i
LECTURE II. — The Verdict of Succeeding
Days on Ancient Conflicts . . 36
LECTURE III.— Some Speculations of Textual
Criticism Justified . . . -79
LECTURE IV. — The Romance of the Versions hi
LECTURE V. — Side-lights on the Authorship
of the Epistle to the Hebrews . . 148
LECTURE VI. — Further Reflections on the
Art of Conjectural Emendation . 177
LECTURE VII. — Side-Lights from the New
Testament on the Relation of Chris
tianity TO THE Greek World . . 212

ERRATA.

p. 12, note, 1. 8 from end : for " is " read " it."
p. i6, last word : for " was " read " had been.''
p. 17, first word : for " followed " read " preceded."
p. 30, 4 lines from bottom : for " MS." read " MSS."
p. 32, Hne 8 from bottom : for " xx. 4 " read " xxii. 4."
p. 46, 5 lines from bottom : for 'B^^a$d read 'Brj^aOd.
p. 51, add to note; "A gfood parallel is Ashdod=Azotus
(so the Septuagint, Herodotus, and Luke)."
p. 62, 1. II : for " Anti-Nicene " read " Ante-Nicene."
p. 81, 1. 8 from bottom; for " entitled '' read " entitled' " and
add on margin : " ' as in R.V."
p. 88, 7 lines from end : for " or " read " of."
p. 90, 1. 7 from bottom ; remove the line.
p. 98, 1. II ; delete " at end of line.
p. 103, line 5 from bottom : for " viii. 2 " read " viii. 11."
p. 115, 1. 8 : for " either " read " each."
p. 143, last line : for " we " read " We."
p. 173, 1. 16: for Tats read rats.
p. 179, 1. 6 from end : for "only seen" read " seen only" ; and
so in the next clause.
p. 181, 1 3: for "vii. 9 " read " vi. 9."
p. 185, 1. 7 : for vrib read inro.
p. 187, 1. 10 ; for "that " read " than."
p. 198, 1. 5 : for i/jL^aTevav read e/x^arevrnv.
I. 7 ; after " mean by" add ifjiPaTeitav.
p. 205, 1. I : after " and " add " , in part,"
p. 210, 1. 10 from end: for " to you that believeth " read "to
you that believe."
p. 210, 1. 1 1 ; for " Descenus " read " Descensus."
p. 215, after 1. 12, add the missing line : " reference to
philosophic schools, that Epicurus."
p. 229, 1. 2 from end : " indiscreta sunt " for " indiscretasunt."
p. 235, 1. 19 ; put the comma after the Greek word.

SIDE-LIGHTS ON NEW TESTAMENT
RESEARCH. LECTURE I.
The Rate of Progress in New Testament
Research.
THE criticism of the New Testament is, in.
our day, one of the progressive sciences.
It has history and it has outlook. In its.
history there are eras from which we reckon,
in its prospect there are expectations which are
of the colour of jocund day, in spite of the mist
upon the mountain tops. Its record involves
epoch-making discoveries which revolutionize the
text, epoch-making minds which interpret the
materials both new and old. " This was a great
discovery," and " this was a great man," we say,
in all the retrospect of genuine scientific life, and
1 T

Z Side-lights on New Testament Research.
we can certainly say it in New Testament criticism,
whether we begin our reckoning with Erasmus,
or whether we end it with Hort. Listen carefully
and you will hear the spirits that preside over the
various sciences talking to one another and to
themselves; they have been assigned the duty
of ministering to those who are intellectually
to inherit salvation, each having his order and
his duty (as the Jews assigned angels to the
separate elements and even set one to look after
the wild beasts);! and the refrain which you will
catch from their soliloquy or from their inter
course is the confession of Galileo, E pur si muove.
This formula applies both to the matter and to
the method of science, as in Galileo's own case.
It was true of what he saw with his telescope,
it was true of what could be seen in himself when
the instrument of research was turned inward.
For he could not have affirmed motion in the
outward cosmos if he had not experienced motion
in the inward man. There were " new lands,
rivers and mountains in the spotty globe " of
his own brain, as well as in the moon that he
saw " from the top of Fiesole or in Valdarno."
Now in every science our Master says to us
! See Hermas. Vis. iv.

The Rate of Progress.

" Blessed are your eyes, for they see." So we
may make a calendar to suit each separate
branch of knowledge out of the things seen and
the people that see, out of the epoch-making
events and the epoch-making men.
In the present short course of lectures I wish
to say something about the text of the New
Testament, considered as a field of progressive
research, and to ask_ whether we are likely to
obtain much further light in days to come, either
with regard to the text or its meaning. May we
say, for instance, that the text is settled; or that
it is more than ever, and perhaps finally un
settled ? May we look at the foot of the page of
a critical New Testament, upon the various
readings in their mounded heaps, and say com
placently, as Bentley did, that it doesn't matter?
Are we as sure as he was that he had a test by
which to separate the precious from the vile, and
that " out of a labyrinth of thirty thousand
various readings that crowd the pages of our
present best editions, all put upon equal credit, to
the offence of many good persons, this clue so
leads and extricates us, that there will be scarce
two hundred out of so many thousands that can
deserve the least consideration." How is that

I Side-lights on New Testament Research.
for optimism ? ^ Why, there are nearly two
hundred alternative readings to Matthew alone,
at the foot of the pages of Westcott and Hort's
New Testament after a criticism that was
certainly drastic, and almost as self-confident as
Bentley's. " Scarce two hundred that can
deserve the least consideration! " Bentley's
language reminds me of an experience of my own
some thirty years ago. One of the fellows of my
college came into my room one day and found
me poring over the various readings in Tischen-
dorf's New Testament. He asked me why I was
wasting my time upon that: the question, said
he, was settled thirty years before. The speaker
was in the year of grace 2 B. H. (i.e. two years
before Hort), and he assumed that the problem of
the New Testament text had been settled in the
year 32 B.H. If I had believed his warning, many
1 Equally optimist was his reply to Collins in the famous
Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Freethinking, " not
frightened therefore with the present 30,000, I for my
part, and (as I believe) many others would not lament, if
out of the old manuscripts yet untouched 1,000 more were
faithfully collected; some of which without question would
render the text more beautiful, just and exact; though of
no consequence to the main of religion, nay perhaps wholly
synonymous in the view of common readers, and quite
insensible in any modern version."

The Rate of Progress.

things would not have happened: for example,
I should not be lecturing here to-day on the rate
of progress in New Testament Research. But
if we must not say that the text of the New
Testament is settled, what are we to say of its
unsettlement ? Is it true that it doesn't matter;
or is the unsettlement of the text like the tremors
in the seismic instruments of some volcanic obser
vatory which tell us that Vesuvius is alive and
that we are going to hear from him presently?
Dr. Hort, to whom I have referred as one of
the calendar men of the science, is almost as
much of an optimist as Bentley, only his optimism
takes a different form. He occasionally despairs
of the text and suggests emendations outside the
manuscript evidence; but he is quite confident
that the text has never undergone heretical
manipulations and that no doctrines of Chris
tianity are affected by the investigations of the
textual critic. To make sure that I do not mis
represent him I will transcribe some of his actual
words :i " It will not be out of place to add here
a distinct expression of our belief that even
among the numerousl unquestionably spurious
readingsi of the New Testament there are no signs
1 Introduction pp. 282 — 285.

i Side-lights on New Testament Research.
of deliberate falsification for dogmatic purposes."
" Accusations of wilful tampering with the text
are accordingly not unfrequent in Christian an
tiquity; but with a single exception, wherever
they can be verified they prove to be groundless,
being in fact hasty and unjust inferences from
mere diversities of inherited text." The one ex
ception which Dr. Hort allows to his rule is that of
the text of Marcion, who mutilated the Gospel of
Luke in the interests of his own theological system.
And Dr. Hort concludes with two optimistic
statements : first, that " the books of the New
Testament as preserved in extant documents
assuredly speak to us in every important respect
in language identical with that in which they
spoke to those for whom they were originally
written"; second, that "it would be an illusion
to anticipate important changes of text from
any acquisition of new evidence." A good deal
has happened since those sentences were written,
and much water has flowed even under the
theological bridges where the currents are usually
abnormally slow. It will be sufficient to say
that the assumptions of textual certainty and
almost final textual accuracy have not been
verified, and that there is much new evidence

The Rate of Progress.

constantly coming to light, some of which does
matter not a little. Perhaps Dr. Hort's mis
statement under this head is due to an error,
with which he and Dr. Westcott started on their
work — that the evidence was all collected and that
they had only to avail themselves of the labours
of their predecessors. So far, then, we find
premature optimism to prevail with regard to
the outcome of New Testament criticism, and
premature optimism is not one of the marks of
progress. The fact is that in spite of all the work done
by great and good men upon the subject.
New Testament Criticism has not yet found its
Newton. That does not mean that we are not
making progress, real and substantial progress.
There was progress before Newton, progress
after him, progress especially in him; there is
progress between one Newton and the next. It
is almost necessary to remind ourselves of this,
because there was, and still is, especially in
Cambridge circles, something like a belief that
the laws of intellectual progress were suspended
by Providence at the time of Dr. Hort's death,
and many absurd things have been said about the

8 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
finality of his analysis of the grouping of the New
Testament MSS., which that acute and modest
scholar would have been the first to repudiate.
Now, in order to find out what has been done
in this branch of science, let us look back a little ;
and I suggest that a good date to look back
to will be the year of grace 1881. In this year
there jpccurred three events that were, for
Englishmen at all events, of prime importance in
the history of New Testament criticism : the first
was the publication of the Revised Version of
the New Testament ;i the second the almost
coincident^ publication of the Greek Text of
Drs. Westcott and Hort, followed by Dr. Hort's
Introduction to the same •? the third was the series
of articles against both the Revision and the
Text contributed by Dr. Burgon to the pages of
the Quarterly Review. To these three great
events I add one microscopic detail from my
own experience. The year 1881 is the date of
1 i.e. on May 17, 1881. 2 i.e. on May 10, 1881.
3 Professor Sanday {Cont.Rev. Dec. 1881) says that the
publication of the Greek Text five days before the Revised
Version was an undesigned coincidence : " There seems
to have been no deliberate plan in such coincidence as
there was." I do not find this very convincing.

The Rate of Progress.

my own personal estrangement from mathematics,
and conversion to criticism! The date explains
my presence here to-day.
Now it is not my intention to discuss the rival
merits of the Authorised and Revised Versions.
The influence of the new version has been
chiefly felt amongst the race of Bibliolaters,
whom it has converted from Monolatry to Dilatry,
from the cult of the A. V. to that of alternative
A. V. and R.V., with a lesser subordinate divinity
known as R.V. mg. The two versions have
become a pair of heavenly twins to whom appeal
is made alternately, much as the Romans used
to swear Mecastor and Edepol. The instinctive
desire of Protestant Christians for authoritative
judgments from the book has expressed itself in
the language of dilemma. I am not prepared
to say that the desire is altogether wrong. It
can be upheld on spiritual grounds. If we had
nothing to discuss except a new translation of
the sacred text, it would probably be sufficient
to say that the Revised Version of the N.T. is a
very bad translation and pass on. It is almost
inconceivable to me that it can ever be ac
cepted by the English-speaking people, whose
language it so ruthlessly perverts. Dr. Burgon

10 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
was surely right when he denounced it as
follows :
" How it happened that, with so many splendid
scholars sitting round their table, they (the
Revisers) should have produced a Translation
which, for the most part, reads like a first-rate
schoc boy's crib — tasteless, unlovely, harsh,
unidiomatic; servile without being really faith
ful — pedantic without being really learned — an
unreadable Translation, in short; the result of
a vast amount of labour indeed, but of wondrous
little skill — how all this has come about it were
utterly useless at this time of day to enquire."
And I do not think that the attempts which are
from time to time made to rehabilitate the
Revised Version in public estimation will have
any success (if indeed rehabilitation can be predi
cated where a position was never really occupied).
The defenders of the Revised Version of the
N.T. will disappear with the Revisers them-
. selves and with those that are attached to them
by what the Romans call pietas.^ Dr. Wey
mouth's New Testament in Modern Speech will,
perhaps, live longer. Why then do I refer to
1 I have been struck by the way in which in certain
circles the very infelicities of the Revised Version have

The Rate of Progress. It
the Revised Version as an epoch-making event?
The reason consists, not in the translation, but in
the text which underlay it. Now, for the first
time, the whole world of English-speaking*
Christians^ was face to face with the reality
and extent of the variations in the text of the
New Testament. Up to the year 1881, few were
aware that there were any important changes
to be faced; only those who were close students.

become the object of devotion. For instance, I noted
recently that a scholar of such excellent taste and judg
ment as Professor Burkitt quotes the Gospel in the form " If
thy hand make thee to stumble.'' I also remember once
taking the late Dr. Schaff (" der unermiidliche Schaff " of
the Germans) to call on Dr. Westcott with a view to the
removal of certain barbarisms from the Version upon which
they had been engaged together; and when Dr. Westcott
asked sharply for instances of the suggested improvement
and reference was made to 2 Peter i. 5 (" Supply in your
faith virtue, etc."), Dr. Westcott angrily replied (and it was.
the only occasion on which I ever saw him ridipg the wild
horse, anger), that he would sooner cut off his right hand'
than alter that translation. A strange fascination for a
rendering in Baboo-English of what Dr. E. A. Abbott, I
believe, once called Baboo-Greek.
2 This is what differentiates the situation from that
created by the publication of Mill's New Testament, and
by Dr. Bentley's proposals for the purifying of the Greek
Text. They raised a very respectable storm, but it was;
in an academic teapot.

12 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
or who read independent translations like Dr.
Davidson's translation of the text of Tischendorf,
knew that the Greek text had passed into the
furnace of criticism, and that it would not come
out exactly the same as it went in.i But now
on the margin of almost every page there
appeared warning notes about what was
to be read in " certain ancient MSS.," or in
" some ancient authorities "; and the uncertainty
produced by these references was accentuated
by a suspicion that it was only the want of a
two-thirds vote which kept such marginal matters
! Many of the rank and file read the translation of
the Codex Sinaiticus which appeared as the thousandth
volume of the Tauchnitz Library: the ministers, at least
the more thoughtful ones of my acquaintance, read David
son's translation of the eighth edition of Tischendorf.
This last has a long introductory preface, marked by
extraordinary inaccuracies uttered with great air of know
ledge. I remember Ezra Abbot of Harvard (the most
accurate scholar I think I have ever known), pointing out
to me some of Davidson's blunders. Amongst other
things he tilts at Alford's Greek Text because is was, by
confession, a diplomatic text. Davidson did not know that
¦" diploma " was another name for a manuscript, and that
Alford's text professed to be based upon the manuscripts
themselves. But the fact is, as Burgon loved to insinuate,
very few of the Revisers even, who set themselves to
re-construct the New Testament Text, had ever handled
or collated a codex for themselves.

The Rate of Progress. 13
out of the text itself. ^ And whatever suspicions
were aroused were confirmed by the controversy
which arose and the battle royal which prevailed
over the merits of the Revision generally. In
judicious Revisers began to tell the secrets of their
prison-house, and in a very little while the Chris
tian Church was taking sides for or against this or
that rendering. Emerson described the spiritual
temper of his time as " a whole generation of
gentlemen and ladies out in search of a
religion; " and so here a whole generation of
.Christian people were out in search of a correct
theory of the text of the New Testament. And
when we reflect how difficult it is to get any but
experts to take an interest in matters which every
one ought to know something about, I think that,
if the Revisers did nothing more than to force
the attention of Christian people to the origins
of the Christian documents, they accomplished
a great result, and so produced an epoch-making
work — though not in the way that they intended.
The chief value of the Revision therefore consists
in the Greek text which underlies it. This is, to
I A vote of one-third of the revisers present in favour of
a reading of the Authorised Version was sufficient to secure
it from disturbance.

14 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
a very large extent, the revised text of Westcott
and Hort, copies of which were confidentially
placed, in advance of publication, in the hands of
all the revisers, and the merits of which could be
defended and explained by the presence of the
skilled editors themselves who had produced it.
Thus when the Revised New Testament appeared,
every Christian reader had to face such questions
as to what was the real ending of Mark's Gospel,
and whether Jesus really prayed for His enemies
upon the Cross.
So much, in passing, with regard to the
Revised Version. Our next business is with the
text of Westcott and Hort and with the criticisms
which it provoked from Dr. Burgon. Now apart
from the merits of the two sides in this great
controversy it is matter of satisfaction that the
publication and discussion of the Westcott and
Hort text demonstrated that English Scholarship
was to the front in the matter of textual criticism.
For a time it seemed as if Germany had ceased
to take an interest in the subject. Her Bibhcal
students had moved into other fields. Tischendorf
had left no successor in his native country and he
had never Hved to write the Prolegomena which
were to justify the text of his eighth edition. No

The Rate of Progress. 15
such work as Hort's Introduction had ever ap
peared in Germany, nor was there anyone in Ger
many who was able to bring a knowledge of
Patristic quotations to bear upon the criticism of
the text in the way that Burgon did, on almost
every page of his Quarterly Review articles. For
once, English scholars were leading the world ; and
when they fought, the rest of the world looked
on and did not venture to intervene, so as to
draw ofl^ attention from the main combatants.
It need hardly be said that this state of things
could not last. The Germans are not long out
side the knowledge of any great question, and
their apparent isolation was but temporary.
They are now amongst the keenest of textual
critics, and under the leadership of Professor
Nestle, Professor Gregory, and Professor von
Soden are rapidly restoring the balance of power.
Here is a significant bit of evidence given me
by one of my German friends. A few years
since one of the most famous German Univer
sities possessed a copy of Scrivener's edition of
the Cambridge manuscript, known as the Codex
Bezae, which was unused and, I believe, uncut.
To-day it is out of its covers from constant
reference and handling. That will serve for a

16 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
parable of how the tide of textual criticism is
coming in again in Germany, and I think we mav
say that it has not altogether ebbed in England.
So, if national pride be ever lawful, here is a
field in which it may be indulged. Only there
is a caution to be expressed with regard to our
temporary primacy in this field. We did not
deserve any such pre-eminence, in view of the
fact that our great Universities had practically
limited research in this subject to those who are
not members of the Established Church by
closing professorships to those who are not mem
bers of that Church. A nation which elects to live
on half its brains has no right to expect to rule the
world. And until learning is de-clericalised we
cannot expect to reach or to retain the highest
standards. It is surprising that no English
Government sees this; or perhaps we ought to
say it is surprising that the English people do not
see it. We may hope that our great Universities,
as is said of Wisdom generally, will be justified
of their children: but they do harm, by their
narrowness, to the subjects that they profess to
teach. The Revised Version appeared on May 17th,
1 88 1, and within the space of a few days was

The Rate of Progress. 17
followed by the Greek Text of Westcott and
Hort. In the month of August appears the
famous Introduction of Dr. Hort : and in the
Quarterly Review for October the first of the
articles by Dr. Burgon, afterwards incorporated
in the volume entitled The Revision Revised.
Dr. Burgon tells us in the published volume that
he had been working on the first of his articles
all through the long summer days of 1881, and
that when the October number of the Quarterly
Review appeared he knew that the new Greek
Text (and therefore the new English Version)
had " received its death-blow. It might for a
few years drag out a maimed existence ; eagerly
defended by some — timidly pleaded for by
others. But such efforts could be of no avail.
Its days were already numbered, . . ." These
words were written two years after the first
appearance of the Revised Version; they cer
tainly are not destitute of self-confidence.
They announce that two big birds had been
killed, I will not say with one stone, but
with one mitrailleuse. So it becomes proper to
ask whether Burgon had really done these two
things, destroyed the Greek Text of the later
critics, and the English Revision which was built2

18 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
to a large extent, upon it. With regard to the
English Revision, I should, as intimated above,
make a fairly complete surrender — not on
account of its underlying Greek Text so much
as on account of its infelicitous renderings of any
text at all. I think, too, that it should be con
ceded that Burgon was right in saying that none
of those who had attempted to reply to him had
answered his arguments. A glance over the
pamphlets which were produced on the other
side will show what I mean. Canon Farrar
attacked Burgon in the Contemporary Review,^
and assured him that " The Quarterly Reviewer
can be refuted as fully as he desires as soon as
any yscholar has the leisure to answer him." That
means that Farrar had tried to answer him and
found the matter outside either his time or his
capacity. He was no match for Burgon in

1 March, 1882. Farrar was astonishingly feeble, and
often very loose in his statements. How does it look in
the light of to-day to pen a sentence like this : " Not only
has our general knowledge of the Greek language become
far more accurate than it was at any previous period,
but the specialities of the Hellenistic dialect have been
thoroughly mastered by the labours of many successive
grammarians and lexicographers." What would Deiss-
man, Moulton and the papyrologists say to this?

The Rate of Progress. 19
Textual Criticism or in vituperation. Burgon
calls the article a " Vulgar effusion," says that
his " remarks are hysterical," assures him that
" The Quarterly Reviewer can afford to wait — if
the Revisers can; but they are reminded that
it was no answer to one who has demolished
their Master's ' Theory,' for the pupils to keep
on reproducing fragments of it; and by their
mistakes and exaggerations, to make both them
selves and him ridiculous." You will notice the
singular " him " in that last sentence, and the
reference to the "Master;" Burgon knew well
enough that it was Hort with whom he had to
contend, not even Westcott and Hort. He treated
the rest of them as so many buzzing flies, and
went on rattling his challenge on the shield of
Achilles, Achilles meanwhile keeping in his
tent. It was the same with nearly all the other
antagonists. They cut a sorry figure, because
of their want of acquaintance with the subject;
even Dr. Kennedy said nothing that had any
bearing on the debate,^ and Dr. Sanday barely
! Dr. Kennedy's knowledge of the problem as compared
with Burgon's may be seen from the following estimate of
the materials for the determination of the text. Ely
Lectures on the Revised Version, p. xliv. " We find also

20 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
touched the e.dge of the controversy.^ An
exception, however, arose when Dr. Ellicott, the
Chairman of the Revision, volunteered to defend
with another of the Revisers, a selected position,
viz : the change of the reading in I Tim. iii. 1 6
(" God was manifest in the flesh "), as well as to
vindicate generally the textual theory of Dr. Hort,
and the consequent primacy of the Vatican Codex
over all other MSS. of the N.T. On looking over
this controversy again (and I was interested in
it at the time, because I ventured to offer Dr.

some assistance in the passages of Scripture cited by
Christian writers of the earliest ages especially by those
who are usually called Fathers of the Church." " Some
assistance " I
2 His acquaintance with the subject at that time was
not what it is to-day. Like the rest of us, I suspect, he
was learning of Westcott and Hort and learning fast. He
admits as much at the close of his article in the Contem
porary Review. " As I have come forward in defence of
their principles it is perhaps right that I should explain
the degree of my own indebtedness to them. ... I am not
prepared to claim (for myself at least) more than certain
rough results, which a deeper knowledge may perhaps
somewhat modify." A sentence marked by Sandayan in
decision — and modesty. Where Sanday was decided, he
was almost certainly wrong, as in the statement that we
were all agreed as to the worthlessness of the Western
readings.

The Rate of Progress. 21
Ellicott some MS. confirmations, from my own
collations, of certain of his references), it is
impossible to resist the conclusion that Dr.
Ellicott was wholly outclassed. Burgon knew it,
and told him So plainly with savage candour, and
his usual skill in vituperation. How will this do
for candour? " Forgive my plainness, but really
you are so conspicuously unfair — and at the same
time so manifestly unacquainted (except at second
hand and only in an elementary way) with the
points actually under discussion — that, were it
not for the adventitious importance attaching
to any utterance of yours, deliberately put forth
at this time as Chairman of the New Testament
body of Revisers, I should have taken no notice
of your pamphlet." To which piece of candid
criticism may be added the following insinua
tions of want of competence in matters that
belong to the expert. " Did you ever take the
trouble to collate a Sacred Manuscript? If you
ever did, pray with what did you make your
collation ? " " From the confident style in which
you deliver yourself upon such matters, and
especially from your having undertaken to
preside over a Revision of the Sacred Text,
one would suppose that at some period of your

22 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
life you must have given the subject a consider
able amount of time and attention." And when
Burgon had finished his bout with the Bishop,
it must be admitted that he had vastly streng
thened the case for the received text in I Tim.
iii. 1 6, for which he gathered up no less than 300
MSS. witnesses, and any amount of Patristic
testimony, some carried over bodily from his
opponents. It is time for me to state that
I believe he was entirely wrong in his conclusions,
but it is impossible to ignore the vigour of his
onslaught or the range of his artillery. He had
spent five and a half years collating the five
great ancient MSS. throughout the Gospels,^ and
a man who had done that had a right to speak
with conviction, even if he were not altogether
right. Moreover he had accomplished the
gigantic task of searching the Fathers for all
the passages which they quote from the New
Testament and the results of this labour are
preserved in a long series of index volumes now
in the British Museum. It is possible to object
to many of his references and to find fault
with some of the texts which he used, but I
1 I happen to possess his copy of the Roman Edition of
the Vatican Codex.

The Rate of Progress. 23
only wish that I possessed a transcript of those
precious volumes. They were the magazine from
which he drew his thunders in the Quarterly
Review, to the amazement alike of his friends
and enemies.
How was it then that no one answered Burgon ?
Well there were not more than two or three who
could have done it. A person who wanted to
floor Burgon would have done well to begin with
his earlier book in defence of the last twelve
verses of Mark. Here is a case in which
Burgon was undoubtedly wrong, but his defence
of the conventional text was so vigorous and
so adroit, that he held the position for a
quarter of a century after he "ought to have
abandoned it. Not a few critics, such as Samuel
Davidson and the like, tried to dislodge him,
but theirs was mere pea-shooting. And as far
as English scholarship goes, nothing really vital
was said until Hort wrote the long note at the
end of his Introduction,^ which people at once
recognised to be the counterplea to Burgon.
And that note was so closely abbreviated and
so inaccessible to the ordinary reader that I
1 He had already come forward on the question in an
article in the Academy.

24 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
doubt if it made many converts. Some one
should certainly have written a volume directly,
as a reply to Burgon's arguments; the subject
demanded and deserved a separate treatment,
and it would have been a splendid training
ground for one of the younger scholars of the
day. Why did they not do it? Why did we
not do it ourselves ? Our lot might have been
worse 1
But as regards the Quarterly Review articles,
there were not many, as I have said, who could
have ventured into the arena. Dr. Westcott
made an attempt to galvanize the corpse of the
Revised Version into fresh life, by writing a
little book on its merits, which could hardly
prove a reply to those who were occupied
with its defects. And when he came in 1896 to
re-issue the Introduction, after Dr. Hort's death,
he made the following statement with regard to
the controversies which had prevailed. " No argu
ments have been advanced against the general
principles maintained in the Introduction and
illustrated in the Notes, since the publication of
the first edition, which were not fully considered
by Dr. Hort and myself in the long course
of our work and in our judgment dealt with

The Rate of Progress. 25
adequately." One can scarcely call that a reply.
It is only an " Ipse dixi " in the dual.i
There was one man, who could have held and
handled Burgon, had already done it on a minor
point; I mean Dr. Ezra Abbot, of Harvard. I
remember writing to him on the subject, and
asking him whether a reply was not demanded
by these articles in the Quarterly, and I find
amongst my letters his reply to my hint dated
October 22, 1883: "I agree that Burgon has
not been thoroughly answered; but I have
no space or time now to give my view of
the matter. His book entitled the ' Revision
Revised,' a reprint with some modifications of
the three articles in the Quarterly, enlarged,
with the addition of a reply to the two Revisers,
was announced as on the eve of publication a
month or six weeks ago, and even the number
of pages in the book was given in the advertise-

1 There is a precisely similar evasion of criticism on
the part of Westcott in his Lessons of the Revised Version,
pp. 2, 3. " They [the Revisers] heard in the Jerusalem
Chamber all the arguments against their conclusions which
they have heard since; and I may say for myself, that
no amount of restatement of old arguments has in the
least degree shaken my coiifidence in the general results
that were obtained."

26 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
ment; but I do not know that it has yet been
issued." From which it appears that Ezra Abbot
was too busy to take the matter up. But what,
you will ask, of Achilles himself ? Why did not
Hort come out into the open field and settle the
questions at issue, much in the same way as
Bentley settled Boyle over the letters of Phalaris ?
I remember asking him once a question on this
point ; but, if I remember rightly the reasons that
he gave for his silence they resolved themselves
into questions of etiquette. First of all. Dr.
Burgon had never sent him a copy of his articles ;
and second, if I understood his allusion rightly,
he suspected that someone had divulged to Bur
gon the Greek text of the N.T. which had been
submitted to him in confidence as a Reviser — a
proceeding which would naturally have provoked
resentment, although it is difficult to see how
a secret of such magnitude could have been kept
for so long by so many people. As far as my
memory goes that is all the explanation which Dr.
Hort could or would give me. One is not bound,
I suppose, to reply to every attack made upon
himself or his positions; otherwise some of us
would have a sorry life. One may elect to
await the verdict of time, and let one's adversary

The Rate of Progress. 27
crow in triumph over one's apparent acquiescence.
Burgon, himself, quick as he was to snatch at
the laurels of apparent victory, had a word from
the inward monitor on the other side. In his
reply to Ellicott he quotes a famous maxim from
Pindar : 'A/j,£pai 8' eirtXotTTOi fidprvpes (TO<j>u)TaTot.
" That their views (i.e. those of Westcott and
Hort) have been received with expressions of
the greatest disapprobation, no one will deny.
Indispensable to their contention is the grossly
improbable hypothesis that the Peschito is to
be regarded as the ' Vulgate ' (i.e. the Revised)
Syriac : Cureton's, as the ' Vetus ' or original
Syriac version. And yet, while I write, the Abbe
Martin at Paris is giving it as the result of his
labours on this subject, that Cureton's version
cannot be anything of the sort. Whether West
cott and Hort's theory of a ' Syrian ' text has not
received an effectual quietus, let posterity decide."
Then follows the quotation from Pindar. And
what has posterity decided ? The " grossly im
probable hypothesis " has been confirmed in the
strongest manner, by the discovery of a further
old Syriac MS., and a maSs of accessory evidence ;
the Abb6 Martin's pamphlet was written when

28 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
he was under intellectual aberration, and the less
said about it the better; and the argument of
Westcott and Hort can hardly be said to have
received a quietus at all. So, as Abbot refused
to reply to Burgon, and Achilles did not come
out of his tent, let us keep our eyes fixed upon
the remnant of the days and watch what further
light is going to break on the interesting field
of controversy. If you like, let us say that
neither party took the laurel of victory, though
one vociferously claimed it: we will leave them
encamped upon the field, and see in what
directions reinforcements are coming up for the
conclusion of the conflict. i

^ On looking over some old letters belonging to the
eighties, I find a sheaf from Dr. Burgon showing the
greatest interest in the work which I was doing, and giving
me some of the wisest counsels as to how to concentrate
my power of study and what to concentrate upon. I believe
that we remained good friends to the last, and I am
sure that I learned much by the direct intercourse which
I had with him. It is very pleasant to remember this in
the case of those whom we have sometimes remorselessly
criticised.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE I.
In the foregoing lecture I have alluded to the
astonishingly optimistic statements which Dr.
Hort made with regard to the preservation of the
New Testament from hostile and heretical in
fluences. The only exception which he allowed
was that of Marcion's readings, which consisted
mainly in excisions from the text of Luke, made
with a view to the removal of everything which
would involve the New Testament Christian in
the belief in the God of the Old Testament. Now-
even when Dr. Hort makes the admission that
Marcion mutilated the N. T. with a heretical
intention, he does not seem to think that this
made any difference to the evangelical tradition,
but I should say that even in the matter of Mar-
cionism Hort was too optimistic.
We know that Marcion had no Infancy Sections
in his Gospel. Perhaps he had removed them
because he did not wish to recognise a fulfil-

30 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
ment of prophecy. He had no Infancy Sections
because from his point of view, there was no
Infancy. Christ had descended suddenly into the
synagogue (everything was sudden with Marcion,
says Tertullian) and began His work at once.
Now it stands to reason that no such opinion
¦could be held if the Gospel of Luke, as we
know it, had been held at the same time, I
am not speaking of the chapters describing the
Infancy, but of the passage which tells that our
Lord came to Nazareth where He had been brought
up, and went into the synagogue according to His
.custom. Naturally Tertullian could at once
retort upon his Marcionite antagonist and
question as to how the custom arose for a
person who had only just arrived. And it could
only be answered by the Marcionite method of
¦excision. Either the word His must be erased
before custom, or the whole clause must go. If,
therefore, we find the compromising words absent
in a MS. it raises the suspicion of Marcionite]
¦corruption. What do we actually find ? One of
the most famous old Latin MS. (the Palatine
Codex) has lost the clause about " His custom "
altogether. The Codex Bezae omits the word
•" His," and is followed by two other Latin MSS.

Appendix to Lecture L 31
of the first rank. Further the Codex Bezae omits
the clause as to our Lord's having been brought
up in Nazareth, and simply says that He came
into the synagogue. Is not that sufficient to
suggest Marcionism in the current texts of Luke,
and ought we not to recognise it, both in Luke
iv. 1 6 and elsewhere. And will it be sufficient,
on the other hand, to re-assure people and say
that no harm has been done and that no one
ever had a vicious intention in transcription or
preparation of texts ? For it will not be possible
to refer all changes of this kind to Marcion him
self. They are due to a school as well as to a
master. And if one school can alter the text,
why not another ? What is true of the influence
of the Marcionite movement upon the text
is also true of the contemporary heresy of
Encratism. If Marcion affected the text, are
we entitled to say that Tatian never affected it?
We know now that his compound Gospel, the Dia-
tessaron, became for a time the standard Gospel
in the Syrian Church, and that it profoundly in
fluenced the text of the separate Gospels. Is it
to be assumed that on questions hke the eating
of animal food, the drinking of wine, the virtue
of celibacy, and the like, we are to believe that

32 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
no Encratisms appear in the text? A little
enquiry will soon enlighten us. We know now;
that Tatian along with many early believers was
sorely puzzled by the presence of the locusts in
the diet of that very holy man, John the Baptist.
One school, probably those who pass under the
name of Nazarenes or Ebionites, changed the
Greek name of locusts aicptSes into the similarly
sounding word ly/cptScs, " pancakes " for
" locusts." But Tatian was bolder than this,
he removed the locusts, and gave St. John a diet
of " milk and honey " in place of the conventional
menu. This meant Encratism in the text. And
there must have been much more of it, for we
find traces of similar corrections in the oldest
Syriac MSS. that are known to us. In the Lewis
MS., for example, we find the "oxen and fatlings"
removed from the supper of the King in Matt.
XX. 4 : and we find the period of married life of
that holy woman, the prophetess Anna (Luke
ii. 36), reduced from seven years' felicity to a
bare seven days. These instances may suffice
to show how the religious movements of any time
or country affect the text of that time or country.
Nor can such changes be considered as un
important or insignificant. We find the question

Appendix to Lecture I. 33
of the re-action of Ebionite or Adoptionist views
raised (or of Anti-Ebionite or Anti-Adoptionist
corrections) as soon as we study the second-
century textual variations in the light of the
history of doctrine in the second century.
Suppose, for example, we were studying Justin
Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, we should
find Trypho expostulating with Justin over the
titles that he gives to Jesus Christ. Trypho is
ready, or almost ready, for the expression of some
faith in Christ, but he enters a protest against
Justin's way of putting it. He objects to the
Virgin Birth as being comparable to the Greek
legend of Perseus : Justin ought to be ashamed
to say such things, and it would be much better
to regard Christ as a man sprung from human
origin, who on account of His law-abiding and
perfect life was elected to be the Messiah:
(KaTTj^iuxrOai iKkeyrjvai els XpwrToi/.) A little later
Justin returned to the point, and asked Trypho
with regard to his admission that, on account
of his life in accordance with the law of
Moses, Jesus had been elected to be the
Messiah. You can see an Ebionite watchword
protruding through the dialogue, and this means
1 Justin, Dial. 67. 3

34 Side-lights on New Testajaent Research.
 -ji 
that in the second century there was a Judaeo-
Christian party which called Christ, not the Son
of God, but the Elect of G<)d. Is that reflected
on the text of the New Testament? An
examination of the oldest witnesses will show
abundantly that there has been either
(a) An unlawful insertion of the title e/cXeKTos
or exXcXey/iei'os into the text of a number of
passages; or else
(b) There has been an unlawful erasure of^the
same term (which is one of the pre-Christian
names for the Messiah), in the interests of a
progressive Christology.
This is not the place to discuss the point at
length, but it may suffice to show that Dr. Hort
cannot be right in divesting the various readings
of New Testament MSS. of dogmatic significance,
or in assuring us of the universal bona fides of the
transcribers. His statement on these points
must remain an astonishment to us, but perhaps
enough has been said to show why we were not
able to agree with his optimistic views of the
textual history.
For a more balanced judgment we may
compare what my friend, the late Professor
Berger, wrote in regard to the text of the

Appendix to Lecture I. 35
Latin Vulgate {Hist, de la Vulgate, p. viii.) :
" La dogmatique elle-meme a sans doute une
grand part de responsabilitd dans la corruption
du texte de la Bible Latine. . . . Les alterations
dogmatiques, en effet, ne sont pas rares dans
le texte de la Vulgate. . . . Les doctrines
les plus chores aux th6ologiens du moyen
dge exercent toutes leur influence sur le
texte de la Bible. Ici c'est le dogme de la
Trinity, que Ton veut trouver formula en toutes
lettres "dans la Bible et que Ton affirme par la
fameuse interpolation du passage des trois
temoins! C'est la foi en la divinite de J6sus-
Christ qui s'exprime en un grand nombre de
falsifications de detail, toujours au detriment de
son humanitd."
What is true of the Vulgate is true of the
Greek texts which preceded it. But to Dr.
Hort the scribes were all angels, as far as
theology was concerned.

LECTURE II.
The Verdict of Succeeding Days on
Ancient Conflicts.
IN our previous lecture we were discussing
the situation which was created in the year
1 88 1 by the issue of the Revised Version,
and the publication of the New Greek Text of
Westcott and Hort. We saw how hotly both the
translation and the underlying text were assailed
by Dr. Burgon, and how he held his ground
against all comers, and serenely awaited the
judgment of the " remnant of the days " ('A/Aepat
iiriXonroi). As it is nearly thirty years since
that great battle was first joined, and we may,
therefore, ourselves be fairly regarded as chrono
logically identified with the Court of Appeal, it
will be interesting to examine what we think of
the issue now. Suppose that those Quarterly
Review articles had just appeared in October,
1908, instead of in October, 1881, could they

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 37
present the same confident demeanour as on
their actual appearance? We will make an
experiment and see what will happen. The first
case that Dr. Burgon brings forward will be found
on p. 5 of his Revision Revised and runs as
follows :
" Undeniable at all events it is, that the effect
which these ever-recurring announcements [of
the existence of various readifngs] produce on
the devout reader of Scripture, is the reverse
of edifying; is never helpful; is always be
wildering. A man of ordinary acuteness can
but exclaim — ' Yes, very likely. But what of it ? '
My eye happens to alight on ' Bethesda ' (in St.
John V. 2) : against which I find in the margin,
¦ Some ancient authorities read Bethsaida, others
Bethzatha.' Am I then to understand that in
the judgment of the Revisionists it is uncertain
which of those three names is right ? . . . Not
so the expert, who is overheard to moralize con
cerning the phenomena of the case after a less
ceremonious fashion. ' " Bethsaida I " yes the
Old Latini and the Vulgate,^ countenanced by
one manuscript of bad character, so reads.
^ Tertullian bis.
2 Hieron Opp. ii. 177 c. (see the note).

38 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
" Bethzatha\" yes, the blunder is found in two
manuscripts, both of bad character. Why do
you not go on to tell us that another manuscript
exhibits " Belzetha " ? Another (supported by
Eusebius^ and [in one place] by Cyril,^
" Bezatha " ? Nay, why not say plainly that there
are found to exist upwards of thirty blundering
representations of this same word; but that
"Bethesda " — the 'reading of sixteen uncials and
the whole body of the cursives, besides the
Peschito land Cureton's Syriac, the Armenian,
Georgian and Slavonic versions — Didymus,^
Chrysostom,* and Cyril^) — is the only reasonable
way of exhibiting it; to speak plainly, why en
cumber your margin with such a note at alll ' . .
But we are moving forward too fast."
From the foregoing statement you will see
that the judgment of the Revisers was divided
between the three readings Bethesda, Bethsaida
and Bethzatha. Of these, they kept Bethesda
in the text and referred to Bethsaida and Beth
zatha on the margin. The rest of the possible
readings they neglected: there is no need for
1 Hieron iii. 121. * i. 548 c; viii. 207 a.
2 iv. 617 c. ed Pusey. 5 jy. 205.
3 p. 272.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 39
us to go into the jungle after them at present.
It is sufficient to remember that for our purposes
in the first instance we have to keep before our
minds the three forms, Bethesda, Bethsaida and
Bethzatha. The first is the reading of the
Received Text, the second is the reading of the
Vatican Codex (Cod. B),i the third is the reading
of the Sinai Codex (known as cod. b^). The last
two MSS. are said to be MSS. of bad character,
and as these two manuscripts are those which are
commonly followed, the one by Dr. Hort, the
other by Dr. Tischendorf, we may say, if we like,
that it is a choice between three editors, Burgon,
Hort and Tischendorf, of whom the two last are
men of bad character, because they persist in
following MSS. of bad character.^ As I say,
we do not need to go into the jungle for more
readings at present, but if we did, Dr. Burgon
1 It will be confirmed presently from one of the Egyptian
MSS. recently acquired by Mr. Freer of Detroit.
2 How decided were Burgon's -views with regard to the
great Uncials may be illustrated from a marginal note
in his copy of the edition of the Codex Zacynthius, now in
my possession : Tregelles had pointed out (p. iii.) the kind
of text presented by the Codex, and its affinity with the
very best codices. Upon this Burgon writes " I should
have said the very worst 1 "

40 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
would cut our way out on the line that may be
described as the Consentient Testimony of
Catholic Antiquity.
When we turn to Dr. Hort's text, we find
that he does not actually put the reading of
the Vatican MS. into the text ; he puts the Sinai
reading in the text and the other in the foot-note
or margin, but it is quite clear that he really
wants to put the B-reading into the text if it
can be done. For if you look at his note on
the subject {Notes on Select Readings, p. 76) you
will see that he definitely states that Bethsaida
may be right, as it is supported by B. and a
great variety of versions, and he suggests that
the name means House of Fish and might be
very appropriately given to a tank hewn in the
rock. For convenience of reference I will add
the whole of his note.
"John v. 2 : Brie^aed (Marg.) Bij^o-atSa b.c. vg. me
(81780-. cod. opt.) the {BrjSa-). Syr. hi. txt. mg. gr.
actl. (Bij^oo-a.) Tart. Bij^eo-Sa. Syrian (Gr. Lat. [it]
Syr. Arm. incl. Did. Text ^^ 33 {rfie) also Biy^a^a
Le. Eus- Onom. ; also Bek^eOd D (a), Betzatlia {ata, —
eta) h.f. vg. Codd: hence— ^—^a, N L. D. 33 lat. vt. Eus.
Text and margin are but slight modifications
of the same name; and perhaps its purest form

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 41
would be BtjO^aiOd, The House of the Olive.
Brjda-axSd may however be right, as it is
supported by B. and a great variety of vv :i a
tank hewn in the rock might naturally bear the
name House of Fish."
Here we have a pretty bit of jungle, of the
kind which commonly occurs in Textual
Criticism: the sum total of it is that Dr. Hort
unceremoniously rejects the verdict of Catholic
Antiquity; would like to follow the Vatican MS.,
actually follows the Sinaitic MS. with Tischen
dorf, (and explains the two names which he prefers
on their Hebrew etymologies. There then you
have the two opposing critics locked horn in
horn in fight, and the question is what do the
succeeding days say about the probable issue of
the combat between these two strong bulls of
Bashan ?
Now suppose we leave the textual theorists
on one side, and begin investigating the question
without any knowledge, in the first instance, of
the special MSS. involved, only knowing that
the name of the pool has come down to us in
a variety of forms, and wishing to find out
something about it. So we begin by asking
1 i.e. the Egyptian and Ethiopic Versions follow Cod. B.

42 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
questions of the simplest kind that curiosity can
suggest. What is this Bethesda, or whatever
its name may be? The answer is, that it is a
pool in Jerusalem. How do we know that?
Because the Gospel of John opens its fifth chapter
by saying that there is in Jerusalem a certain
pool with an uncertain name. Is the pool yet
extant? The answer is, we do not know; that
is, we do not know in the year 1881. We may
perhaps know in succeeding days. Is there any
way of knowing? Are there any marks
of identification? Yes, it is said to be near
the Sheep-something: but we cannot make
out whether it is Sheep-gate or Sheep-pool or
Sheep-market. Do we know of any Sheep-
gate in Jerusalem? Only from references in
Nehemiah, which appear to place such a gate
in the North Wall of the city, near the East End.
Do we know of any Sheep-pool? Not the least.
Have we any other identification ? Yes, it is said
to have five porches or arches. Is there any
pool in Jerusalem that is flanked by five arches ?
Not that we know of in the year of grace 1881.
Has any one seen this pool since the time when
this event happened, or since it was recorded to
have happened? Yes, it was seen amongst

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 43
others by a certain pilgrim from Bordeaux in
the year ;}^;i A.D. What does he say of it ? He
says that " inside the city there are a pair of
pools, having five arches, which pools are called
Betsaida."! May not this have been a reckless
identification on the part of a pious traveller?
Reckless identification would hardly produce five
arches. Then may we say the real name of the
pool is Bethsaida? No, we may only say that
the Bordeaux pilgrim called it so. He may have
taken the name from his Gospel, and the double
pool with the five arches from his observation.
But in that case have we not conceded the form.
of the name, by a second piece of evidence
coeval with the Vatican Codex, and does not this
virtually settle the question ? No, for Eusebius,
writing about the same time, and with excellent
means of knowing, calls it Bezatha. Then what
are we to do to settle the question ? I thought
we were going to wait the wise testimony of
succeeding days.
Suppose then we transfer ourselves to the city
of Jerusalem in the year 1888, and examine the
excavations which the Roman Catholic monks
^ "interius vero civitati sunt piscinae gemellares, quin-
que porticus habentes, quae appellantur Betsaida."

44 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
are making in the neighbourhood of the Church
of St. Anne in the N.E. comer of the city. They
have brought to light the remains of an ancient
church, and here is a stairway leading down to
a crypt under the church, or perhaps it is an
earlier church. On the N. wall of the crypt there
are the remains of an ancient fresco, and we can
clearly see the figure of an angel; the figure is
crossed by wavy lines of a conventional character
which represent water, and it is clear that what
is commemorated is the troubling of the water
by the descent of the angel into it. We ought,
therefore, to be somewhere in the neighbourhood
of the famous pool. But this is not all. The
wall of the crypt is divided into five compart
ments, which imitate arches. So there can be
no doubt that this is the Bethesda Church.
Carry the excavation under the floor of the
crypt, and a further flight of steps takes you
down to the pool itself, and to five shallow
porticoes on its north side, lying underneath the
imitation arches of the floor above. Here, then,
¦we have what seemed to me when I first saw it,i
shortly after the exposure of the fresco and the
discovery of the pool, the best piece of archaeo-
i In January, 1889.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 45
logical identification that has yet been made in
Jerusalem. The site seems to have been lost
under the rubbish of the N.E. quarter of the city
from very early times, and has been sought by
pilgrims and travellers and scholars in every con
ceivable corner of the city. The accuracy of the
identification rests upon the five arches which flank
the pool ; it can hardly be maintained that these
are an artificial product of a pious church-
builder, who thought he had found Bethesda, for
the pious builder evidently imitated what he had
already found. Nor is there any suggestion on
the part of the Bordeaux pilgrim that a church
had been built over the pool at the time of his
visit, though the arches, or at least the ruins of
them, were there already. i
We may fairly claim, then, that the pool has
been found, and in all probability the sheep-gate
can be identified somewhere in the same angle
1 Dr. Mommert Der Teich Bethesda pp. 34, argues that
the Bordeaux Pilgrim did not see- the five arches, but
simply took them from the text: for, he says, Eusebius in
his Onomasticon says that the Bethesda Pool is the probatic
[i.e. sheep-] pool, formerly having five arches. And Jerome
in his translation of Eusebius says that the pool had five
arches formerly. But all of this is quite consistent with
the theory that the ruins of the arches and their ancient
foundations could be clearly made out.

46 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
of Jerusalem, as suggested by the references in
Nehemiah. But what are we to call the pool?
To answer this question, look at any map of
the Holy City and you will find the quarter in
which the pool has been located is known by
the name of Bezetha. The name is so much like
the forms which are given in the critical
apparatus to John v. 2, that it will be worth our
v(rhile to study the name that is written across
the N.E. angle of the map of Jerusalem. It is
curious that so few have seen the meaning of
this striking coincidence of names. In the
edition of the Itinerary of the Bordeaux Pilgrim
published by the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society,
Sir Charles Wilson notes that the name Bezetha,
by which Josephus distinguishes the hill north of
the Temple, is merely a different form of Beth
zatha; and that it may be suggested as possible
that the pool derived its name from the hill and
was known as the " Pool of Bethzatha." And
in a note he argues that " as far as reasons of
language go Be^eOd, By^aOd, BrjO^aOd, etc. may be
different forms of the same word. Dr.- Mommert
suggests hesitatingly that Eusebius changed the
name of the pool from Bethesda to Bezatha, in
order to define the pool by the quarter of the

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 47
city where it is found: but he does not follow
up the clue. Eusebius had no need to make any
change. The names were the same. Conder
also came near the identification in Hastings'
Dictionary where he notes : " In ^^ and L the name
is given as Bethzatha (comp. the name of Bezetha
for the north quarter of Jerusalem); in B. it is
Bethsaida." The comparison would have been
better, if he had given the real reading of L.,
which is Bezatha. But evidently the point had
not seriously impressed him, for he goes
on to say that " a more probable site for
Bethesda is the Virgin's Pool ... at the foot
of the Ophel slope south-east of the Temple
as proposed by Robinson," from which it appears
that he did not attach serious weight when he
wrote the article to the Bethesda excavations.^
It is curious that he pays so little attention to
them. Why, then, do we call this corner of the city
"^ In the account of the re-discovery of the Pool given
in Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund
for 1888, Conder has a note and calls it the Mediseval
Pool of Bethesda. He says that it is doubtful whether it
can claim to be the real Bethesda, and talks of the Virgin's
fountain. Why the Pilgrim of Bordeaux and Eusebius
should be called Mediseval does not appear.

48 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Bezetha? The answer is that we take it from
Josephus, to whose pages we must now turn,
in order to verify the spelling etc. We shall
find then in Josephus' Wars of the Jews, five
passages in which he describes the elevated
ground on the north df the Temple and beyond
the Tower of Antonia by the name in question.
He tells us that it was separated from the Castle
of Antonia by a deep fosse, and that the Timber
Market was in the neighbourhood, and he explains
to us the meaning of the name. Let us look at
the MSS. of Josephus, to see whether there are
any .variations in the spelling, for there is a critical
apparatus to Josephus, as well as to the Gospel
of John. We at once discover that many of the
same variations turn up which were noted by
Burgon and Hort. For instance we have Betheza,
Bethaza, Bezetha, Bethzetha, Bethesdan, Besde-
than, Besdathan, Bethsaidam, Bezethana and
Zebethana, with some even worse aberrations;
i.e., we have a series which is very like what
we have in John; and it seems clear that the
aberrations are due to the same or similar causes,
and they can be reduced to the same types as
in the Gospel. Fortunately the text of Josephus
is not under the care of Catholic Antiquity, in

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 49
the way that Burgon supposes the N.T. to be;
and we are therefore at liberty to say that no
sane critic would edit the name in Josephus as
Bethesda or as Bethsaida; the only alternatives
being Betheza and Bezetha, or slight modifications
of these. I notice that Niese, the latest editor,
does not insist that the same spelling should rule
throughout Josephus, but edits now Betheza, now
Bethezan, now Bezetha, and Bezatha. The real
spelling seems to me to be one of these forms.
Now if this is what Josephus calls the quarter of
the city, and the same name is given to the pool
in the Codex L., the probability is that Codejx
L. has best preserved the original name, which
is very close indeed to what Hort edited, evidently
against his will. So we shall say that the name
of the pool is Betheza or Bezetha.
But then there is another point of interest which
comes up out of our observation of the coincident
readings and variations in Josephus and in John.
We know also, from Josep;hus, the meaning of
the name. For instance he tells us in one place
(B.J. ii. 530) that " Cestius burned the Bezetha
or Newtown, and the Timber Market and then
encamped over against the King's Palace," (i.e.
the Antonia). In another passage (B.J. v. 151)
4

50 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
he tells us that " in the language of the district
the recently built quarter of the city was called
Bezetha which you may translate into Greek as
New Town or Kainopolis.''^ Here again we see
how both Burgon and Hort are at fault : Burgon
by supporting Bethesda which means House of
Mercy, Hort by suggesting House of the Olive
or House or Place of Fish. It must be quite clear
by this time that the name Bethsaida has
wandered from the real Fish-Town on the Lake
of Galilee: the reading of the Vatican Codex is
certainly wrong. As to the other forms, there is
something to be said for Bethesda, if we abandon
the meaning commonly given to it, and regard the
spelling as an attempt to express more accurately
what Josephus tells us is the true meaning. For
it is clear that he is working on the two Hebrew
words Beth which means " a house " and Had ash
which means " new." And just as he makes
Qadesh into the Greek Kedasa, so he has made
Newtown into Bethedesa from which Betheza is a
more rapid pronunciation. But it should be
noticed that the Bethesda of the Received Text is
very near, after all, to what must have been the
1 So also in B.J. v. 246.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 51
original Hebrew. ^ Probably then it is an editorial
refinement on the part of some early reviser and
a very good one. This then is what the succeed
ing days have to say on the subject of the name
of the Pool: both the great antagonists were
wrong, Hort badly wrong, and Burgon very
slightly. But we have found the Pool and are
very near indeed to its name. So far, so
good. But now, after we have gained a little light on
an obscure problem, without, as we hope, being
unduly tedious, may we leave the great warriors
on one side and examine into some other
questions relating to this very interesting section
of John. It will be noticed that we have already
done the Fourth Evangelist a very good turn;
we have vindicated his geographical accuracy
in a very important particular. Now let us go
1 It is an interesting study to trace in the Old Testament
the transliterations of the O.T. names by the various scribes
and translators. For instance, in Judges vi. 25 the text
of B. has Esdri ( 'Eo-Spet ) where the text of A. has 'le^pC
(Yezri). Both transliteration? are an attempt to render
a Hebrew Zayin. So that in this literature we may
equate the sd and z without difficulty. In the same way
most MSS. and translators will render Ezra by Esdras,
and there is no need to assume the d to be intrusive.

52 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
on and see if we can vindicate his history, i As
you probably know, there has been great con
troversy over the first verse of this fifth chapter
of John, and the reference in it to a feast of the
Jews which Jesus attended. Not merely have the
modern commentators been perplexed who had
to choose between the difficulty of adding one
more Passover to the Ministry, or of bringing
Jesus to Jerusalem for a visit at some other time
of the year, when there seemed nothing in the
Synoptic Tradition or in the early belief of the
Church to warrant such an extension of the
Ministry or such a frequency and variety in our
Lord's visits to Jerusalem. Even the earlier
Patristic students and the copyists of the sacred
text have shown that they were under the spell
of the same perplexity. Take the case of the
copyists. Probably half the early MSS. have
inserted^ the definite article before "feast," so
as to indicate the Passover: "After this was
the feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusa
lem." That can only mean the Passover. The
1 I have already said something on this point in the
pages of the Expositor (December, 1906), but the matter is
important and will bear repetition, especially with varia
tions and expansions.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 53
question was discussed as early as the end of
the second century, for Irenaeus in counting up
how many Passovers Jesus had kept, says that
the second Passover was the one at which he
healed the paralytic who was lying by the Pool
for thirty-eight years. ^ And not a few modem
critics have made the same mistakes as Irenaeus
about the Passover, as well as continued the
curious opinion that the sick man had been
waiting thirty-eight years for a successful bath.
Another MS. emphasises the belief by adding the
words " of unleavened bread." Another inserts
the word " their " before the feast, so as to
make it the feast of the Jews par excellence,
just as we find it described in the Peter Gospel.^
One MS. adds the explanation that it was the
Feast of Tabernacles. When we come to the
Fathers, we find Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexan
dria suggesting that it was Pentecost. And what
perplexed the ancients did not cease to puzzle
^ Iren. 147.
2 The passage in the fragment in Ev Petri is as follows :
"And he delivered Him to the people on the day before
the Unleavened Bread, which is their Feast."
We should compare the Lewis Syriac in John vi. 4, where
we have " Now there was at hand the Feast of the Un
leavened Bread of the Jews."

54 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
the moderns, who added the Day of Atonement
and the Feast of Purim, thus giving us pretty
clear demonstration that neither ancients or
moderns really knew anything about it. Accord
ingly Westcott says of the unnamed feast that " it
has been identified with each of the three great
Jewish Festivals — the Passover (Irenaeus, Euse
bius, Lightfoot, Neander, Gresswell, &c), Pente
cost (Cyril, Chrysostom, Calvin, Bengel, &c.),
and the Feast of Tabernacles (Ewald, &c.). It
has also been identified with the Day of Atone
ment (Caspari), the Feast of Dedication (Peta-
vius ?), and more commonly in recent times with
the Feast of Purim (Wieseler, Meyer, Godet, &c.)."
That nameless feast has been chased round the
calendar as the pool has been hunted round the
city. I am now going to explain to you how I
was led to a conclusion quite different from
these, in spite of the rich variety of choice which
they present, at a time when I was not thinking
anything about the Gospel of John or our Lord's
ministry. It was during the summer of the year
1903 when I was making a journey across Asia
Minor from Persia to the Mediterranean, through
a region which had been horribly pillaged and
devastated by the massacres of 1895 and 1896,

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 55
and which is still the scene of constant " bleeding
white " of the Christian populations. I passed
through a village named Habusu, in the plain
of Harpoot, and in the course of conversation
over the manners and customs of the people,
I ascertained that they have a remarkable
practice of waiting for the descent of the Angel
Gabriel on the night of the New Year. The
scene of the descent is supposed to be the
village pool, which is dammed up on the previous
afternoon in expectation of the event, so as to
give more scope to the Angel, and to those who
practise the cult. The belief is that the descent
of the Angel bestows healing virtues upon the
water, and that, in particular, the person who'
first succeeds in drawing the water after the stroke:
of midnight will find it turn to gold and silver
in his possession. Accordingly the whole popu
lation, with the exception of the Protestants, who
look upon the business as superstitious, turn out
into the water on New Year's eve, in the hope
of bettering their fortunes and securing good
luck for the coming year.
What struck me at once in this curious custom
was the parallel to the account in the Gospel
of John, and the first suggestion was that the

56 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
population of this far inland village between the
Taurus ranges, had imitated something which
they had read in the Gospel. But there were
objections to this. First of all, it was a common
custom of both Turks and Christians; second,
there was just the variation that one expects in
folk-lore practices which have come down out
of immemorial antiquity. The Jerusalem custom
femphasised health as the blessing brought by
the Angel; the Asia Minor practice put the
emphasis on wealth and prosperity. Moreover,
it was doubtful if the Armenian population could
have, at a very early period, such as seems
required by the practice of the whole population,
transferred the account of the Angel's descent
from their Gospel, when it is almost certain that
their Gospel did not originally contain the account.
Then I came across the account of a famous
Burmese Festival, when the King of the Nats,
or .Burmese Angels, descends to inaugurate the
New Year. It had striking parallels with the
Jewish Feast on the one hand, and with the|
Armeno-Turkish Festival on the other. Here
again the festival was timed for midnight on New
Year's eve, and the following is the description
given of it by Monier Williams :

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 57
" When the day arrives, all are on the watch,
and just at the right moment, which occurs
invariably at midnight, a cannon is fired off
announcing the descent of the Nat-King upon
earth. Forthwith men and women sally forth
ou. of their houses, carrying pots full of water,
consecrated by fresh leaves and twigs of a sacred
tree, repeat a formal prayer and pour out the
water on the ground. At the same time, all who
have guns of any kind discharge them, so as to
greet the New Year with as much noise as
possible. Then, with the first glimmer of light,
all take jars of water and carry them off to the
nearest monastery. First they present them to
the monks and then proceed to bathe the
images." After they have drenched the images
of the Buddhas and Bodhisatvas, water throwing
becomes universal, and we recognise at once the
features of sympathetic magic, and of the rain-
charms which are to secure the fertility of the
crops in the coming year. Such washing of
saints' images, and such throwing about of water
(which shows Jupiter Pluvius, or the clerk of the
weather, how to do it) are still practised in many
parts of Europe.
But what we are concerned with is the parallel

58 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
which this affords to the cases already cited.
It is quite certain that the Burmese never bor
rowed their water-festival or their descending
angel from Jerusalem or from Armenia. Yet the
coincidences are such as to show that, if they
did not borrow transversely, they must be
deriving the practice vertically from some
primeval custom or instinct, whose features can
be detected over a very wide area of human life.
We may call the festival by the name of " Taking
the Luck of the Year " or " Taking the Luck of
the Water," for water is the chief feature in the
luck of primitive man. Thus we see that in Jeru
salem the luck is emphasised as health, in
Armenia as wealth, in Burma as fertility and
general prosperity. We shall presently be able,
I think, to point to traces of this custom within
the limits of our own islands. But the first thing
that is clear is this, that by the analogy of the
Burmese and Armenian customs, the festival in
John V. must be a New Year's festival: it must
be the Feast which the Jews call Rosh-ha-Shanah or
Head of the Year : and the Angel must be a part
of the machinery of the festival, whether the
critics leave him in the text or thrust him out
into the margin. As far as I know, the only

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 5?
person who has suspected this is Westcott; and
as I sometimes criticise him adversely, I will
quote him in full, so as to give his memory due
honour, and himself the credit of the discovery.
His comment runs as follows :
" It is scarcely likely that the Day of Atonement
would be called simply a festival . . . but the
Feast of Trumpets (the new moon of September)
which occurs shortly before, satisfies all the con
ditions that are required. This ' beginning of
the year,' ' the day of memorial ' was in every
way a most significant day ... On this day,
according to a very early Jewish tradition, God
holds a judgment of men (Mishnah, Rosh-ha-
Shanah II. and notes) : as on this day He created
the world. . . . _ In the ancient prayer attributed
to Rav (Second century) which is still used in
the synagogue service for the day : ' this day
is the day of the beginning of Thy works, a
memorial of the first day ' . . . And on the
provinces it is decreed thereon : ' this one is for
the Sword, and this for Peace: this one for
Famine and this for Plenty.' " The reference to
the Jewish service shows that the New Year's day
was one on which the luck was fixed: more
exactly, I suspect, it was in debate, and was

60 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
finally fixed by God and the Angels ten days after
on the Day of Atonement. ^
So then the scene in John V. is to be laid on some
September evening (for the day begins at sun
down, and the New Year); the people are wait
ing for the trumpets to sound the New Year (the
trumpets answering to the guns in the Burmese
Festival), and while they are waiting Jesus passes
by and observes a man who is hoping to get the
Luck of the Water. We are not to assume that
the man had been waiting long at the Pool, say
for thirty-eight years, as some have suggested.
The language of the Gospel is quite clear: "Jesus
knew that he has been sick long by now,
yvovi oTi TToXw )(p6vov £x*'" which corresponds
exactly to the words that precede, " he has passed
thirty-eight years in this malady of his " {rpidKovra
KOI OKTio en] i)(u>v iv ry acrOevcCa avrov).
But there is, I suggest, a probability that they

^ For instance, the Mishna says that at the Feast of
Tabernacles, the Water question is decided for the Year.
Hence there used to be a Water-libation on that Festival,
which may be interpreted as a prayer for rain. Rabbi
Simeon ben Jochai taught that if Israel were found worthy
at the moment of the New Year they would receive
abundance of rain; but if unworthy the rain would be
dispersed over seas, rivers, &c.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 61
tried the Luck of the Year in Jerusalem every
day from the new moon up to the Day of Atone
ment. If that were so, it would explain every
detail in the story, including a possible repeated
failure to get the " Luck." Moreover the new
explanation would restore historical value to a
story in John which, up to the present, has
appeared increasingly suspicious. When we get
the geography and the calendar indication right,
and the folk-lore of the time right, we may fairly
contend that we are interpreting history and not
merely piously playing with legends . Nor does the
central figure of the incident lose any dignity
when He appears in the midst of a people prac
tising an ancient cult, and without stopping to
discuss their cult, tells the man who is looking
for aid from that unsatisfying quarter, to take
up his mat and go home. He would doubtless
say the same if He were to appear amongst the
pilgrims at Lourdes, who really represent an un
conscious survival of the same practices as used
to prevail throughout so wide an area of human
life, " If Christ came to Lourdes," — well. He
would do the same as when he came to
Bethesda. But you will ask me before leaving this part

62 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
of the subject and giving you some concluding
touches from the region of folk-lore, to tell you
something about that disputed verse, which
records the descent of the Angel. Dr. Burgon,
too, and Dr. Hort will both want to know what I
am going to say on the question of the text. For
instance Dr. Burgon tells us (p. 283) " The
troubling of the Pool of Bethesda is not even
allowed a bracketed place in Dr. Hort's Text.
How the .(accomplished critic would have set about
persuading the Anti-Nicene Fathers that they
were in error for holding it to be genuine
Scripturej, it is hard to imagine." (p. 311), " The
words which he insists on thrusting out of the
Text are often conspicuous for the very quality
•which (by the hypothesis) was the warrant for
their exclusion: " i.e., they have the ring of
genuineness which Dr. Hort denies them. I
think it must be concluded that our enquiry has
not diminished the ring of genuineness about
the famous descent of the Angel. At the same
time it seems impossible to regard it as a part
of the primitive text. On the other hand, if
not a part of the primitive text, it must be very
early, for two reasons ; first of all, it has coloured
almost the whole of the Western Latin tradition ;

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 63
second, if added, it must be a Palestinian
addition, for who else but one who was closely
acquainted with Jerusalem customs could have
added the explanation. Moreover the writer of
the explanation knows that it is an annual custom
for the Angel to descend at a particular feast,
and says so. So we find ourselves again in
agreement with Westcott who says that the dis
puted words " form a very early note added to
explain v. 7 [i.e. the troubling of the water],
while the Jewish tradition with regard to the
Pool was still fresh." Well, if the words were
added when the Gospels were still under Palestine
influence and emendation, we must be at a very
early period. And I think the gloss should
stand on the margin or in a foot-note, both on
account of its antiquity and because of its
furnishing the correct explanation of what took
place. But I am afraid this would hardly
satisfy Dean Burgon's manes, any more than I
could satisfy him if I said I would accept
Bethedsa in place of Bethesda. I did not expect
when I took up the loose threads of this investi
gation to find that the enquiry would go so
far to endorse his protest against the marginal
readings, " Why encumber yourself with such

64 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
a note at all ? " Certainly for English readers
there does not seem the least necessity to change
the conventional Bethesda.
And now for a few concluding remarks on
the Luck of the Water and the Luck of the New
Year. Did they take the luck in these islands ?
Here are some considerations which suggest that
they did. Here is an extract from a letter in
the Transactions of the Woolhope [Hereford]
Naturalists' Field Club for 1898 — 1899.
"THE LUCK OF THE YEAR."
" There is a custom that I have heard of in
North Herefordshire, and I have acquaintance
with those that have seen it : it is practised on
New Year's Day and the ' Luck of the Year ' is
supposed to depend upon it. It is considered an
omen of bad luck if a girl or woman be the first
to come from the outside into the house. It is
therefore devoutly desired that the first to cross
the threshold should be a member of the male
sexj Should this be so the visitor is invited
to drink of the 'Dew of the Well,' i.e., to be
the first to draw and to drink water from the well.
After this is accomplished the visitor returns
to the house and is invited to be the first in the

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 65
New Year to draw cider and to partake of cake
with the newly-drawn cider. Upon leaving he
is given a coin." Here we have the Luck coming
in the form of a person, or rather the Luck of
the First Foot, but the point I want you to
notice is that he is the first to drink of the water
of the well in the New Year. That is where he
gets his Luck from. It is exactly parallel to the
Armenian belief that prosperity will follow the
first person who gets the water consecrated by
the descending angel. i
Here is another interesting testimony from
Herefordshire which is even clearer.^
" At Bromyard' and its neighbourhood, as
1 For the " Luck of the First-foot," cf John v. 4 (" Whoso
ever first steppeth in,") and note that in the North of
England "the first-foot across the threshold is watched
with great anxiety," the good or bad luck of the house
during the year depending on the first comer being a man
or a woman. Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. vol. xi. p. 244.
2 For these points I am indebted to Thiselton Dyer's
British Popular Customs, Past and Present, 1876.
M am especially interested in Bromyard, because it is
an outlying centre of the worship of a Midland deity.
To explain what I mean: most persons are aware from
Mr. Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill that the spirit whom we
call Puck was once ffonoured in Sussex by our forefathers. 5

66 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
twelve o'clock on the 31st of December draws
near the last of the Christmas carols are heard
without doors, and a pleasurable excitement is
playing on the faces of the family around the
last Christmas log within, a rush is made to the
nearest spring of water, and whoever is fortunate
to first bring in the ' cream of the well,' as it is
termed, and those who first taste of it, have
' prospect of good luck through the forthcoming
year.' " — The Antiquary, 1873, Vol. iii. p. 7.

Have they noticed him in Hertfordshire at Puckeridge, and
just outside Bournemouth at Pokesdown? There is some
thing similar to this in the place-names of the Midlands.
I am writing in Birmingham or Bromwich-ham, to the
north of me there is West Bromwich and Little Bromwich,
and Bromford Bridge (the Bridge being a later addition
to the original ford) ; then to the S.W. there is Bromsgrove
(originally Bromesgrave), which suggests at once the cult of
a deity, and over in Hereford there are Bromyard and Brom-
field which convey nearly the same impression. When the
people in these parts abbreviate Birmingham, they call it
Brum, and I suspect that Brum or Brom was the original
tribal deity of this district. Was he the Thunder-God (cf.
BpepM, fremo), or must we look for some other explanation ?
Perhaps Miss Harrison, who knows all about the worship of
Bromios, will tell us (see Proleg. to Study of Greek Religion
p. 414), I am loth, for the sake of the people amongst whom
I dwell, to accept her explanation that Bromios means
Beer-God. I shall, perhaps, try to show presently that it
is the Celtic deity Bormo.

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 67
There is a similar custom reported from the
South of Scotland. In the South of Scotland,
as soon as the clock has struck the midnight
hour, one of a family goes to the well as quickly
as possible and carefully skims it : this they call
getting the scum or ream of the well.
'Twall struck — twa neighbour hizzies raise.
An liltin' gaed a sad gate.
The flower of the well to our house gaes
An' I'll the bonniest lad get'.
The " flower of the well " signifies the first
pail of water, and the girl who is so fortunate
as to obtain the prize is supposed to have more
than a double chance of obtaining the most
accomplished young man in the parish. — Med.
aevi Kalend., Vol. i., p. 129.
Here a race for the Luck seems to be implied,
and we are very near to the " Whosoever first,"
&c., of the Gospel. The parallehsm between
the " flower of the well " in the Lowlands and
the " cream of the well," &c., in Herefordshire,
will be noticed. Clearly we are in the same cycle
of beliefs and practices.
Further North the New Year's water drawing
takes a more solemn form, there seems to be

68 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
no race for it, and it is used for aspersion as
in the Burmese festival. Here is an account of it :
" As soon as the last night of the year sets in,
it is the signal with the Strathdown Highlander
for the suspension of his usual employment, and
he directs his attention to more agreeable
callings. The men form into bands with axes,
and shaping their course to the juniper
bushes, they return home laden with mighty
loads, which are arranged round the fire to dry
until morning. A certain discreet person is dis
patched to the ' dead and living ford ' to draw
a pitcher of water in profound silence, without
the vessel touching the ground, lest its virtue
should be destroyed, and on his return all retire
to rest. Early on New Year's morning the Usque-
cashrichd, or water from the dead and living ford
is drunk, as a potent charm until next New Year's
day, against the spells of witchcraft, the malignity
of evil eyes, and the activity of all infernal
agency. The qualified Highlander then takes
a large brush, with which he profusely asperses
the occupants of all beds; from whom it is not
unusual for him to receive ungrateful remon
strances against ablution." [Then follows the
purification of the house with smoke from the

The Verdict of Succeeding Days. 69
juniper bushes.] Popular Superstitions of fhe
Highlanders of Scotland. Stewart, 1851.
Here we again recognise that the Luck of
the New Year is the Luck of the Water. There
is also the sense that one may draw either
Water of Life or Water of Death, and that great
care must be taken to have the right person to
secure the Luck: so here again we are on the
track of the same old customs.
I have said enough to show how widely these
customs are spread. One touch of folk-lore
makes the whole world kin. And there is no
irreverence in proving the existence of folk-lore
in Palestine, or pointing to traces of it in the
New Testament. It becomes really valuable
if it vindicates the historical character of certain
sections in the fourth Gospel.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE II.
Since writing this lecture I have had the
happiness of reading Dr. G. A. Smith's great book
on Jerusalem, and finding myself in cordial dis
agreement with it on certain points, and in
particular, on his treatment of Bethesda. I will
take up the principal points seriatim so that the
ground may be clear for further discussion, and
note both where we agree and where we differ,
as actual students of the topography of the Holy
City. I . We agree with one another in the following
statement with the exception of the last clause : —
Vol. i., p. Ii8. "North of this [i.e. the
Birket Isra'il] and on the west side of the Church
of St. Anne, beneath vaults on which rest the
remains of probably two churches, is a pool cut
out of the rock on at least two sides, 55 feet long
and 12J broad (almost 17 metres by 3.8) with
another beside it.i No trace of a spring has
1 P.E.F.Q. 1888. ii7ff.
Z.D.P.V. xi. 178 ff.

Appendix to Lecture IL 71
been found or an aqueduct: the water, which
gathers sometimes to the depth of 20 feet, is
immediately drawn from the surface. There can
be no doubt that we have here the twin pools
which, from the time of Eusebius at least till
the end of the sixth century, were identified
with the pool of Bethesda; but from that to the
pool actually intended by St. John is, as we
shall find, a far cry indeed." All right as we
shall find, except the last clause. Note the
admission that the pools at St. Anne's are
identified from the time of Eusebius with
Bethesda: these are then the pools of the
Bordeaux pilgrim.
2. We are agreed that this quarter of the
city is called Bezetha, but we are not agreed what
is the interpretation. I will collect what G.A.S.
says on the subject.
i. p. 18, note 4. "Bezetha may equal Beth-
zaith. House of Olives. So Dr. Hort and the
Codex iSinaiticus ; the Syriac N.T., calls the Mount
of Olives Beth-zaithe." No doubt about the
etymology of Beth-zatha. But the question is
as to the equation between Bezatha and Beth
zatha. ii. p. 244, note 2. After quoting Josephus'

72 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
account of the position of Bezetha relatively to
the Tower of Antonia, the note adds to the text :
B.J. iv. 2. " I have omitted the strange meaning
which Josephus gives to the name Bezetha : ' this
recently built quarter is called in the vernacular
Bezetha, which, if interpreted in the Greek
tongue, would be called New-City.' More
correctly in ii. B.J. xix. 4, Josephus says that
Bezetha (here in Niese's text spelt Betheza) was
also called New-City. Bezetha cannot mean New-
City : probably it stands for Beth-zaith, ' house '
or ' district of Olives.' "
Here the attempt is made to suggest that New
town is an alternative name, the suggestion is
absolutely negatived by the previous passage
which G.A.S. has quoted ('exXiJ^i? 8' e^nxupius Bt^e^a
TO veoKTUTTOv fiipos, o iii6€pii.7)vev6ix,evov 'eWciSi yXiMTtrg,
KaivT) XeyoiT av iroAis.
Here it is said distinctly that Be^eOd may be
translated as New-town. Moreover G. A. Smith
omits to notice the significance of Niese's change
of the text to Betheza (for Betheza is phoneti
cally the same as Bethedsa). No case is, there
fore, made out for contradicting Josephus'
etymology or for replafcing Betheza (Bezetha)
by Bethzatha.

Appendix to Lecture IL 73
3. In Vol. ii. p. 564 ff, is a definite discussion
of the site of Bethesda. First the problem is
discussed textually, the three contending readings
being compared : Bethesda, Bethzatha and Beth
saida. (Some of the references are wrong: L
is quoted for BrjO^add, and a reference is made
to a certain Codex at Leiden without saying
what it is a MS. of.)i We then have the statement
as to the meaning of the names that none of
them is clear. Bethesda as house of mercy is
not certain: Bethzatha was the name of the
quarter of the city to the North of the Temple.
Bethsaida, " house of hunting " or " of fishing,"
though well supported is hardly appropriate to
Jerusalem, and may easily have arisen to an error
of the ear for Bethzaitha, " place of Olives," or
by confusion -with the Galilean place name. Here
we have a question raised as to whether Bethesda
could mean House of Mercy: if it couldn't why
did the Syriac translators write it Beth-hesda and
1 Apparently this is taken from Encyc Bibl s.v. Bethesda
which begins " Bethesda (BU0E2AA) cod. leid. . . . i.e.
House of Mercy." Here again there seems no clue by
which to identify the Codex Leidensis or its readings
What is it? A MS. of the Greek N.T. or the Peshito or
the Onomasticon? Certainly the last, but it should not
be quoted, for it is wrong.

74 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
the Arabic Tatian write- Betharrahmat ? And
why did the pious people rplace the Church of St.
Anne in the neighbourhood, because of the simi
larity between Bethesda and Beit-Hanna, each of
which means House of Grace ? See Clermont
Ganneau, quoted by G.A.S. in Vol. ii. p. 566, or
why should Josephus (B.J. V. 474) say that a
certain man from Adiabene was called 'Aytpa?,
which signifies " lame," unless he is translitera
ting the Syriac hagir ? ^
Here again we have the false equation between
Bezetha and Bethzatha which has now crept from
the notes into the text, so that the quarter of the
city is now Bethzatha which is certainly not
Josephus' form. The judgment about the im
probability of Bethsaida is correct, but Sanday
is quoted rightly in a note as saying that " the
combination of two authorities so wide apart as
' Notice too how he oscillates in the spelling of Hebron
between 'EySpaJv and XeySpcoi/, and in Hilkiah between
EXxias and XtXxcas; and what about 'Evcox for Hanokh?
01 ®a^u)p Kai'EpiJu!)!/ in Ps. Ixxxviii. 13. And how should
we expect the name of Hezekiah to be written in Greek?
Will not 'Edemas do? Must it be Xicricias .^ Can G.A.S.
be right in saying that it is doubtful whether an original
hi or he would be represented in Greek by e ?

Appendix to Lecture IL 75
Tertullian and B. carries the reading back to a
remote antiquity. "^
But then, as Burgon would say, " Have you
not yet found out. Sir, that all various readings
are early ? "
The good point made in the textual enquiry
is the recognition that the name of the pool and
the name of the quarter of the city, are the same.
But the name itself is wrong. And now we come
to an extraordinary statement which we quote
in full:
ii. p. 566. " At least six sites have been
proposed: The Hammam esh-Shefi, the Twin-
pools adjoining the North-West corner of
Antonia, the Birket Israin, the Twin-pools at St.
Anne's, the Virgin's Well or Gihon, and Siloam.
Tradition supports in succession the second,
third ani fourth of these. The Twin-pools by
Antonia are probably those identified with
Bethesda by the Bordeaux pilgrim, Eucherius,
Eusebius and Jerome; the Birkit Israin has been
connected with our passage since the thirteenth
1 Only Sanday doesn't remind us that when we push
the reading back on the faith of Tertullian we are pushing
back the angel as well, for Tertullian says (piscinam,
Bethsaidam angelus interveniens commovebat, De Bapt. 5).

76 Side-lights on N^ggfestament Research.
century; and the po* of St. Anne's at least
since the Crusades." feompare this statement
with the one quoted alAe in which it is definitely
conceded that " therein be no doubt that we
have here [at St. An*'s] the twin-pools which
from the time of EusAius at least to the end of
the sixth century, wJe identified with the Pool
of Bethesda." It is | far cry from the Crusades
to the beginning of the fourth century. After
having got rid of t le pools at St. Anne's by
contradicting his o\ n statements and making
their identification a\matter of the Middle Ages,
it was comparatively* easy to wander off to the
Virgin's Spring and conclude that " the balance
of evidence therefore is in favour of the Virgin's
Spring, but the whole is uncertain."
But if the Virgin's Spring is the real pool, what
becomes of the identification of the name of the
pool with the name of the N.E. corner of the city;
an identification which still stands in the text ?
The Virgin's Pool is not in Bezetha, and it could
not, for certain, be described as a " place of
olives." That name must belong to an area, not
to a hole.
We are obliged to cjonclude, then, that G. A.
Smith has got into confusion, through the con-

Appendix to Lecture II. 77

flicting character of the evidence involved or by
writing passages over again after a lapse of time
without due caution. I hope the matter is now
reasonably clear.
Folk-lore of Sunderland and District
(N.E. Durham).
FIRST-FOOTING.
The following note on the first-foot and the
New Year in the North of England was given me
by one of my students : the Luck of the Water
appears to have disappeared and to be replaced
or continued by the Luck of the First-foot.
" A custom known as first-footing is practised
by almost the whole of the population. It
consists of the following ceremony, which has
only very slight variations among the different
classes. (i) A man {never in any case a woman) is
chosen to be ' first-foot ' ; some people have a.
preference for dark complexioned men and some
for those with light complexions; whilst some
prefer blue eyes and some brown ; others choose
old men, but some will have only young men (I

78 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
myself was ' first-foot ' at the age of twelve).
(2) The person chosen always leaves the
house before 12.0 p.m. on New Year's eve, and
by some means obtains (in no case from the
house where he is going to be " first-foot ") a
piece of coal, some bread or other food,and any
thing else he cares to procure. Then as soon
as 12.0 p.m. has passed and the New Year dawns
he enters the house and gives the coal and food to
the first person he comes in contact with. There
is much hand-shaking and well-wishing, and when
this is over the first-foot must partake of refresh
ment in the shape of wine, tea, spirits, or some
other liquid; he must also cut the New Year's
cake, and be the first to partake of it. After
this is over, all and sundry are welcome to enter
and an ' open ' house is kept the whole night
through." Another of my students writes me at the New
Year, from Belfast, that she has just been round,
according to promise, to cross the threshold of
a superstitious old lady, who likes to have a dark
person in first; and that she had taken a littlei
wreath of straw for her to hang up to make the
ritual quite complete.

LECTURE III.
Some Speculations of Textual Criticism
Justified.
IN our previous Lecture we were discussing
some points in connexion with the famous
story of the Troubling of the Pool by the
Angel; and we were able to explain the incident
without any fanciful references to intermittent
springs or rock-syphons or possible medicinal
qualities of the water, by transporting ourselves
into the region of folk-lore and studying else
where than in Palestine, and unencumbered by
the traditions of pious commentators, phenomena
which are similar to those recorded in the fifth
chapter of John. Incidentally we discussed out
side the region of Textual Criticism, what was
the real name of the pool, and what its position ;
and we were able to arrive at satisfactory con
clusions for both; and we showed that the alter
native readings proposed for the name of the pool
79

80 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
in the Revised Version were both of them in
correct, and that the rekl name was much nearer
to that which the modern critics expel from the
text. The result was new and to some extent
surprising. It vindicated at all events Dr.
Burgon's protest against the encumbrance of the
margin with notes as to readings which cannot
be correct.
Now I do not really suppose that Burgon
cared very much whether the famous pool was
called Bethesda or Bethedsa [Betheza] : he
certainly would not have torn up the trees in his
" Vast Typhoean rage more fell "
over a little innocent question about the spelling
of the name of a pond. He was far more con
cerned over the complete extrusion of the account
of the Angel that troubled the waters : he had
lost a supernatural being. He had been shorn of
a miracle; both the miracle and the miracle-
worker were attested by Catholic Tradition;
therefore they must stay within the covers and
compass of the sacred text. If the oldest MSS.
leave them out, so much the worse for the oldest
MSS. Outside the Catholic Church and its
imagined unity, all men and all MSS. are liars.

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 8t

Most people would have been thankful that
Textual Criticism had relieved them of the burden
of that periodic angel, who haunted a certain
patch of dirty water in Jerusalem. We have,
ourselves, at times, indulged in that form of in
ward congratulation, just as we are thankful that
one can befieve in the Gospel of Mark without
being committed to the thaumaturgy of the last
twelve verses. But with Dean Burgon the
excisions made in the text stood together: he
resented them all : and he hated those who made
them. I hope I have shown that there is a
ground of reconciliation between those who love
the story of the Angel and those who have no
sympathy with it ; and that both sides may unite
on a folk-lore basis in concluding "the thing never
really happened," bu,t " what really happened was
that people thought it did." And as I said, the
supposed gloss is certainly entitled to a marginal
place in Greek Testaments and in English Trans
lations. I hope this will satisfy the shades of
the great dead, as well as the Angel Gabriel who
is the principal sufferer by the criticism.
But now I want to say a few words about
the general effect of the excision of passages from
the New Testament on the ground that they are
6

82 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
not found in the oldest MSS., or do not appear
to belong to the books in which they are found.
This is probably the most portentous feature
about the newer dissection of the Gospels; they
appear to have been put together piecemeal.
The knife is applied to a crack here, or a seam
there, and a whole section comes away. A
breach of continuity is detected: then some
chapters must have been misplaced, or some
intervening matter does not properly belong
there. The changes occur often at the most
vital points in the narrative; the Prayer upon
the Cross goes : the words of Institution are lost
from the Lord's Supper; the story of the
adulteress to whom our Lord spoke words of
authoritative mercy are relegated to an appendix.
Whole sections appear decorated with brackets
and stars, implying that they are strangers and
foreigners in the places where we find them.
One would not mind so much if it had only
been the verses in Matthew about the Signs
of the Sky and the Signs of the Times, or the
statement that " Old wine is a better drink than
new wine " ; but when we come to the mutilation
of the Lord's Prayer or the excision of the Agony
in the Garden, surely Dean Burgon might say,

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 83
" I do well to be angry." At all events he would
have done well to be angry (within limits) if his
anger had followed his intelligence, and if the
verdict of his judgment had been countersigned
by the discoveries and investigations of the
" succeeding days " to which he made his final
appeal, as he said, with serene confidence. Un
fortunately, as we shall see, the verdict of " Time
that trieth Truth" appears to be often against him.
In Dr. Hort's presentation of the N.T. text,
the pages are frequently disfigured by double
brackets, implying a residual uncertainty as to
what is contained within them. These commonly
mean that, in the judgment of the editors the
words affected are not a part of the original text.
One would have supposed that in that case such
words would have been promptly removed to the
foot-notes or the appendix. But apparently the
courage of the editors failed at the last moment,
and they express themselves, through Dr. Hort,
as follows :
" None can feel more strongly than ourselves
that it might at first sight appear the duty of
faithful critics to remove completely from the
text any Words or passages which they believe
not to have originally formed part of the work

84 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
in which they occur. But there are circum
stances connected with the text of the New Testa
ment which have withheld us from adopting this
obvious mode of proceqcTing."
On examining the circumstances, to which
Dr. Hort alludes, it appears that while they
believed the passages in) question not to be a part
of the text, they did not feel quite sure that they
did so believe. So they consecrdted their vacilla
tion by the use of double brackets, but expressed
themselves, as a rule, quite positively on the
matter in the appendix. And this hesitation
has led to one curious result in an opposite
direction. In Matthew xxvii. 49 quite a number
of ancient authorities, including the Vatican and
Sinai MSS., insert a statement that " another
with a spear pierced His side and there came
out blood and water." The language agrees
closely with the corresponding statement in John,
but the doctrine differs : in Matthew His wound
is inflicted before death, in John after death, and
to establish the fact that He was dead. In spite
of this change in the point of view, most
scholars will find it very hard to believe that
it is (anything but a transfer from the text of John,
probably by way of a Harmony of the Passiori

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 85
Gospels. But the sentence is so well attested in
Matthew by the authorities whom Westcott and
Hort always follow that they put it into the text
as if it belonged there, and then marked it for
removal, as if it did not belong there.
But now we are in danger of getting into the
jungle of the various readings, from which I
wanted to keep you clear. Let me keep to my
main question, the verdict of time with regard
to the excisions made in the text by the critics.
I will take three notable cases, in each of which
there seems to have come some fresh evidence to
hand since the pubhcation of the Revised Version.
The evidence which I am to present relates to
the authorship of the passages impugned. And
after all, if we could get at it, that is the real
point which we want to know. Dr. Hort's method
of summing up the question of authorship usually
consists in saying that it is " a singular inter
polation, evidently from an extraneous source,
written or oral." " The influence^ of extraneous
records or traditions of one kind or another is
clearly perceptible in some cases and its presence
may with more or less probability be suspected
in others." If that is a correct judgment, we
1 Introd. p. 296.

86 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
ought surely to be able, sometimes, to unearth
some of the written records to which allusion
is made, or to come across traces of their authors.
Is it likely that investigation should be wholly
barren into the origin of the materials, which,
according to Dr. Hort, were so freely incorporated
by the pious scribes of the second century? We
will take three cases, as I said, and examine the
results of modern enquiry as to their authorship.
The first shall be the last twelve verses of St.
Mark: the second shall be the Prayer of our
Lord upon the Cross : the third (which we will
treat very briefly) shall be the story of the
adulteress. I. The last twelve verses of St. Mark were the
subject of Dr. Burgon's great monograph, in
which he assailed those who were for removing
these verses from -the text, and, as he believed,
smote his antagonists hip and thigh with a
great slaughter. It is not necessary for me to
go in detail into the objections that have been
made against the authenticity of these verses.
We are probably familiar with the main points
of the indictment : their absence from the
oldest texts of the New Testament, the existence
of an alternative ending of a highly rhetorical

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 87
character which no one can believe to be by
the hand of Mark; the abrupt return of the
narrative in the ordinary text to an earlier
point of the narration, intimating that a fresh
Resurrection account is being used; and the in
ternal evidence of this new Resurrection account
against its Marcan authorship : all of these
things are sufficiently known now to English
readers. We are aware now that the Gospel is
shorn of its last twelve verses, and ends abruptly
with the words " And they were afraid — " which
is not a literary ending, nor a Christian ending,
and can hardly be a Greek ending :i so that we
are obliged to assume that the real ending of
Mark is gone, and speculate as we please as to
what has become of it and what it was like.
Some persons who have a certain amount of
imagination will say that the last leaf was absent
from an early copy, others that it is substantially
1 It was simply the accepted conclusion of the Gospel
for a certain space of its history. The remarkable con
firmation of this by Mrs. Lewis's Syriac Gospels from
Mount Sinai is now well known. It was an interesting
moment when the brush dipped in re-agent brought up the
missing colophon to the Gospel, and showed that the oldest
Syriac Gospel was on the side of the two oldest Greek
uncials in stopping short with " they were afraid," and
adding no alternative.

88 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
preserved in the end of Matthew or in the last
chapter of John : others that Mark was interrupted
just as he was finishing or tl^at he had to catch
a train or something of the kind, and never got
back to his desk again. I am not going to
speculate on these matters, further than to tell
you the first two words that will be found on the
missing leaf, if it should ever be recovered. The
narrative went on like this : [For they were
afraid] of the Jews :
i<f>oPovvTO yap Tovi 'louSaious.
But I am anticipating matters by taking sides,
and assuming that the last twelve verses are
not genuine. Let us hold our hand and see what
has happened with regard to the end of Mark.
The most recent thing is the discovery of a new
and expanded ending to the Gospel. Early in
1907 a number of ancient manuscripts were on
sale in Cairo by a dealer named Ali Arabi. They
comprised fourth and fifth century copies or
portions of the Old and New Testaments in
Greek, and were said to have come from the town
of Akhmim (the ancient Panopolis), a place
which will be remembered by the recovery from
one of its tombs of portions of the Book of Enoch
and the Gospel and Revelation of Peter in 1886.

speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 89
The MSS. in question were examined by Messrs.
Grenfell and Hunt and offered to the British
Museum, which for some reason or other that
I am not able to divine declined to buy
them. So they passed to America, and became
the property of Mr. Freer, of Detroit, who has
placed them for publication in the hands of one
of the professors of the Michigan University. I
may say in passing that the assumption that the
MSS. were obtained by excavation at Akhmim
is an illusion: they came from a famous Coptic
Monastery, and another batch from the same
haul have gone to Berlin. When the Freer MSS.
came to be examined, it was found that the text
of the last verses of Mark (contained in one of
the precious codices, written perhaps in the fifth
century) was accompanied by notable expansion.
It ran on in normal fashion till the end of the 14th
verse, and then proceeded something like this:
" And they defended themselves saying that
this age of lawlessness and sin is under the power
of Satan, who, through unclean spirits, does not
suffer the true virtue of God to be apprehended.
Therefore now reveal Thy righteousness. And
Christ addressed them and said, ' The limit of
the years of the authority of Satan has been

90 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
reached, but other dread things are coming : and
it was for those who had sinned that I was
delivered to death that they might return to the
Truth and sin no more, but /inherit the spiritual
and immortal glory of righteousness in heaven,
but go ye into all the world, &c.,' " and then the
Gospel concludes conventionally. Of this extra
ordinary expansion no Greek trace has been
preserved, but Jerome had given a translation
of the first lines of the expansion and said that
he had found it in Greek MSS. So here we had
the problem of the last verses of Mark accen
tuated by another very striking piece of material,
belonging apparently to a very early period.
We may be quite sure that this is not the lost
ending of Mark. It corresponds in literary style
with the short ending which Westcott and Hort
print as an alternative for the last twelve ve>rses :
I mean the passage which tells us that "AUlthat
mean the passage which tells us that " All that
had been enjoined to them they reported to Peter
and his company. And after this also Jesus
Himself [appeared to them] and from the East
to the West sent forth by their means the hbly
and immortal preaching of the eternal Gospel."
The new expansion is fitted on to the last twelve

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 91
verses and so, I suppose, ought not to be used
in evidence against them: but it is certainly in
evidence for the freedom with which the close
of Mark was being handled, and this laxity in
dealing with the text implies that something had
gone wrong with the conclusion of Mark from the
beginning and the scribes were aware of the
fact. So we have one more important piece
of evidence as to the unsettlement of the text.
But there is no sign of authorship, although we
may be quite sure the style is not that of Mark.
And, as we have said, even if we push this new
section back into early times, we are driving
the last twelve verses of Mark before it.
But who really doubts the antiquity of the last
twelve verses of Mark ? Surely that point might
be freely conceded: though I remember once
having a battle with my friend, the late Dr.
Moulton, over it, when he protested vigorously
against something which I had said to that effect.
I believe he thought I was Burgonizing: but I
think he was quite convinced by my statements
that the antiquity of the last twelve verses had
been underestimated. And if any one had any
doubt upon it, the discovery of the actual author
ship to which I am now going to refer, will be

92 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
decisive on the point. Many of you will remem
ber the discovery made by Mr. F. C. Conybeare
of an ancient Armenian MS. in the convent at
Edschmiazin, in Russian Armenia, which had the
last twelve verses of Mark actually spaced off
from the rest of the Gospel, and in the inter
vening space a line was written in red, containing
the words : Ariston Eridzou
i.e. of Ariston the Presbyter.
So here at last was the missing evidence for the
authorship of the last twelve verses, and a dis
covery for critical confirmation which should be
the end of all strife. The only remaining
question would appear to be as to the exact
person intended. Two suggestions arose at once
to the mind of scholars : either that it was Aristo
of Pella, who in the reign of Hadrian wrote an
account of a disputation between a Jew and a
Christian relating to the Old Testament pre
dictions of Christ : or else it must be the Aristion
who is mentioned along with the Presbyter John
in a famous passage from the second century,
in which Papias records how he had been
in the habit of collecting traditions from those
who had been hearers of the Apostles, with a

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 93
view to finding out from them what Andrew or
Peter had said, or what Philip or Thomas or
James or John or Matthew or any other of the
Lord's disciples, or what Aristion and the Pres
byter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. The
suggestion, then, at once arises that this Aristion
whom Papias recorded as a walking repository
of traditions of the Lord, a real live index-man,
is the person to whom the Armenian MS. refers.
Papias does not actually call him a Presbyter;
but as he couples him with a John who is called
the Presbyter John, when he comes to dis
tinguish him from the Apostle John, it may
reasonably be imagined that Presbyter is also his
ecclesiastical appellation. So I think we may say
that the author of the last twelve verses is found,
and that the verdict of time inclines strongly
against the Burgon contentions. There does not
seem to be much room for hesitation: but a
cautious judgment would perhaps be that of Dr.
Swete, in his Introduction to the Gospel of Mark
(p. cxiii).
" The documentary evidence for the longer
ending is, as we have seen, overwhelming.
Nevertheless there are points at which the chain
of evidence is not merely weak but broken.

94 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
Besides the fact that in the fourth century, if
not in the third, the ' accurate copies ' of the
Gospel were known to end with XVI. 8, and that
in the two great fourth century Bibles which
have come down to us the Gospel actually ends
at this point, those who maintain the genuineness
of the last twelve verses have to account for the
early circulation of an alternative ending, and
for the ominous silence of the Ante-Nicene fathers
between Irenaeus and Eusebius in reference to
a passage which was of so much importance both
¦on historical and theological ground. When we
add to these defects in the external evidence the
internal characteristics which distinguish these
verses from the rest of the Gospel it is impossible
to resist the conclusion that they belong to
another work, whether that of Aristion or some
unknown writer of the first century." So Dr.
Swete, with excess of caution: for surely if we
have a conviction that the longer ending is due
to a writer of the time of Aristion, and if we
turn up an early piece of direct evidence which
says it was Aristion, there does not seem much
excuse for hesitation.^
1 Professor Burkitt expresses the following obscure
verdict in Encyc. Bibl. Vol. 4, Col. 501 1 (Texts and Versions).

speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 95
The evidence has, however, been vigorously
resisted in one or two quarters. Schmiedel in the
Encyclopedia Biblica {Resurrection Narratives,
col. 4050) tries to show that as there is nothing
new in the summary which we call the last twelve
verses, it cannot be by Aristion; " There is no par
ticular reason why we should assign to a personal
disciple of Jesus such as Aristion the authorship of
so meagre an excerpt as Mark xvi. 9-20 from
which absolutely nothing new is to be learned."
But we may have to allow some latitude in the
interpretation of discipleship, and there is a
suspicion that the summary was introduced in
order to avoid saying things which should con
tradict the other evangelists : hence meagreness
is in order.
Professor Bacon, of Yale University, has deve
loped a marvellous theory to account for the
heading " of Ariston the Presbyter." According
to him the Armenian scribe who made it had

" The inference is that the scribe of the MS. or of its
archetype, had access to a tradition that Aristion, the friend
of Papias . . . was the man who added the verses at the
end of the second Gospel. This would seem to be fifty
years too early if other indications are to be trusted.'
The passage is not clear. Fifty years too early for what ? And
who said that Aristion added the verses ?

96 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
been reading the History of Moses of Chorene,
and understood Moses to say that Hadrian made
Aristo of Pella the secretary of Mark when he
appointed him (Marcus) Bishop of Jerusalem.
And hence he attributes the appendix to the
Elder Aristo, the secretary of Mark. It must be
allowed that this is a very learned scribe and
Professor Bacon a very ingenious person to have
discovered him. Everybody misunderstands
everything. Mark the Evangelist becomes
Marcus the Bishop of Jerusalem in the second
century : Aristo of Pella is imagined to have been
his secretary, and is therefore imagined to have
finished the book which Marcus did not write.
One may prove anything by dealing with docu
mentary evidence in this way, and the laws of
probability may be finally abolished. But as I
do not suppose any one has been seriously
affected by these conjectures, I do not need to
go further after them into the wilderness. ^
2. We will now take the second passage to
which I referred : the Prayer of our Lord upon the
Cross as recorded in Luke xxiii. 34. No one will
^ Bacon's statement will be found under the heading
" Aristion " in Hastings' Dictionary of Christ and the
Gospels. There is a further reference on the subject in
Journal of Bibl. Lit. for 1908, pp. I — 23.

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 97
like to see these words shut up in double brackets,
as though they were doubtful, because we have
an irresistible conviction that the passage could
never have been invented; and there is perhaps
no change in the whole of the Gospels which pro
duced such an outburst of feeling on the part of
Dr. Burgon. I jnust quote you a passage to show
what I mean. " These twelve precious words :
(' Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them ; for they
know not what they do'), Drs.Westcott and Hort
enclose within double brackets in token of the
' moral certainty ' they entertain that the words
are spurious. And yet these words are found in
every known uncial and in every known cursive
copy, except four; besides being found in every
ancient Version : and what, — (we ask the question
with sincere simplicity), — what amount of
evidence is calculated to inspire undoubting con
fidence in any existing Reading, if not such a
concurrence of authorities as this ? . . . We
forbear to insist upon the probabilities of the case.
The divine power and sweetness of the incident
shall not be enlarged upon. We introduce no
considerations resulting from Internal Evidence.
True, that 'few verses of the Gospels bear in
themselves a surer witness to the Truth of what 7

98 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
they record, than this.' (It is the admission of
the very man who has nevertheless dared to
brand it with suspicion.) But we reject his
loathsome patronage with indignation. ' Internal
Evidence ' — ' Transcriptional Probabihty,' and
all such ' chaff and draff ' with which he fills his
pages ad nauseam, and mystifies nobody but him
self—shall be allowed no place in the present dis
cussion. "^ Burgon then proceeds to collect more
than forty Patristic witnesses to the verse, and it
is evident that he is as learned as he is angry."
Meanwhile Dr. Hort, on the other side, main
tained that it had come into the Gospel of Luke
from an extraneous source, and showed that the
evidence against it was very strong. It seems
clear that it was unknown to the oldest forms of
the Latin and Egyptian Versions, in spite of
Burgon's claim to all the versions. Since then
the discovery of the Lewis Syriac shows that it
was originally absent from the Syriac Version,
so that all three of the great versions (Latin,
Egyptian and Syriac) began without it. There
were other weak spots in the champion's armour :
but still the question must arise as to the possible
source of such a tradition.
• Revision Revised, pp. 82, 83.

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 99
Who else could have recorded it? Should
we not have the extraneous record attested by
someone if it had really existed? Now at this
point I want to give a curious piece of evidence
which has lately come to light. There is a late
Latin writer whose works are preserved in the
Patrology of the name of Haymo. He was
Bishop of Halberstadt in the first half of the ninth
century, and had studied in his early days in
the famous monastery at Fulda, under Rabanus
Maurus. Amongst the many commentaries
which he wrote upon the Scripture both of the
Old and New Testaments, there is one on Isaiah,
and if we turn to his comments upon Isaiah LIII.
we shall find the following remarkable state
ment -.^ " Pro transgressoribus Judaeis sive per-
secutoribus rogavit dicens dum penderat in cruce.
Pater ignosce illis. Sicut enim in Evangelio
Nazarenorum habetur: ad hanc vocem Domini
multa millia Judaeorum astantium circa crucem
crediderunt." What does Haymo mean by
telling us that " at this word of the Lord many
thousands of Jews, who were standing around
the Cross, believed ? " The word of the Lord
means the Prayer upon the Cross, and Haymo
1 Migne P.L. ii6. Col. 994.

100 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
tells us that this was in the Gospel according to
the Nazarenes, with an additional statement of
a highly rhetorical character that many thousand
Jews believed on our Lord, in consequence of His
prayer. By the Gospel according to the Naza
renes, there seems to be no doubt that Haymo
means the lost early Gospel which commonly goes
by the name of the Gospel according to the
Hebrews. If that be the case then we have
found a source to which we, can refer the
expansion made in the text of Luke, and so justify
Dr. Hort's statement that it comes from an
extraneous source. Or we can, if we please, say
that the scribe who put it in Luke used the same
source as did the Gospel of the Hebrews to which
Haymo refers. But why should we multiply
origins, when the Gospel to the Hebrews is early
enough and sufficient to be responsible for the
assumed quotation? Such an explanation would
clear up all the textual difficulties and leave us
in a good spirit of expectation that the whole of
the missing Gospel may some day be recovered.
I am surprised myself that it has eluded us so
long. In making this suggestion oiie will have
to go further afield, and be prepared to

speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 101
raise more difficulties than one solves. It will
be necessary to ask how Haymo knew this. Had
he a copy of the Nazarene Gospel of which he
speaks ? It is hardly to be believed. It is more
probable that in making his copimentary on
the prophet Isaiah, he did what all wise scribes
of that time were accustomed to do, he brought
out of his treasury things new and old, especially
the latter. He must have had some lost com
mentary of antiquity at his disposal, at least in
the form of extracts. And it ought to be possible
to discover the commentator who preceded
him. But then, as I say, we shall raise more
difficulties than we solve : for the quotation in
Haymo occurs in his commentary on Isaiah LIII.,
at the end of the chapter, and Haymo is showing
that Christ fulfilled the prediction that " My
righteous Servant shall justify many and He shall
bear their iniquities." Now it is hardly possible
to disconnect from this interpretation the closing
words of the chapter in which the Servant of
God is said " to have borne the sins of many,
and to have made intercession for the trans
gressors." In each case Haymo points out the
conversion of the Jews. Thus the closing verses
of Isaiah become a prediction of the Lord's

102 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
prayer for His enemies, and of the immediate
and striking result that was accomplished by that
prayer. And it is at this point that the difficulty
arises. We could very well admit that the Gospel
to the Hebrews had fashioned an artificial fulfil
ment to the language of Isaiah LIII. in the con
version of many thousands of Jews who stood
around the Cross : but it is quite another thing
to admit the Prayer on the Cross to be itself an
artificial fulfilment of the closing words of the
great chapter. For the internal evidence is
decisive against the belief that the whole of the
passage in the Nazarene Gospel is from one
hand. If it is a fabrication, there must be two
fabricants. The man that invented the latter
part cannot be the artist of the first part. More
over it would be easy to show that pious persons
in the second century were fulfilling prophecies
for themselves. We have had an instance before
us in this very lecture, in the new passage which
has been found inserted among the last verses of
Mark. Here our Lord is made to say (and the
passage must be a fabrication), that " on account
of those who sinned I was delivered over to
death : " but this is an almost verbatim reproduc
tion of the closing words of Isaiah LIII. in the

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified. 103
Greek of the LXX : (Sto. ras a.vo/.uas airZv TraptSoOr)
for their sins He was delivered up; see also the
preceding verses). Indeed it can hardly be
denied that there was a tendency in certain
quarters to manufacture details of fulfilled
prophecy. So that in quoting Haymo, we are
raising one of the most difficult exegetical
problems. But whether we can at present resolve
all these difficulties is not the immediate question.
What is important is that, for the first time, an
attempt has been made to identify the extraneous
source whose existence Dr. Hort conjectured, in
order to explain the curious relations of the MSS.
to one another, and the absence of the incident
we have been discussing from sO many lines of
textual transmission. So we make the hypothesis
that the text of Luke has been glossed from the
Gospel to the Hebrews by some well intentioned
early scribe.
And now we are in a position to pass on to
my third passage, the famous story of the adul
teress, contained in John vii. 53 — viii. 2.
3. You are familiar with the doubts that have
been raised with regard to the authenticity of
this passage. To begin with, it has no very early
attestation in John, except in Western MSS., and

104 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
is absent from nearly all the great uncial MSS.,
and most of the early versions. Moreover it
breaks the continuity of our Lord's discourse
with the Jews and produces " a serious disruption
in the incidents and discourses. "^ Accordingly
Dr. Hort sums up the argument against the verses
as follows :
" When the whole evidence is taken together,
it becomes clear that the section first came into
St. John's Gospel as an insertion in a compara
tively late Western text, having originally
belonged to an extraneous independent source.
That this source was either the Gospel according
to the Hebrews or the Expositions of the Lord's
Oracles of Papias is a conjecture only: but it
is a conjecture of high probability."
The reason for this conjecture lies in the fact,
that Eusebius,^ when giving an account of Papias,
who flourished in the second century says that
Papias " has likewise set forth another narrative
concerning a woman who was calumniated be
fore the Lord concerning many sins, which is con
tained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews."
The natural inference is that the section in
John is borrowed either from Papias or from the
1 Hort Iritrod. Notes p. 87. 2 jj.E. iii. 39. 16.

Speculations of Textual Criticism Justified, 105
Gospel according to the Hebrews. Now here is
a fresh consideration to which we wish to draw
attention. There is a very famous group of
cursive MSS. known to scholars as the Ferrar
group, marked by many rare and many extra
ordinary readings : and in this group the section
in question is inserted after Luke xxi. 38 ; no
reason, that I know of, has ever been assigned
for the transfer, unless it be that it finds a some
what similar setting in Luke to what it normally
does in John, in the statement that " the people
came to Jesus very early in the morning to the
temple to be taught."
My friend. Dr. Blass, was persuaded that the
real home of the passage was in Luke, and
printed it so in his edition of that Gospel. And
when one reflects that we have already had
reasons to believe that Luke was, at a very early
date, glossed from the Gospel according to the
Hebrews, that some MSS. of Luke are certainly
glossed with a story, which on other accounts
has been referred to the same Gospel, it does
not seem an unreasonable thing to suggest that
the same hand which inserted the Prayer on the
Cross may have inserted the story of the adul
teress in the same Gospel, which perhaps had a

106 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
short life in that connexion, but afterwards in
the West was taken up into John's Gospel where
it found a home, until the textual critics of later
days were strong enough to dislodge it.
It would be the height of folly to dogmatize
over matters of this kind. But in any case we
have fairly good evidence as to the source from
which this story came : and perhaps these three
illustrations may suffice to show how time deals
with the difficulties raised by textual criticism,
and vindicates against rash utterances and violent
objurgations, the soundness of the methods and
the trustworthiness of the results arrived at by
the masters in this particular art and craft.
Perhaps if we should succeed before long in
finding either the lost works of Papias or the lost
Gospel according to the Hebrews, many things
that have been perplexing us as to passages
in the New Testament that seem too loosely
attached to their contexts and too feebly attested
by ancient authorities, would become perfectly
lucid to us. For in these larger matters which
involve the removal of whole sections or verses,
the same rule holds as applies to lesser variations,
that " when the cause of a variant is known,
the variant itself disappears."

APPENDIX TO LECTURE III.
Something was said in the foregoing Lecture
about the extent to which fulfilments of prophecy
have been manufactured by the writers of un-
canonical gospels, such for example as the Peter
Gospel, the Gospel according to the Hebrews,
the Apocryphal Gospels relating to the birth and
boyhood of Jesus, &c., and the question is still
an unsettled one whether, and if so, how far, we
ought to recognize a similar influence to be at
any point at work in the Canonical Gospels.
To deal with such a, question thoroughly would
require a whole course of lectures and would
certainly bring up some critical situations of
great interest. But as this is not the place for
an extended inquiry into a collateral issue, how
ever interesting, I will confine myself to a single
instance which has recently come to light, in
which many of the links in a chain of what I

108 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
call prophetical gnosis can be clearly made out.
Suppose, for example, we were reading the
account of the Mockery of Jesus at His trial
before Pilate, and we should find in Mark xiv.
65 the following statement:
" And some of them begafi to spit upon Him
and to cover His face and to buffet Him, and to
say to Him : Prophesy, and the underlings
received Him with blows : and they were striking
Him on the head with a reed and spitting upon
Him." Now let us see how these incidents of the
Passion are recorded in the Peter Gospel; of
which we have a large fragment preserved from
a grave in Egypt. Here we find as follows.
" And others standing by were spitting on His
face, and others gave Him blows on His cheeks,
others were pricking Him with a reed, and some
were scourging Him and saying This is the
honour with which we will honour the Son of
God." Now it is not difficult to detect a certain
process of expansion of the narrative as we
pass from Mark to Peter, as for instance when
the words, " and some of them began to spit
on Him " are explained in the sense that " others

Appendix to Lecture III. 109
of the bystanders began to spit on His face," the
expansion being obvious and natural. But it is
not so clear why the general statement that they
were buffeting Him (according to Mark) and that
they were striking Him on the head with a reed
(Mark) should appear in Peter in the form that
they gave Him blows on the cheeks and pricked
Him with a reed. And we might hazard a con
jecture that these transitions show the influence
of a passage in Micah (iv. 14) which tells us
" that they shall smite the judge of Israel with
a rod upon the cheeks " : the cheeks being read
into the Marcan narrative in order to make the
parallel. At first sight this seems a little artificial, and
the question might be asked why a reference to
Micah and the prophetic gnosis is necessary at
all. Let us see if there is any evidence of the
employment of the passage from Micah in the
sense which I have intimated.
Amongst certain Manichaean documents which
have recently come to light from Chinese
Turkestan, of which I shall be speaking
presently, there are some old Persian fragments
containing the account of the Passion: from
these we find the following sentences decipher-

110 Side-lights on New Testanient Research.
able, the matter being apparently a harmony of
certain Gospels : i f
" A crown of thorns set bn His head

With a reed they smite Him on the cheeks.
On His eyes ( ? face) they spit.
And they call out ' Our Lord Messiah.' "
Here we are very near indeed to the actual
passage from the Prophet. Perhaps the writer
has used the Peter Gospel, but if so, he has
brought the language closer to that of Micah.
So we have again the suggestion of prophetic
gnosis. The argument is not final, the proof
is incomplete. But it is at all events suggestive
that we should find from the far East an un
expected confirmation to a theory which has
been evolved in order to explain the relations
between Mark's Gospel (considered as primitive)
and the Peter Gospel (generally regarded as a
product of the second century and strongly
coloured by prophetical gnosis).

LECTURE IV.
The Romance of the Versions.
ONE of the first things that a student learns
when he begins the critical study of the
New Testament, is that the materials
for the determination of the text consist of
Copies, Versions and Fathers — that the original
text is known to us by Transcripts, by Trans
lations and by Transferences. And when the
historical development of the science of N.T.
criticism is under review, it will soon be seen that
it is only by slow degrees and with much hesita
tion that the factors supplied by the Versions
and the Fathers have been allowed weight in
the determination of the right readings. We
began indeed, in these islands, with a version
which practically passed for the original, both
among the Saxons and the early English, as indeed
the Latin Vulgate still does where religion is
ill

112 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
regulated by infallible authority. But those were
the days when Textual Criticism was in its very
infancy. Wyclif does not encumber his margins
with disputes over the spelling of Bethesda or
with references to what " some ancient authorities
say." Even Tyndale who is close to the great
revival of Biblical studies does not use his
margins for that form of edification: he has
something much more amusing to say, about the
Pope's Bull devouring more than Aaron's Calf,
with enquiries as to when the Pope is going to
cry Hoo ! i.e.. Hold, and stop building St. Peter's.
But while Wyclif's object is to render the
Latin Vulgate into English, Tyndale's object is
to get away from the Latin version to the original
Greek; and it is only gradually, under a mixed
influence of reaction and of learning, that scholars
have come back to realise the importance of
the Vulgate in the determination of the text,
and still more the importance of those earlier
Latin versions which preceded the Vulgate and
are often our surest guides to the forms in which
the Greek New Testament once circulated. How
slowly, too, did the Syriac Version find its way
into the West, and into due appreciation of
scholars. Its first edition is the Vienna volume

The Romance of the Versions. 113
of 1555; but that is five years later than the
great folio New Testament of Stephen which held
its own for so long a time, as the standard text
to which all reference should be made, of which
Bentley ironically said that Pope Stephen's text
stood as if an apostle had been his compositor.
But Bentley, himself, who planned to reform the
New Testament Text by means of a combination
of Greek MSS. and Latin Versions, had no
suspicion of the extent to which scholars in later
days would defer to the evidence that should
be brought from the Euphrates or the Nile.
The Coptic Version had a better welcome; it
found its way into the textual apparatus before
even it got into print, and was employed by
Bishop Fell in his notes, more than thirty years
before it appeared as an edition. It found a
place, too, in the notes to Mill's great edition,
again before the actual publication of the version.
So there were some up-to-date Biblical scholars
in England, before Agamemnon 1 Around these
great versions, the Syriac, Egyptian and Latin,
and the later versions that are affiliated with
them, there gathers not a little of romance and
a good deal of mystery. We can see great
figures looming through the mist of the past, 8

114 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
or suspect them, where the veil is too thick to
be actually penetrated. We are sure that the
work was inspired by Kings, Sages, and Saints;
for we can often come acrbss their traces; the
orthodox churchman is to' the front, but so is
the heretic and the Arian; and sometimes people
of servile origin and lowly station stand out, as
having with great toil and difficulty enriched
whole populations with the words of life. One
has only to think of Ulfilas, the Apostle of the
Goths, of Frumentius and Aedesius, the captives
of the Abyssinians; of Tatian, the Assyrian (to
whom we owe the text of the Diatessaron) ; of
Rabbula, the Bishop of Edessa (to whom belongs,
in all probability, the honour of the Peshito text,
one of the most beautiful, perhaps the most beau
tiful, of all the translations of the New Testament).
Or to come down to more modern times, we may
think of Alfred the Great and the venerable
Bede, and see how wide an array of great person
alities is open to us, and how varied have been
the experiences and fortunes of the translators.
But it must not be forgotten that there is still
much that is elusive and mysterious about the
subject of the Versions ; the authors of the early
Latin translations are altogether unknown to us,

The Romance of the Versions. 115
until we come to Jerome: the first translator of
the separate Gospels into Syriac is still a mystery,
and will probably remain so; and as far as I
know there is not a vestige of evidence as to the
translators of the early Egyptian versions. So
that, from the historical point of view, we run
into a cloud, as we try to penetrate to the origin
of either of the three great lines of versions of
the New Testament, and the same thing will be
true of not a few of the lesser and later trans
lations that have come to light.
In the present Lecture I propose to raise two
questions with regard to the diffusion of the
Gospel in Asia, and to draw your attention to
one new Asiatic version which has recently come
to light. I am going to ask whether there is
any reason to suspect that the Gospel was, at
an early date, translated into (a) the Chinese
language; (b) into any one of the Indian lan
guages; and I am going to tell you of the
discovery of a translation of the New Testament
into the language of a people on the further
side of Siberia, and on the very borders of China.
We will take the last point first, as it has a
bearing upon the other two questions, apart
from its own particular interest.

U6 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
In the year 1903 there were found in Chinese
Turkestan, by a German explorer named Griin-
wedel, a variety of MSS. written in a Syriac
hand. He acquired them, either by purchase
or by actual exploration, from a place named
Turfan. Some of them were written on paper,
others on white leather or on silk, but though
written in a Syriac alphabet, they were not in
the Syriac language, but in old Persian or in
Turcoman, and they contained a variety of
writings belonging to the heresy of Mani the
Persian, which we know by the name of Mani
chaean. Upon the doctrines of Mani and his
followers these MSS. are destined to throw great
light: for amongst them are portions of Mani's
own gospel, and epistles : then there are frag
ments of a Christian Gospel closely related to
the Gospel of Peter, and of a Passion Gospel
which appears to be related to the Harmony of
Tatian. Further, there are hymns and prayers
of the Manichees which illustrate their doctrines
and ritual and will enable us to re-write the
history of that wide-spread heresy, which once
counted Augustine amongst its followers : and
there is a portion of Mani's own work, which
he called by the name of Shapurakan. The

The Romance of the Versions. U7
importance of all this is evident. For Mani is one
of the most mysterious figures of the early
church ; it is marvellous that one man, a heretic
from the Christian standpoint, and still more
a heretic and proscribed person from the stand
point of the Zoroastrian religion, should have
succeeded in spreading a new dualistic faith,
which borrowed from both Christianity and
Parsism, over every country which he visited,
including perhaps both China and India.
These Turkestan documents are from the tenth
century, but they may perhaps imply that Mani-
chaeism had been there from the third century
under the apostolate of Mani himself. This phy
sician from Babylon is a very wizard in religious
propagandism, and stands on a level with
Mahomet himself. We, have, then, a wealth of
new evidence for the study of Manichaeism, and
we find, as I have said, the great heresy occupy
ing Chinese Turkestan as far back as the tenth
century and no one can say for how many
centuries before that. But what of Christianity
itself? Behind the writings of Mani and his
followers we see the Gospels, and the Syriac
Gospels, too, in evidence : but up to the time of
the first publication of these documents by Pro-

118 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
fessor Miiller, there was no trace, except these
indirect evidences, of Syriac Gospels or Syriac
Churches in these distant regions and at the
early date which the Turfan discoveries
suggest. In August, 1905, however, there arrived in
Berlin, addressed to Professor Sachau, eight
photographs of leaves of four separate MSS.
They were accompanied by a letter, sent appa
rently from a station on the Siberian Railway
by an archeologist who was engaged in the
explorations in Chinese Turkestan of which we
have been speaking. The MSS. were written,
three of them in the Syriac language, the fourth
in Syriac characters with slight variations, but in
an unknown tongue. The date of the MSS. was,
to judge by the handwriting, of the ninth or tenth
century, but as Professor Sachau was cautious
enough to say that the writing of such out
lying districts is apt (like the fashion of ladies'
dresses in the country) to be a little archaic,
perhaps we might have to depress the date
a little from the first estimate. Of the unknown
language he was able to conjecture that it
belonged to the Iranian family and to identify a
word or two here and there. For instance, when

The Romance of the Versions. 119
the letters Pncmik were expanded as Pancamik,
even those who only know enough of the meaning
of Indian words to tell that Punjab means five
rivers, would have little difficulty in recognising
the word for fifth; so here was a new language,
related to our own, apparently at the furthest
point in N.E. Asia that Indo-European speech
has yet been discovered. The Syriac leaves,
properly so called, contained portions of the
Nestorian Church hymns for the ecclesiastical
year, exactly as they were in use and as they are
found in MSS. in the original settlements of the
Nestorians in the Tigris Valley and on the frontiers
of Persia. But what were Nestorians doing in this
far away district amongst people of another lan
guage, and presumably of another race than them
selves ? It was probable that they were in close
relations with them, for they were using their own
alphabet with some modifications, to transcribe the
words of the language of their neighbours. And
this at once suggests the relation of teacher and
taught, and that the outlying Indo-Iranian people
had no written speech of their own. In that case
the Nestorians must have been something more
than transient guests. Is it possible that they
were on a mission? They clearly had carried

120 Side-lights on New Testament Research. j
their religion with them, as far as their own souls
were concerned : for here were the Church rituals
and hymn-books. So the;ire were interesting
questions in the air, and it was natural to awai\
with expectation the further reports of what
Herr Albert von le Coq had found amongst the
ruins of Turfan. Amongst those which have
since been published in facsimile, or whose con
tents have been communicated to the Berlin
Academy of Sciences, there was a long piece
in the new language, to which I am now going
to draw attention. As the district from which
the text camie is called by the ancient geo
graphers Sogdiana, the language has been chris
tened Sogdianese. The new piece of Sogdianese,
then, was marked with vowels in the Nestorian
manner, had also some traces of accentuation,
and was evidently meant for reading aloud. At
its close was a rubric in Syriac to the passage
which was to follow:
" For the fourth Sunday of the month Kanun the
former. From Matt. c. i.,"
from which it appears that we are dealing with
a lectionary arranged according to the Syrian
calendar. On looking over the passage which
precedes, of which the heading is lost, it was

The Romance of the Versions. 121
easy to find something that could be made out :
for instance here were the words
'at soqant qat xvardarat qu-' Abraham mkx^ pitri-sa.
Here it is clear that we have something
to do with Abraham our father, and bearing
in mind that the next lesson has to do
with the opening of Matthew and the beginning
of the life of Christ, it is not hard to make the
successful guess that here we have a bit of the
hymn of Zacharias, " And the oath which he
sware to our father Abraham."
The passage was a translation of Luke i. 63-
80. So now we could go to work and study the
new language and make out its grammar and
dictionary. Here the decipherers were greatly
helped by another leaf which contained a passage
from Galatians iii. in a double transcription,
Syriac in one column, and Sogdianese in an
adjoining column. So the working out of the
grammar, etc., went on merrily, and we do not
feel so far away from home when we learn that
I am = 'im
thou art = 'is
he is = x^ci
or that we are, you are, and they are, are
• represented by- 'ista, 'ista, x^nt

122 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
which you can compare with the Greek, and
Latin forms. Many words can be at once
identified by their Sanskrit and Persian parallels :
and sometimes a plain Englishman can see what
is meant. So it is clear that the Nestorians had
translated the New Testament into Sogdianese,
and had taught the natives the alphabet and the
doctrine. One more achievement to be reckoned
to that great missionary Church!
The Nestorians had been expelled from the
Roman Empire on account of their refusal to
call the Blessed Virgin the Mother of God (a
noble and far reaching protest), and on account
of their recognising two distinct natures in Christ,
and now they had turned to the Gentiles and
were filling a continent with their doctrine.
Whatever date we assign to these MSS. from
the ninth century to the eleventh, they imply a
previous occupation of Sogdiana by Nestorian
missionaries. And we cannot well dissociate the
conversion of this district from the still greater
task which lay geographically before them, the
conquest of China for Christ, and other work
which must have been done by them on their
travels eastward from Mesopotamia and the
Persian Gulf. It was a campaign of deliberate

The Romance of the Versions. 123
conquest, one of the greatest that Christian mis
sionaries have ever planned. We might be quite
certain that they did not pass through Persia
without translating the Scriptures into the lan
guage of the people to whose tolerance they owed
their very life, nor neglect the populations through.
whom they passed. As a matter of fact, we
have evidence on these points. For if we want
to get an idea of the extent of the Nestorian
propaganda in Central Asia and China, we have
only to take the documentary evidence of the
division of these lands into provinces and
dioceses. In the year 1265 the Nestorians
reckoned twenty-five Asiatic provinces and more
than seventy dioceses. Amongst the latter were
Transoxiana, Turkestan, China and Tangout.
Tangout comprised the part of Western China
now known as Shensi and Kansu, and the capital
of the province was Hsi'en-fu where a great
inscription was discovered to which we shall
presently refer. From Marco Polo and other
travellers we get information of the existence of
Nestorian Churches all along the trade routes
from Bagdad to Pekin.i
From the foregoing it appears probable that
' See Bonin in Journal Asiatique, ix serie, torn 15, p. 584.

124 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
from quite early times there was a steady out
put of translations into Old Persian on the part
of the Nestorian Church, and we need have not
the least hesitation in saying that these trans
lations must have included the Scriptures; and
if they translated the New Testament at the early
date indicated, the version is probably not yet
published, as the existing Persian texts do not
seem to be of any great antiquity. In view of
the extent of literary work covered by the Nes
torian translators, coupled with the fact that we
find the Nestorian Comtmentators quoting the
Diatessaron as late as the ninth century, it is
interesting to reflect that there is a possibility
that we may come upon the lost Diatessaron in
one of these outlying translations, a point on
which we shall have something to say presently.
Now supposing we have located rightly the
activity of the Nestorian scholars and teachers
in Sogdiana, let us look at the map and see how
far afield it is to Hsi'en-fu, within the Chinese
Empire where we next come across the Nesto
rians, and find a very famous monument erected
to commemorate the conversion of China to
nominal Christianity in the seventh century of
our era. Instead of beginning with the study

The Romance of the Versions. 125
of the actual monument, of which I am so for
tunate as to possess a splendid rubbing, obtained
by the deputation of the Baptist Mission (Mr.
Wilson and Mr. Fullerton) who recently visited
the place — I propose to begin with a very late
and curious tradition which I came across in a
modern Greek Synaxarion, or Summary of the
Lives of the Saints, arranged for the course of
the Ecclesiastical Year. Here under the date
October 6th, I found a sketch of the labours of
the Apostle Thomas, running something as
follows :
iirpo)(mpr]<Te Kal lo)S cts Trfv KiVav, rj %ivav Tr/v
dvaTiakiKmrdTrp'. oOev koX dvayivwa-Kopi.ev ets rrjv Viwypatjti.av
ToC $aT^€a, OTL iv T<u iroXv^puAA^TO) TTvpyo) Kal iroXvn.p.yyTiO'
opixni {kuOoti etvai oXos diro o.v<a6ev eo)S /caTO) taKoSo/j.rj/j.a'OT
'eK CTivcKov K€pd/jL(ru, iv TOVT<o, Xiyu), T<a irvpyw yeypap,fi,r]p,ei/a
etcri TO. Xoyta ravra. Ata tov Oeiov ®o>p.a 17 oipawos ¦jtiVtiS'
€^airetrrq, KoX eis %LV<Sv (7roA.1v hrjK. rj iwapxiav) irapeyeviTO.
He (Thomas) went on as far as the furthest
east of Kina or China; wherefore also we
read in the geography of Fatzda,, that in the
renowned tower (a costly one, too, for it is all
built from top to bottom of Chinese porcelain:
in this tower, I say,) are recorded the following
words : By the divine Thomas the Heavenly Faith

126 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
was sent forth and it reached China's (city or
province). Here then we have a tradition which the
Synaxarist borrows from some modern Greek
geography (of which I am unable to find a copy)
that there was a famous monument of porcelain
containing an inscription that St. Thomas sent
the Faith into China. And the Synaxarist
explains this to mean that St. Thomas himself
visited China in his missionary travels. Now
with regard to this tradition, it seems clear that
the reference is ultimately to the famous monu
ment of Hsi'en-fu, and the reference to St.Thomas
is very instructive; obviously it arises out of the
fact that St. Thomas is the patron-saint of the
Church of Syria, or at least of Edessa, which
is the starting point for the first eastward
migrations. That St. Thomas preached in China
is merely one more case to be added to many
others of the migration of traditions. Its single
foundation lies in the fact that Nestorian mis
sionaries converted China to Christianity. We
shall see the importance of this when we come
to a somewhat similar case, the preaching of
St. Thomas in India.
And now let us look at the monument itself.

The Romance of the Versions. 127
and the very important chronological date which
it presents. The inscription is in Chinese, but
is flanked and bordered by Syriac writing in a
beautiful hand of the eight century : to judge
from the fact that Chinese literati make pilgrim
ages to the province of Shensi in order to copy
the characters of the inscription, the Chinese
writing must be as exquisitely classical as the
Syriac is. Hsi'en-fu is the name of the district
in which the monument is found, and the actual
city is called Chang'an. There are many other
famous monuments in this city, amongst them
a set of stone tablets of the Confucian Classics,
engraved in the years 833 — 837 A.D. You will
find in Dr. Legge's lecture on the Inscription,
published under the title of Christianity in
China, an account of the discovery of the monu
ment in 1625 and of the .way in which its text
came into the hands of the Jesuit missionaries.
It is an astonishing thing and betrays a very
discreditable spirit of scepticism that this dis
covery should have been challenged in the West
as a fabrication of the Jesuits an'd that amongst
the names of those who disputed its genuineness
Bishop Home is found side by side with Voltaire
and Renan. On the other hand Gibbon saw

128 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
clearly what was the meaning of the inscription
and tells us that " the Christianity of China
between the seventh and the thirteenth century
is invincibly proved by the consent of Chinese,
Arabian, Syriac and Latin evidence. The in
scription of Si-gan-fu which describes the fortunes
of the Nestorian Mission from the first mission
A.D. 636 to the current year 781, is accused of
forgery by La Croze,i Voltaire, etc., who become
the dupes of their own cunning, whilst they are
afraid of a Jesuitical fraud." The dates which
are given are obtained both from the Chinese text
and from the Syriac borderings : the latter say
it is the year 1092 according to the reckoning of
the Greeks, i.e. the year 781 of our era:^ the
1 La Croze did not deny the existence of a Christian
Church in China: cf. La Croze, Histoire du Christianisme
des Indes. i. 62: "Pour ce qui est de'l ancien Christian
isme connu et prechd dans le Royaume de la Chine, il
me semble qu'il y auroit de la tfemferit^ a le nier. Marc
Paul en fait mention, et les premiers Missionaires de
J6suites en ont trouv^ quelques vestiges. D'ailleurs les
livres Ecclesiastiques des Malabares et leurs anfciennes
Ecritures faisant mention de I'Eveque qu'on y envoyoit
autrefois de Babylone, il semble qu'il n'y a point de lieu
d'en douter. A ces preuves je n'oserois ajouter I'lnscrip-
tion deterr^e I'an 1625 dans la Ville de Siganfu, capitale
de la Province de Xensi. C'est une pi^ce manifestement
suppos^e comme je I'ai fait voir ailleurs."
^ In the year 1092 of the Greeks my Lord Yezdbuzid,

The Romance of the Versions. 129
Chinese text gives us the date of the arrival of
the Mission. The first missionary is named
Olopun, a name which I cannot identify, he is
called the greatly virtuous Olopun and he is
said to come from the West, from the Kingdom
of Ta Ts'in.
" Guiding himself by the azure clouds, he
carried with him the true Scriptures. Watching
the laws of the winds, he made his way through
difficulties and through perils. In the ninth year
of the period Chang-Kwan (A.D. 635) he arrived
at Chang'an. The emperor sent his minister,
Duke Fang Hsiian-ling, bearing the staff of office,
to the western suburb, there to receive the visitor,
and conduct him to the palace. The Scriptures
were translated in the Library. (His Majesty)
questioned him about his system in his own
forbidden apartments, became deeply convinced
of its correctness and truth, and gave special
orders for its propagation."
It may, I think, be inferred that the greatly
virtuous Olopun was already acquainted with the
Chinese language, for there is no reason to
Presbyter and Chorepiscopos of Kumdan (i.e. Chang'an)
the royal city, son of the departed Meles, Presbyter of
Balkh, City of Tahuristan, erected this stone tablet, etc.
9

130 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
suppose that the Emperor and his staff knew
Syriac. And if Olopun' was capable of trans
lating his sacred books at . sight into Chinese,
and of holding a prolonged religious conference
with the Emperor, it would be absurd to suppose
that he neglected his opportjunity to make a
Chinese translation of the saqred books which
he had brought with him. ^^^hat happened on
a small scale in Sogdiana must have been
repeated on a large scale in iChina, and I fail
to see the reason why some of tAese early Chinese
Scriptures should not be founB.Jsdien we have
found Scriptures in the wildeaness outside the
Flowery Land. Whether the jChinese Mission
preceded or followed the mission to Sogdiana,
we may not be able to determine with certainty.
But as it is all on one line of j march and good
generals do not leave unreduced fortresses in
their rear, we may, if we please, put the Mission
to Sogdiana first. The steady pressure which
was driving the Nestorians eastward may be
seen by the illustration of the 'Syrian ecclesias
tic who erected the tablet; his father was a
priest in the City of Balkh. The motto in those
days must have been, " Go East, young Christian,
go East," and it is a valid motto yet. That

The Romance of the Versions. 131
Olopun brought his books with him appears
from the further description of the great inter
view, which resulted, three years later, in an
imperial proclamation to the following effect :
" Systems have not always the same name.
Sages have not always the same personality.
Every religion has its appropriate doctrines which
by their imperceptible influence benefit the in
habitants. The greatly virtuous Olopun of the
Kingdom of Ta Tsin, bringing his Scriptures and
his images from afar, has come and presented
them at our high Capital. Having carefully
examined the scope of his doctrine, we find
them to be mysterious, admirable and requiring
nothing (special) to be done; having looked
at the principal and most honoured points in
them, they are intended for the establishment of
what is most important. Their language is free
from troublesome verbosity; their principles
remain when the immediate occasion for their
delivery is forgotten; (the system) is helpful to
(all) creatures and profitable for men — let it have
free course throughout the Empire."
Amongst those books it is reasonable to
suppose that the complete New Testament was
included; for the author of the inscription in

132 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
summing up the doctrine of Christianity says of
our Lord that " when His mighty work was thus
completed, at noon-day He ascended to His true
place. He left behind Him the twenty-seven
standard books. These set forth the great con
version for the deliverance of the soul." The
number twenty-seven exactly covers our present
New Testament : but as the Peshito does not
contain four of the Catholic Epistles, or the
Revelation, I should hesitate to believe that this
is all that is meant by the inscription; it is
possible that there may be some added volumes
— perhaps of Canons, or of Clementine or other
Apocrypha. The number, however, is so
strikingly coincident that we may be sure the
Syrians brought their New Testament with them.
That they brought other books as well may
perhaps be inferred from the description of the
country of Td Ts^in from which the Christian
Embassy was supposed to have come, a land
" where robberies and thefts are unknown among
the common people : where men enjoy happiness
and peace : where none but] the Illustrious
Religion is observed, none but virtuous rulers
are appointed : a territory of vast extent whose
literary productions are brilliant."

The Romance of the Versions. 133
I find it hard to believe that all the literature
imported by the Nestorians and all the books
translated by them can have perished. Some
where, perhaps, in the corners of the Buddhist
temples that succeeded to the Christian monas
teries, there may be lurking . Syriac and Chinese
MSS., or Syro-Chinese bilingual MSS., which
would add greatly to our knowledge of the
Nestorian Church and of the Christian literature.
If such exist, they cannot, from the nature of the
case, be of late date; and they may be very
early. For Dr. Legge thought that the Nestorian
movement had received its death-blow by an
Imperial edict of A.D. 845. So that any sur
viving MSS. could not be later than the ninth
century and may be as old as we like reasonably
to imagine. I notice that Dr. Legge does not
think that much translation on the part of the
first missionaries can be inferred, and that prob
ably only select passages were invoked, but I
submit that, after the evidence from Sogdiana,
this suggestion has lost its verisimilitude; I see
no reason why the Diatessaron itself should not
turn up in China.
And having reached that point, I will confess
that my optimism once reached the point of

134 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
believing I had found it. It came about in this
way. Many who are acquainted with the early
stages of the Christian campaign for the con
quest of China, will remember that Morrison
began his studies, preliminary to the translation
of the New Testament into Chinese, by working
at a Chinese Harmony of the Gospels which was
in the British Museum: this Harmony he ulti
mately made the base of his first Chinese New
Testament. Besides this, the translation con
tained the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline
Epistles, with the exception of Hebrews. Looked
at from the outside, that has the appearance of
being an early canon of Scripture. The im
pression this translation made upon Morrison may
be seen from his memoirs (compiled by his
widow, London, 1 839) :
p. 67. " The British and Foreign Bible Society,
almost from its formation, had the claims of
China before it : and having been informed that
a MS. version of the New Testament in the
Chinese language was deposited in the British
Museum, entertained thoughts of printing it:
but, on further enquiry the idea was relin
quished." 1
' The reason for this was that they knew it to be a Harmony,

The Romance of the Versions. 135
p. 11 . " After he had acquired the method
of writing Chinese, and some degree of familiarity
with the characters, he commenced the trans
cription of the Chinese MS. in the British
Museum, which has already been mentioned,
containing a Harmony of the Gospels, the Acts
of the Apostles, and all the Pauline Epistles
except that of the Hebrews."
p. 78. " Speaking of his endeavours to
prepare himself for his work, Dr. Milne says,
' what was acquired of the language proved after
wards of very trifling utility. The Dictionary
and the Harmony of the Gospels, were more
useful. They were originally the work of some
Roman missionaries in China. By what in
dividuals or at what time, these works were com
piled, has not been ascertained; but Providence
had preserved them to be useful, and the just
merits of their authors will doubtless one day be
reckoned to them.' "
It is not quite easy to say how Dr. Milnej
was so sure the Harmony came from Roman
hands, when he had no clue either to the hands
and not a text of the Gospels. Mr. Canton, in his History of
the Bible Society, says that they had also ascertained from ex
perts that it was based upon the Vulgate. See Canton, l.c. i.
24 and 299.

136 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
themselves or to the period of their activity.
Morrison took his copy of ^he Harmony to
China with them and used to 4et his assistants
and domestics to read therefrom on the Lord's
Day and he tells us that " My assistant is of
opinion that the translation ivhich I have of
the Gospel and Epistles (which I brought from
England) was made by some Chinese : the style
being better tlian he supposed could be pro
duced by any foreigner." In his letters to the
Directors of the London Missionary Society, he
frequently alludes to the famous MS. of which
he had a further transcript made by one of his
assistants, as follows :
" I have also Low Heen, whom I mentioned
before; he transcribed for me the Harmony of
the GrtDspels and the Acts of the Apostles. He
put them into the form of Chinese books, which
they had not before, &c."
" In September I sent the Acts of the'
Apostles, carefully revised with the Greek text,
corrected and pointed, to a Chinese printer, and
after having a specimen of his workmanship,
engaged for i,ooo copies. I am t/^have the
blocks, which if cut on good woods according to
our agreement, will strike off 15,000 cr^^ies before

The Romance of the Versions. 137
they need be repaired and after that the plates
may be used for a greater or less period of
time. How many they will strike off before they
are absolutely useless I cannot say. The terms
are 521 dollars," &c.
And again in a letter from Canton on January
nth, 1814:
" I beg to inform the Society that the
translation of the New Testament, carrying on
at this place, into the Chinese language, has
been completed, and I hourly expect the last
sheet from the press  The Gospel, the
closing Epistles and the Book of Revelation, are
entirely my own translating. The middle part of
the volume is founded on the work of some
unknown individual, whose pious labours were
deposited in the British Museum. I took the
liberty of altering and supplying what appeared
to me to be requisite; and I feel great pleasure
in recording the benefit which I first derived
from the labours of my unknown predecessor."
These are some of the passages in which
Morrison speaks of the MS. which contained the
Harmony. I cannot see that he ever himself
refers the work to Roman or Jesuit hands. 1
' The actual MS. in the British Museum has the following

138 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
This, then, is what I went in quest of, with a
desire to obtain some information as to the nature
of the text and the character of the Harmony
that was translated. But, as so often happens
in these matters, the scent became cold, and after
conference with Professor Giles, of Cambridge,
and the examination of some passages together,
I came to the conclusion that some Western
Harmony, perhaps one of the many Latin
Harmonies, lies at the back of the MS. It would
be interesting to have some further light thrown
on this point : the translation itself, when done
back into English, is very fresh and racy.
And now let us retrace our steps, bearing in
mind the information that we have acquired, our
convictions as to the splendid zeal and enthusiasm
of the Nestorian Church, and of their skill in
transferring their spiritual oracles into the
tongues of surrounding peoples and nations.
We are now to ask the question. What about
India? Was there ever an early planting of
note : " Evangelia Quatuor Sinice MS. This transcript was
made at Canton in 1738 and 1739, by order of Mr. Hodgson, Jr.
[of the East India Company], who says it has been collated
with care and found very correct. Given by him to Sir Hans
Sloan in September, 1739." But this tells nothing about the
ancestry of the' MS., nor the original composer.

The Romance of the Versions, 139
Christianity in India ? And if so was it effective ?
Was it the work of the Nestorians ? Or was it
earlier ? And if it was earlier, was it in any way
re-inforced by Nestorian activity? The problem
is a very interesting one, for it may be
approached in so many different ways. We
might begin with the facts, or with the traditions,
or with the d priori probabilities of the case.
The facts are the existence to this day of a Syrian
Church in Malabar, claiming direct descent from
St. Thomas, and possessing a certain amount of
Syriac literature in their archives, but using the
Malayalam language in their every-day inter
course. A similar Church once existed in
Madras, where it has been displaced (what was
left of it) by the Roman Catholics. The tradi
tions are two-fold, one the written legends of
the preaching and death of St. Thomas, especially
the book known as the Syriac Acts of Judas
Thomas the Apostle, according to which
Thomas, or rather Judas Thomas, is sold by our
Lord to a certain Indian merchant, and goes to
India to build a palace for the king of the
country. The other tradition of Christian
preaching in India is a precise one and comes to
us through Eusebius, who tells us that Pantaenus

140 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
the Christian philosopher and teacher of Clement
of Alexandria, the founder of the famous school
at Alexandria, had actually made the journey to
India, and found traces of the preaching of the
Apostle Bartholomew; and that Bartholomew had
left in the country the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew
(about which Gospel the Fathers talk so much
and so obscurely). ^ These are the two forms
of tradition which we are called upon to
harmonize. As to the probabilities of the case we may say
that they are very high for a belief in Nestorian
missions to India: for the people that found
China by a long overland journey of many
months over countries most inconvenient of
transit, could hardly have neglected what was
practically their next-door neighbour by sea.
The trade-route, whether by land or sea, has
always been the line of advance of the Gospel.
Now let us turn from the a priori probabilities
to the facts. We do find such a Church still
existing in Malabar. It has been the subject,
in our time, of a very famous conflict in which
1 This tradition is transcribed by Jerome and amplified
in his characteristic manner. What he adds to the Euse-
bian tradition is probably agreeable fiction.

The Romance of the Versions. 141
the two rival branches of the Syrian Church, the
Jacobite or Western, and the Nestorian or
Eastern, fought out their rights of control over
the native churches in India before an Anglo-
Indian Court. What happened in the decision of
the case was something like what happened
recently when Scotch Churchmen came to
England for the settlement of their internal
strife : the Court took the wrong view, and
I believe, as a matter of fact, its judgment
has since been reversed. It gave the Syrian
churches in India to the Jacobites. But a little
study of archeology would have shown that they
were Nestorian churches. The oldest churches
in the Malabar and Madras districts contain
crosses surrounded by old Persian inscriptions :
so the churches must have been under Nestorian
administration and governed from Seleucia-
Ktesiphon on the Tigris. We may regard the
Syriac and Old Persian languages as the two
languages of the Christians in these districts,
the one being the language of ecclesiastical
government, the other the language of the
temporal control to which they deferred. There
is no trace of any vernacular Indian Scripture,
as far as I know, on these early monuments.

142 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
And this agrees closely with what we find in
the travels of Kosmas Indicopleustes, who is our
first trustworthy authority for Christianity in
Southern India, that " even in the Island of
Ceylon, in the Indian Sea, there is a Church of
Christians with clergy and a congregation of
believers, though I know not if there be any
Christians further in that direction. And such
also is the case in the land called Malabar, where
the pepper grows. And in the place called
Cabana, there is a bishop appointed from
Persia : " and he tells us, in speaking again of
Ceylon that " the island hath also a Church of
Persian Christians who have settled there, and
a presbyter who is appointed from Persia, and
all the apparatus of puBlic worship; but the
natives and their rulers are heathens."
This evidence is of the highest importance;
it fixes the date of the colonization of the various
places in Southern India as something anterior to
A.D. 522 when Cosmas made his Indian journey;
it shows the Churches as colonies, rather than
as successful missions, that is, in an early stage
of development; and it furnishes these state
ments on the faith of a man who knew Persia
and is believed to have been himself a Nestorian.

The Romance of the Versions. 143
When we take the early sixth century evidence
of Kosmas with the seventh century evidence of
the Madras and Malabar Churches, we can have
little doubt that the Christianity of Southern
India in those Says (and some of it which has
continued to our own) is Nestorian Christianity
of the same period as that of the great missionary
movement which took the Nestorians across the
Continent of Asi^ to China at the beginning of
the seventh century.
It is curious, however, that amongst these
Churches we do not now come across any
early traces, as yet, of vernacular Scripture,
nor of the translation of sacred books, such
as we find in Sogdiana. It is, of course,
possible that the Persian Syrians went to India
for trading purposes as well as for religious ends,
and perhaps this may have been the direction in
which their energy was drawn off. Kosmas' one
bishop in Ceylon is a different figure from the
long tale of Syrian ecclesiastics who decorate the
Hsien-fu monument. Moreover there is con
clusive evidence that for many years they
were re-inforced by immigration from the
Persian Gulf and not by proselytism only.
we may confidently refer the history of Chris-

144 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
tianity in Southern India to a Nestorian origin.^
The questions that remain are concerned with
the legends of the preaching of St. Thomas and
St. Bartholomew.
I have no space to deal exhaustively with the
two traditions which ascribe the origin of Indian
Christianity to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew.
In favour of the former there is the identification
of the King Gundophar, with a first century ruler
of Cabul and the Punjab, of whom many coins
are extant. There is no doubt as to the existence
of a real Gundophar, and if he is the person in
the Thomas legends, the India of those legends
is, at the furthest, the Punjab, to the west of
India; at the nearest, the outlying portions of
the Parthian Empire. For the " coins of Gun
dophar are common in Cabul and Candahar, and
in Seistan and in the Western and Southern
Punjab."^ In my judgment, the identification of Gun
dophar is not enough to float the Thomas legends
1 The best book on the Syrian Church in India is a
work under that title by Mr. Milne Rae. It is sometimes
spoken of disparagingly by such as are " insolent to main
tain tradition," but that is not necessarily a demerit.
^ Cunningham: Journal of Asiatic Society Tixm., pp. 711,
712, quoted by Milne Rae : p. 364.

The Romance of the Versions. 145
to the level of history. He was evidently a ruler
of great force and influence who had caught the
popular imagination, and was likely to turn up
in the apocryphal story which connected the
Church of Edessa with Churches on the farther
frontier of Parthia. But, if we concede the
possible existence of such Churches, we know
too much about St. Thomas from the internal
analysis of the Apocryphal Acts to regard him as
anything else than a substitute for the Heavenly
Twins, who were, in those days, the patron deities
of Edessa.
With regard to the supposed mission of Bartho
lomew which was said to have been attested by
Pantaenus, I should like to speak with more
reserve. It has about it some elements of veri
similitude. I am not one of those people who
wish to minimize the historical intercourse
between India and Alexandria : it is possible that
people travelled to India, more than occasionally,
before the Suez Canal was opened and before
the establishment of the P. & O. line of steam
ships. But the story is suspicious, in the same
way in which the Thomas mission is suspicious.
It contains a suggestion of apostolical authority
for some persons unknown, and this is the most
10

146 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
dangerous way that history takes of saying " I
am of Paul " and " I of Cephas." The India of
which Pantaenus speaks may be, however, the
real India, as he seems to have had some know
ledge of the Brahmins: and if he did not take
this from books, we may have to admit something
like an Indian mission by Pantaenus in the latter
part of the second century. But we are not
able to clear the matter up, for want of sufficient
evidence and corroboration.
However, we have now gone over the
ground, and we conclude that there is no
prospect of recovering an early Indian Bible,
as we think there may \)e of recovering
early Chinese Scriptures. We have drawn
attention to the marvellous activity of the
Nestorian Church : they have long since shrunk
to the merest remnant in the mountains of
Kurdistan : " the wild-boar out of the wood has
wasted them ; " their Paradise has returned to the
wilderness. But we cannot think of their
remnant without interior motions of compassion
and regret. " Men are we, and must grieve
when e'en the shade of that which once was great
has passed away." Christians are we, and must
grieve over unsuccessful attacks on the rulers of

The Romance of the Versions. 147
the darkness of this world. For as Gibbon so
justly and so honestly argued, " the zeal of the
Nestorians overleaped the limits which had
confined the ambition and curiosity both of the
Greeks and Persians. The missionaries of Balkh
and Samarcand pursued without fear the foot
steps of the roving Tartar." Their passion to
preach Christ where he had not been named was
worthy of St. Paul himself, and their decline and
almost complete disappearance is one of the
mysterious features of Ecclesiastical History.

LECTURE V.
Side-Lights on the Authorship of the
Epistle to the Hebrews.
IN the present Lecture I propose to leave
the fields of Textual Criticism and of
Archeology, where I have been trying to
test ancient beliefs by new discoveries. We have
tried to excavate in Jerusalem the right text
of John V. 2; to unearth new endings of Mark
in Egypt; to decipher fresh translations of the
Syriac New Testament in Siberia; but now let
us leave the region of external research, and try
a simple problem of authorship, unencumbered
by a great deal of critical apparatus or theories
of genealogical relation of the great MSS.
Perhaps in the problem which I propose to
undertake I may not refer to any variation of
the text at all, except in one direction, viz., I
may suggest some slight alterations in the forms
or arrangements of the words : that is, I shall

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 149
resort occasionally to conjectural emendation.
I am aware that until quite recent years this was
considered a prohibited practice. For example,
when Bentley brought out his proposals for the
great folio edition of the New Testament, in
which all the errors were to be cleared up, he
expressly disowned conjectural emendation in
the following terms :
" The author is very sensible, that in the
sacred writings there's no place for conjectures or
emendations. Diligence and fidelity, with some
judgment and experience are the characters here
requisite. He declares, therefore, that he does
not alter one letter in the text without the autho
rities subjoined in the notes."
When one reflects upon Bentley's astonishing
skill in the restoration of a corrupt classical text
in Greek or Latin, it is certain that it required a
great deal of self-denial, an astonishing exercise
of self-restraint, to write such a sentence as that
which we have quoted. He did, however, leave
himself a loophole of escape from the rigidity
of his own rule ; for he promised that " if the
author has anything to suggest towards a change
of text, not supported by any copies now extant,
he will offer it separately in his Prolegomena."

150 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
The caution which Bentley expressed has been
imitated by most of the great critics since his
day, with the exceptions of Lachmann and Hort.
But of the lesser men who have anticipated Hort
in claiming to correct the text against all the
MSS., it must be admitted that their success has
been but slight, and that the praise which they
have won has been largely, if not wholly, self-
bestowed. Conservative critics like Scrivener
would allow no such proceeding as conjectural
emendation. " It is," says he, " now agreed
among competent judges that Conjectural Emen
dation must never be resorted to, even in passages
of acknowledged difficulty : the absence of proof
that a reading proposed to be substituted for
the common one is actually supported by some
trustworthy document being of itself a fatal
objection to our receiving it"; and again, "the
reading to which no manuscript, or old version,
or primitive Father has borne witness, however
plausible and (for some purposes) convenient,
cannot safely be accepted as genuine or even
probable." But Scrivener leaves something like
a loophole, for he goes on to say that " there
may still remain a few passages respecting which
we cannot help framing a shrewd suspicion that

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 151
the original reading differed from any form in
which they are now presented to us." That is,
we may believe the text to be hopelessly wrong,
but we must not venture, even by the simplest
change, to put it right.
It need hardly be said that Dr. Burgon goes
further than Dr. Scrivener : he attacks Dr. Hort's
emendations fiercely and then says, " Some will
be chiefly struck by the conceit and presumption
of such suggestions as the foregoing. A yet
larger number, as we believe, will be astonished
by their essential foolishness. ^ For ourselves,
what surprises us is the fatal misapprehension
they evince of the true office of Textual Criticism
as applied to the New Testament. // never is to
invent new readings, but only to adjudicate
between old and conflicting ones." And then,
after setting Dr. Hort down for conceit, presump
tion and essential foolishness, he goes on to
ask him " to. consider whether he does not bring
himself directly under the awful malediction with

1 This is something like the language in which Conyers
Middleton attacked Bentley's proposals : " So much vanity,
pedantry, blunder and self-contradiction were hardly ever
found together before within the compass of a single
sheet."

152 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
which the beloved disciple concludes and seals
up the Canon of Scripture."
But I was only incidentally referring to the
possibility that the text may sometimes be wrong.
Take such simple cases as the opening of the
third epistle of John, where the Papyri show that
the conventional opening for a letter is not
TTtpl irdvrmv but Trpo Trdvrtav ; not "Concerning
all things I pray," &c, but " First of all I hope
you are well "; or such a case as I Cor. i. 13,
where the negative m has dropped before the
repeated syllables of ixefnipuTTox. So that the
ordinary translation " Is Christ divided ? " is very
nearly right. And so on in ever so many places.
What I want to do in this lecture is not to
discuss and defend the general principle of
conjectural emendation, but to consider the
authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As
you are aware, there is a hypothesis before the
world which was proposed by Dr. Harnack
several years since, according to which the
anonymous writing (call it epistle, or call it
sermon, or address, or homily) is to be credited
to the joint authorship of Aquila and Priscilla,
the friends of Paul who are mentioned in the
Acts and occasionally elsewhere in the New

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 153
Testament — with a distinct preference for Pris
cilla as the predominant partner (a preference
which has some evidence in its favour from the
order of the names in the text of the New Testa
ment). It would he too much to say that the new
hypothesis holds the field, for there are some
quarters in which it is regarded as a jeu d' esprit.
On the other hand there were not a few (like
Dr. Peake and Dr. Moulton) who saw at once
that it was an entirely reasonable hypothesis and
capable of strong support: and I have myself
said as much in public on several occasions.
It is not necessary to review at present the
traces which Dr. Harnack thought he had found
of dual authorships, nor to argue at length
whether the feminine feature in the authorship
might not be responsible for the lack of the
preface or title to the book, and for the hesitation,
in certain quarters, as to its canonicity. We
will restrict ourselves to one single chapter of the
Epistle an'd ask what light this chapter throws
on the question of authorship, and whether it
definitely decides the question or leaves it still
open. The chapter to which I refer is the
eleventh, one of the most striking sections in

154 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
the book, and almost capable of being dissected
out as a separate Bible lesson or tract. My
reasons for selecting this chapter are three; first it
is a chapter in which Dr. Harnack detected femi
nine handiwork ; second, I had myself suggested
some features in it which seemed to reflect the
joint experience of Aquila and Priscilla; and
third, there have been urged from this chapter or
in connexion with it, some very strong objections
to the new hypothesis, the facing of which will,
I believe, help us to the right understanding and
ultimately to the true solution of the problem.
First, then, we are to let Dr. Harnack speak on
the chapter; then we are to say a few prelimi
nary words ourselves, and lastly we are to try
and meet objections.
.1. In a note at the end of his article on the
Authorship of Hebrews,^ Harnack remarks that
without laying too much stress on the obser
vation, we ought not to neglect to notice that
in the catalogue of Heroes of Faith in c. xi.,
women are three times mentioned: in two of
these references (i.e. Sarah and Rahab) the allu
sion is very far fetched. The mention of Sarah
with Abraham is an astonishment to the
1 Preuschen's Zeitschrift. 1900 p. 40.

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 155
expositor, and still more the a.brupt intrusion
into the roll of heroes of the words " women
received tlieir dead raised to life again! " And
it seems clear that a tendency is here betrayed
of a desire to incorporate women also amongst
the witnesses to faith, for which the Old Testa
ment furnishes very imperfect material.
The point raised is apparently a small one, as
it is only raised in a note; but it is a very
important one and demands closer and further
investigation. It certainly does astonish one to
find Sarah claimed as a great believer, when
the Old Testament lays such emphasis on her
incredulity of the divine promises ; and there are
some other exegetical difficulties in the passage.
In the case of Rahab the difficulty might
perhaps be evaded by the consideration that the
question of Rahab's salvation was a problem
in primitive soteriology : some holding with
the author of Hebrews, that it was a case of
salvation by faith ; others with James, that it was
a case of salvation by works ; while the harmoni
zing of the two statements was made by Clement
of Rome, who was certainly a careful student
of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
But even if we could isolate the case of Rahab,

156 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
we should still be perplexed over the women
with their resuscitated dead, who can only be
the Shunamite and the Woman of Sarepta; and
why, it may be asked, should these be credited
with special faith for miracles done by the great
prophets who in this connexion are not even
mentioned. So the suggestion of " feminization " in the
Epistle remains, and the only question is whether
it can be counterbalanced or rendered more
striking. Does Hebrews xi. feminize ? That is
the question.
2. In my own reading of this chapter I was
struck with the stress laid on the thought of
exile by the writer, whether in recording instances
from the past in which good men have had to
leave all to follow God, or in inculcating the
characteristic Christian grace of detachment,
which results from a right estimate of things
transitory and of things eternal.
And I have hazarded the conjecture that in
most cases where the grace of detachment is in
a high state of development, it is connected
with outward forms of detachment, which have
providentially been the stepping-stones into the
higher experiences. Now we , do not say that

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 157
unworldliness and Heimweh are found only in
the Epistle to the Hebrews, but they are found
so emphatically there and especially in the
eleventh chapter, that one is disposed to believe
that it is an exile that writes and that enforced
wanderings have laid the foundation for the
doctrine and experience that " there remaineth
a rest to the people of God." And just as
Browning added as a corollary to this verse the
words " And I have had trouble enough, for
one," so we may consider the words to be not
merely an addendum, but the very premiss of
the argument.
Now when we read our chapter through, we
find— (i) That Abraham was one of Faith's exiles:
that he went in search of a promised land; that
Isaac and Jacob were also dwellers in tabernacles,
and they all looked for a city of God at the end
of or beyond the tent-life. All this patriarchal
circle confessed that they were strangers and
pilgrims in the earth. Their talk betrayed their
country. They might have returned if they
would; but they are pressing towards a better,
a heavenly country. God thinks better of thern
because of their passion for the better land.

158 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Surely this is exile's and pilgrim's talk, and not
merely the observation deduced from a super
ficial reading of the Old Testament stories.
(2) And what about Joseph dying in Egypt,
and giving instructions about the return of his
bones to the home-land ? And why did he talk of
the exodus of the children of Israel? We are
astonished, too, to find that it was an act of
faith when Moses fled from Egypt, and the
incident is coupled with an allusion to the wrath
of the king. Is it surprising that this chapter
should be credited to an actual exile, and in that
case the forsaking of Egypt becomes parallel
with a decree of Claudius Caesar that Jews
in general, and two particular apostolical Jews
among them, should depart from Rome ? So we
write against this chapter the words, " An exile
speaks." That the motive for the discourse
was not confined to the subject-matter of the
chapter, viz. " the making and fortunes of the
heroes of God," may be seen from the way the
writer strikes the same note in the thirteenth'
chapter : " Let us go to Jesus outside the camp,
and let us bear His reproach, for here we have
no abiding city, but we are seeking the one to
come."

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 159
So I have suggested that the chapter which
we are discussing belongs not merely to the
sentiment of Christian people generally, whom
Peter admonishes to live like pilgrims and
strangers and avoid the attractions of the world
and the flesh, but that it has a particular force
in being connected with the experience of Aquila
and Priscilla. If this could be defended, the
argument of Harnack for the dual authorship
or for the dual authorship and feminization of
the epistle would be re-inforced.
3. And this brings us to the third point, viz.
that from this very chapter there will be brought
forward the strongest objections to Harnack's
hypothesis, and it is possible that some of them
may be fatal. And these objections are of two
kinds : first, that if it be true that the eleventh
chapter is feminized, the feminization is insuffi
cient, in view of the available material, and
therefore must be held to be accidental : second,
that the chapter can be grammatically proved to
come from a masculine hand. These are the
two directions in which we now propose to carry
the investigation, and we will take them in order.
(i) It will be seen that at this point we are
definitely contradicting Harnack's suggestion that

160 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
the Old Testament was ill supplied with women
heroes. For it may be asked. Why do you
neglect Deborah? And have you nothing to
say ahont Esther? And why should Judith be
forgotten? And again if Barak is mentioned
and Deborah neglected, whereas the Old Testa
ment definitely makes Deborah the central figure
of the emancipation, and puts the Song of
Victory into her mouth, then it would be just
as fair to call the omission of Deborah a case
of de-feminization as to call the intrusion of
Sarah a case of feminization. And in the
same connexion Jael finds no notice — the one
that was blessed among women in the tent
and was therefore taken by certain fathers to be
a type of the blessed Virgin herself (as I think I
remember Bishop Wordsworth once expounding).
Surely if a Jewish or Judaeo-Christian prophetess
were writing the record of her race in epitome,
she would not have neglected the Charlotte
Corday of that particular time of distress. Or,
to go one step further, if prayer and faith go hand
in hand, was there to be no mention of Hannah's
prayers ? Should Samuel be definitely men
tioned, and his believing mother be ignored ? Or
if Rahab is worthy of commemoration on account

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 161
of the escape of herself and her family from the
sack of Jericho, her lack of virtue being no obstacle
to the reception of grace, why should Susanna
find no place, when her case was one both of
faith and of virtue ? Should Daniel be made
mention of — for he is certainly intended in the
words " stopped the mouths of lions " — Daniel,
who " came to judgment " in the case of the
wronged innocence of the Jewish lady, and no
allusion be made to her conflicts, prayers and
deliverance ? And if these feminine features are
all ot them wanting, what becomes of the sup
posed feminization of the roll of heroes ? Surely
Harnack must be wrong in saying that the Old
Testament is poor in heroines, and the conclusion
must be that the eleventh of Hebrews is insuffi
ciently rich in them.
Now, in order to examine how far this!
destructive argument has weight, I propose to
approach the subject from two fresh points of
view; first, by comparison with a similar roll
of heroes elsewhere; second, by a more exact
elucidation of the persons intended in the eleventh
chapter. We begin, then, by asking for a similar
composition. For it is agreed on all hands that
this is the meaning of Hebrews XI. Its watch- II

162 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
word is Faith, but its subject is the praises of
the elders. It is true that the roll-call is prefaced
by a statement that the worlds were made by
the word of God and that it is by faith that
we understand this. But then this is preceded
by the statement that " Faith is the mark of the
men of old time " : so we see clearly that the
allusion to creation only means that the writer
is turning the pages of his Bible for instances of
faith, and recognises in passing that even in
Gen. i. i we find a place tor faith, in the
conviction that the Seen is the product of the
Unseen. But this allusion is only there for the
sake of literary completeness; it amounts to
saying that we will search the Bible through for
this thing, from Genesis to whatever was the last
book in the writer's Old Testament. And as
we are going to examine the roll-call in Hebrews
by the side of another famous roll-call, it will be
necessary to find out, if possible, just what the
last book in the writer's Bible was. And I think
it is not difficult to see that it must have been the
fourth book of Maccabees. The fourth book of
Maccabees is not much read nowadays, and its
authorship is unknown: for a time it passed
under the name of Josephus, but it can easily be

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 163
seen that such an eloquent treatise, with such
flashing rhetoric, and such an acquaintance with
Stoic philosophy cannot have been the work of
Josephus. Moreover, it must be earlier. It is
concerned with the praises of the mother and her
seven sons who withstood the frown of Antiochus
the tyrant and despised his laws. It tells of the
triumph of reason over passion, and it glows
with the hope of an immortal life beyond the
pains of death or the tortures of the tyrant. The
early Christian Church took over the Maccabees
and set them amongst its saints, where the Greek
Church still commemorates them, and this book,
the so-called Fourth of Maccabees, is the text
book, as I suspect, of the primitive commemora
tion. When the writer of this book has described
in detail the resistance which the Maccabee
mother and her seven sons made to the
ordinances and threats of Antiochus (the key
note of which resistance is the two words
uexpt Oavdrov," until death itself"), and when the
death of the seven sons has been followed by
the suicide of the mother, he says that it would
have been well to put an inscription on their
tomb for a national memorial, and to say —
" Here lie an aged man, and an aged

164 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
woman, and her seven sons through the
violence of a tyrant, who sought to over
throw the Hebrew polity. But they avenged
their race, by looking away to God, and by
enduring tortures even unto death."
(eis ®£ov af^opSvres, Kal /teXP' Oavdrorv ras ^aadvovs
VTro/xeLvavTis. )
Now if we compare the closing passages of
Hebrews XI. with the opening words of Hebrews
XII. we shall find that all commentators agree that
the bede-roll includes the Maccabees, and con
cludes with them ; but it has not been so generally
noticed that Hebrews XII. continues with the
Maccabees, and imitates the language which is
suggested for their memorial. Look at the
expressions, " Let us run our race also, looking
away to Jesus (a<^op5vT£s m tov 'Iijo-ow), for ye
have not yet resisted unto blood (oiJTroj fie^pis
aifxaros dm/careoTi^Te) .
So we may say that the Bible of the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews ran from Genesis
to IV. Maccabees. But I must not dwell further
on this point, but return to the other bede-roll
with which I propose to compare that in the
Epistle to the Hebrews.
In the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach there

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 165
is, towards the end of the book,i a celebrated
chapter, which is commonly read in English
Colleges on the day appointed for the commemo
ration of benefactors. It is called the Praise of
Famous Men, from its opening words, " Let us
now praise famous men^" In Greek its title is
" The hymn (or praise) of the fathers." The
writer, then, records in detail the praises of
Enoch, Noah, Abraham,^ Isaac and Jacob, Moses,
Aaron, Phinehas, Joshua, Caleb, Samuel, David,
Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Hezekiah, Josiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve prophets, Zerub-
babel, Nehemiah: and then after a few stray
references to earlier worthies, the writer settles
down to dilate on the merits and glory of the
latest hero of all, Simon the Son of Onias.
Now if we review this list, I think we shall see
that here also the writer is turning the pages of
his Bible, at least mentally, when he writes; the
reference to the twelve prophets probably shows
that he is working from a book. So he is doing
just the same as the writer to the Hebrews is
doing. And the curious thing is that he never
1 Cap. 44.
^ Notice the language xliv. 20, ev Trei.paap.(o evpeOr] ;
and cf Hebrews xi. 17, irto-rei 'A;8paa/i...Tr£tpa^dp,Ei'os.

166 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
mentions a woman at all in the whole of his
story of Israel. This, then, is the way in which a
man would write the historical summary ; and the
observation and the comparison with Hebrews,
strongly confirms Harnack's suggestion that the
latter writer has feminized. It is either a woman,
or a man under the influence of a woman.
But, having made this comparison, and shown
how it works in favour of the Priscilla hypothesis,
we can go a step further; we can try and get
some closer idea of what the Bible of the writer
to the Hebrews was like, and so make some
further identification of the persons whose
praises are there, at least in epitome. We will
identify some further characters in the cloud of
witnesses. The cloud, in fact, very readily be
comes crystalline, though I do not think the
interpreters of the Epistle have adequately recog
nized this. When we read the chapter carefully
we soon see that the roll of the saints changes
into a roll of the virtues of the saints ; the names
of the heroes and heroines are dropped, and their
deeds only are commemorated; but it is not
difficult, speaking generally and recognizing that
we are making a Biblical study, to identify the
persons behind the actions. No one, for instance.

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 167
has the slightest doubt that " stopped the mouths
of lions " refers to Daniel, and " quenched the
violence of fire " refers to the Three Children ;
and it would be a perverse exegesis, which
should try to add any other figure to Daniel
because the plural is used and we are told that
" believers have stopped lions' mouths and
quenched fire." So we know that Daniel was in
the Bible which we are exploring for. In the same
way any one who is acquainted with the apocry
phal books that tell of the death of Isaiah and
his rapture to heaven, or of the murder of
Jeremiah by his compatriots, will have no doubt
that Isaiah and Jeremiah were intended by the
terms, " were stoned and were sawn asunder " ;
the legend of Isaiah's death at the hands of
Manasseh and of Jeremiah's end must have been
in the hands of the writer of the Epistle, who
may very well have had the traditions in a written
form; but it is sufficient if we say that the
thought of Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Bible
History called up their traditional deaths. So
we are encouraged to seek for further identifi
cations and we know the way to go to work. The
presumption is that we are dealing with Biblical
matter, and that a single person or group of

168 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
persons (as in the case of the Three Children),
underlies each clause; though we do not know
that they are restricted to single clauses. i But
in order to make our identifications correctly,
we must (observe that such identifications were
matter of enquiry in the first century of our era,
probably within twenty-five years of the pro
duction of the book.
If, for instance, we turn to the first Epistle of
Clement of Rome, c. 17, we shall find him
speaking as follows :
" Let us become imitators of those who went
about in goatskins and sheepskins, preaching the
coming of the Christ : I mean Elijah and Elisha
and also Ezekiel; and besides them those men
also that obtained a good report."
Here we see (i.) that Clement knows his Epistle
to the Hebrews, (ii.) that he has been identifying
the characters in the eleventh chapter. Of the
acquaintance of Clement with Hebrews there can
not be a shadow of doubt : he quotes it so often,
that some early writers suggested that he might
be the author; and it is curious that he never
says he is quoting, as he does when he quotes
1 The Maccabees, for instance, appear to be diffusely
treated.

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 169
Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians. So either
the authorship was unknown in Rome, or, as
Harnack suggests, it was suppressed.
Clement goes on to say that " Abraham
obtained an exceeding good report {ip-apTvp-qO-q
/xeyaXws) and was called the friend of God,"
in which we see him combining the language
of Hebrews with that of the Epistle of James.
There are other coincidences and assonances,
besides his larger quotations, by which we can
see how thoroughly Clement has assimilated the
Epistle to the Hebrews. Now let us turn to the
fifty-fifth chapter in which Clement is enumera
ting the sacrifices which have been made from
time to time through love of others. After
allusions to pagan illustrations of the virtue of
self-sacrifice, he turns to the Scripture and
remarks as follows :
" Many women being strengthened by the
grace of God have performed many manly deeds.
The blessed Judith, when the city was beleaguered,
asked of the elders that she might be suffered to
go forth into the camp of the aliens {aXXoi^vXwv).
So she went forth and exposed herself to peril
and went forth for love of country, and of her
people which were beleaguered: and the Lord

170 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
delivered Holofernes into the hand of a woman."
Bearing in mind what we have already said
about Clement's acquaintance with the eleventh
chapter, and the identifications which he has
made in it, let us throw into parallelism this
passage of Clement with Hebrews xi. 34 :
Clement. Hebrews.
Many women were made Out of weakness
strong by the grace of were made strong :
God; (iv&uvap.uiOua-aL) {i^vvap.u>Or)crav)
performed many manly waxed valiant in
deeds ; fight ;
Judith went forth to the turned back camps
camp of the aliens of the aliens
(dXA.o<^vXo>v) (dXXoTptW)
It seems clear, then, that the persons, who
out of weakness became strong are in Clement's
' judgment women in general and Judith in
particular. 1 But this identification .in which
Clement passes from the general statement as to
woman's weakness, to the particular triumphant
' As a matter of textual criticism this puts Clement in
evidence for the reading ivehwafiwOria-av, which the Editors
commonly [discard. What is supposed to be the later reading
turns out to have by far the earliest attestation.

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 17t
instance, requires that the word " women " in
Hebrews xi. 35 should stand higher up, or that
it should be repeated. The text must run
" women out of weakness were made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, overthrew camps of
aliens." But at this point the objection will be
made that if we are in this way resorting to the
dangerous expedient of conjecturally restoring
the text, we must go further ; we must correct the
masculine word for valiant ,(t<rxvpot) into the
feminine (loxvpat). If we do, I think we
shall miss the point of the writer, who wants to
say that " weak women became strong (men) in
fight " and uses the masculine deliberately.
Clement sees this and therefore explains that
" women, made strong by Divine Grace per
formed manly deeds; " he is explaining the
masculine adjective. So, after all, our con
jectural emendation, as far as we have gone,
need not amount to more than the displacement
or repetition of a single word. But perhaps the
suggested use of the masculine adjective may
be thought too rhetorical a device for the Epistle
to the Hebrews. In that case we must emend.
But this is not all that we learn from Clement ;
not only has he identified Judith as the woman

172 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
who overthrew the camp of the aliens, but he
goes on with another illustration of feminine
courage. "To no less peril did Esther also,
¦who was perfect in faith, expose herself that she
might deliver the twelve tribes of Israel, when
they were on the point to perish. For through
her fasting and her humiliation she entreated the
all-seeing Master, the God of the Ages ; and He,
seeing the humility of her soul, delivered the
people for whose sake she encountered the peril."
The allusion to Esther, following on Judith, with the
statement as to the perfection of her faith,i sug
gests that we are still in the region^ of Hebrews
1 Cf. Hebrews xi. 40, p,apTvpri$ivTe's Sia Trji irtcrT£(i)9,
.iva p.^ X'^P'* ¦fjp.usv TeXeiuiOuXTiv.
2 And this is also clear from the fact that Clement goes
•on to the early verses of Hebrews xii., and discusses the
value of chastening with a reference to the same passage
of Scripture as we find in Hebrews xii. 6. The sequence
in Clement is as follows after the praises of Esther; c. 56
" Therefore let us also make intercession for them that
are in any transgression, that forbearance and humility
may be given them, to the end that they may yield not
=unto us, but unto the will of God. For so shall the
compassionate remembrance of them with God and the
saints be fruitful unto them and perfect. Let us accept
chastisement, whereat no man ought to be vexed, dearly
beloved. . . . For thus saith the holy word . . . ' whom
the Lord loveth He chasteneth and scourgeth every son
whom He receiveth,' &c."

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 173
XI. and raises the question as to whether Esther
also must not be found in the roll of heroes.
But it is not quite so easy to define Esther's
position as it was Judith's. Perhaps " escaped
the edge of the sword " may cover the case, but
the description is very general and can hardly
be relied upon with confidence. ^ It depends in
part on the unknown order of the books of the
Bible in the writer's collection. We do not know
how the books were arranged or what was the
order of chronology deduced from them. As I
said above, we are sure that the history ends with
Maccabees : over and above the reference to
IV. Maccabees, we have the language of II.
Maccabees imitated as in Hebrews xi. 38 iirl ip-qp-CaKi
irA.avwp.evoi Kal opefTi Kal oTnjXatow Kal rats dirais ttji yrjs-
(" wandering in deserts and mountains and in
dens and caves of the earth ") with which we
may compare II. Maccabees x. 6 ev tois opecriv
Kal iv Tots (rrrrjXaCoL'S OrjpCoiv Tpoirov ^crav vep.dp.evoi.
(" they were living herded together like beasts
in the mountains and in the caves ").^
1 We might perhaps compare Esther xiv. 13 " Think not
that thou shalt escape."
2 Cf. also Psalms of Solomon xvii. 19, e'n-A.avcuvTo ev
€p^p.ois (Twdyjvai xf^xas avriov aTro KaKov.

174 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
And now we have said sufficient as to the
structure of the Praises of the Famous, and the
conclusion must be that there are Famous
Women in the list as well as Famous Men. To
Sarah and Rahab and the Widow of Sarepta we
have added Judith and Esther. So there ought
to be no hesitation in saying positively, what
Harnack said doubtfully, that the eleventh chapter
has feminized. And if this be correct, the case
for the authorship of Priscilla is much streng
thened, by the removal of some of the strongest
objections. We are still somewhat surprised at
not finding a definite reference to Deborah, but
what we have found is positive evidence, which
silence on certain points hardly affects any
further. (ii.) There remains one further, and perhaps
fatal objection to be met, the masculine
grammar of the chapter. The eleventh chapter,
like the rest of Hebrews, has the transition to
which Harnack alludes from " We " to " I."
In xi. 2 we have " We understand that the worlds
were framed by the word of God " {iriarti vomp-ev
KTi). But this is only the " we " of the
community, and so has no bearing upon " dual "
or '" multiple " authorship. On the other hand

Authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 175
we have in v. 32 the words " The time would
fail me recounting," &c. and here we have not
only the singular but the masculine singular, 1
{iKXiixj/ei p,e yap Sir/yov p.evov). And this masculine
participle is the real rock in the track, if
we want to refer the Epistle to the Hebrewsi
(or even the eleventh chapter) to Priscilla. There
remains, however, the possibility that, as it is
a case of variation of a single letter, the text
may have undergone correction. In that case
we should probably find the original reading
lurking somewhere amongst the MSS., unrecog
nised or unrecorded. So far as I have been able
to make investigation, I have not found any
trace of the supposed missing reading. And
until such traces can be found, it is only fair to
say that the adverse evidence at this point to
the Priscilla hypothesis is very strong: and it
would not be proper to cure the text of its
difficulty by a conjectural emendation unless the
case were already finally settled by other con
siderations. So we may leave the matter in
uncertainty, but with the hope that after all
some light has been thrown upon the meaning
of the text, and that, sooner or later, decisive
1 As my colleague, Mr. Maynard, pointed out to me.

176 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
evidence as to authorship may be forthcoming.
We need not make apologies because we are not
able to settle finally all the points that come up
before us for investigation. There is much that
will always remain obscure in the history and the
interpretation of an ancient literature; on the
other hand there is also much that can be
elucidated. The twentieth century has its dis
advantages but it is not a bad time to live in,
for the genuine explorer. And if our lectures
can only be decorated by the title of side-lights,
we may hope that they have the merit of being
fairly clear of prejudice, and that in seeking
after further light, we have not added anything
either to the fog that bewilders or to the dark
ness that paralyses those who are engaged in
the progressive interpretation of the Christian
religion.

LECTURE VI.
Further Reflections on the Art of
Conjectural Emendation.
WHEN we apply the test of time, following
Dean Burgon's appeal through Pindar
to the " remnant of the days," who
are the clearest witnesses and the most impecc
able judge and jury, and ask how it fares in such
an appeal with the conjectural attempts to emend
the text of the New Testament, we are obliged to
admit that it goes very hard with the emendators.
This does not, by any means foreclose the
question and prove that emendation is improper
in the New Testament, but it certainly suggests
for it a narrower scope than has been in the
view of those who practise the art. For example,
I practise conjectural emendation freely, and
often spoil the margins of my book with it; but
if I allow time to elapse and then go over the
ground again, there is usually a tiny " No " to
"' 12

178 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
be written against the correction, with perhaps a
cross-reference to some passage which shows
that the text was right as it stood. Certainly
conjectural emendation will not be justified, if
we do not first take pains to understand to the
utmost and from every point of view the passage
proposed for emendation. Many a correction is
ruled out by suspending the judgment and
increasing the attention. The text was right
after all, we are obliged to say; it was we who
were the sinners and not the scribes. No doubt
it is a sense of the exceeding sinfulness of other
scholars, and of our own occasional lapses from
critical virtue, which has caused the art of con
jecture to fall, in modern days, into much
disfavour. And then there is, in the New
Testament, a wealth of . manuscript evidence
which seems to negative the reference to such
an apparently subjective court of appeal as the
mind of a scholar when he is perched on
the judgment seat. Mrs. Browning, you will
remember, speaks in Aurora Leigh, of her
heroine's father as having the scholar's regal
way of sitting on thrones and judging Israel,
and that his margins were decorated with such
notes as " Corrupte citat : lege potius." Well,

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 179
people do not like regal ways in Biblical criticism :
and it is not surprising that we should be sent
back again to the manuscripts, and to the study
of their internal relations, as if they should say
to us " To the law and to the manuscript testi
mony of the law; if they speak not according to
this rule, there is no light in them." Or they
might quote from Ben Jonson,i where one of his
characters is challenged as to the authorship of
certain bills which are fixed to the pillars in St.'
Paul's Cathedral, and replies : " Sir, if I should
deny the manuscripts, I were worthy to be
banished the middle aisle [of Paul's] for ever."
Now in Renaissance and Reformation times
they practised emendation with more freedom
than we do, and often with remarkable skill.
The reason for this is evident; that race of
scholars was familiar with MSS. to an extent
that is almost incredible to us; many authors
whom we have only seen in print, they had only
seen in written form, or at best in the doubtful
texts of first editions based upon single copies,
or upon very scanty re-inforcements of single
copies. Consequently they had the art of
conjecture, especially I think in Latin, at their
' Every man out of his humour, iii. I.

180 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
fingers' ends, and they could often tell you at a
glance what an author must have written from the
mere scrutiny of what the scribe had made him
write. Dean Burgon vigorously denounced two
things; (i.) the inexpertness of critics who had
never handled a Codex, (ii.) the folly of thosej
who resorted to conjecture for the decision of the
text. But he did not reflect that if his critics
had really been familiar with MSS. and their
collation, they would almost for certain have
brought back out of their studies the art of
conjectural emendation. It is hard for me to
believe that neither he nor his friend. Dr.
Scrivener, had any conjectures up their sleeves,
when my own raiment bulges out with them to
a degree comparable to the robes of a pious
Franciscan brother whom I once saw smuggling
cigars at Jaffa. It must certainly have been the
highest form of self-denial in them to refrain from
mending a text which they would infallibly have
attempted the cure of, if it had not been labelled
Bible, and decorated with a Noli me tangere.
From such timidity the Reformers, at all
events, were remarkably free : perhaps Beza is
as good an instance as we can quote of the artist
at work in this field. Some years since my

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 181
friend. Dr. Blass, published a little book called
Philology of the Gospels, in which he emended a
passage in the Acts of the Apostles (vii. 9), where
we come upon the account of the people who
disputed with Stephen. The text says they came
from the Synagogue which is called of the Liber
tines and of the Cyrenians, and from Cilicia and
Asia. Dr. Blass felt there was something wrong
with those Libertines, and with the popular
explanation of them, and he accordingly
corrected Libystine for Libertine, Libystine being
one of the classical forms for what we call
Libyan; and by this restoration he threw Libya
and Cyrene together, as geographical neighbours
(cf Acts ii. 10 " the parts of Libya about
Cyrene "), and gave them a common synagogue
in Jerusalem. This was very ingenious, and
after he had made it, Blass remarked that " the
conjecture has not really been made so far as
I know; nevertheless it might have been made
by a reflecting critic." Blass did not know that
it had already been made by Beza as early as
1559 and abandoned in his N.T. of 1565 out of
deference to the MSS. Here was the " reflecting
critic " in possession of the field before him, and
I had the pleasure (it is one that springs from the

182 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
" scholar's melancholy, which is emulation ") of
pointing out to Dr. Blass that the proposed
emendation was also under the aegis of Le Clerc
and of Spanheim and of Gothofredus, that it was
quoted by Mill with disfavour, by Wetstein and
Bowyer with approbation, that it is in the New
Testaments of Griesbach and Knapp, and has
a paragraph devoted to it in Schleusner's Lexicon
of the N.T. Nor did this exhaust the history of
the matter. So that it appears that if, as so
often happens, the history of a good conjecture
has for its sequel the exclamation " Pereant qui
ante nos nostra dixertmt," the curse may easily
involve a historical massacre. The tracking!
out of Professor Blass' antecedents was a work
of pure joy to me, and I have somewhere a
letter which he wrote me in reply. But the
reason why I quote the matter is not to dis
parage Blass, whose emendation stood all the
firmer for the support which it derived from the
antecedent history of criticism, but in order to
point out an instance, which may be taken as
typical, of the sagacity of the great Beza.i
There is another beautiful emendation which
1 For a further discussion of the matter see Expositor,
November, 1902, pp. 377—399-

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 183
Blass suggested to John xix. 29 which falls under
similar condemnation or, if we prefer, has similar
early attestation. Blass proposed to read instead
of " they put a sponge filled with vinegar upon
hyssop io-o-coTTO)," " they put a sponge filled with
vinegar upon a dagger va-a-io," the rare word
^cro-os, which means a Gallic spear, having been
misunderstood. A reference to Bowyer's
Conjectures will show that the emendation had
already been proposed by Camerarius. But I
must not loiter over Blass and his anticipators :
we have been in the same net ourselves from time
to time.
There is, however, one direction in which
these earlier scholars were limited; the MSS.
which they knew were mostly written in the
cursive character and were comparatively late in
date; consequently the typical mistakes made
by scribes of such MSS. furnish only a slight
clue to what would happen in the copying of a
MS. written in the uncial character, where mis
takes in the .letters are quite different from those
that occur in cursive MSS., and where the
continuous script introduces perils and pitfalls
of its own. Every stage in the history of a
book has errors which are peculiarly its own;

184 Side-lights on New Testament Research.

and it follows from this that whenever we ascend
to a fresh level in the history of the transmission
of the text, we open out a fresh prospect of
conjectural correction of the text. I have the
greatest admiration for that form of scholarship
which makes good corrections possible: it has
an ease of its own, and looks more like instinct
than reason, but behind the simple and con
vincing suggestion there often lies, besides the
resources of what we call learning, a long
experience as reader, as copyist, and as editor,
without which the step to the successful cor
rection would never have been made.
Probably the greatest man that English
scholarship ever produced in this regard was
Bentley. I doubt if he ever had an adequate
predecessor or follower in this country : the bow
of Ulysses is hard for lesser men to bend and
handle. But how he enjoyed handling it himself :
how obvious was his delight in a successful
restoration of a corrupt passage, and how more
than obvious was his Red-Indian satisfaction
when he scalped someone else who had un
successfully attacked the problem before him.
Here is a pretty specimen of both his art and
his manner. There was a certain contemporary

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 185
of his named Barnes who issued what I suppose
might be called the Cambridge Homer of that
day. In the course of his work Barnes tried to
correct an obscure scholioni in which there stood
a sentence as follows ; " When he introduced
the Trojan captives, he asked them from which
of the Trojans {mjo mroripov Tuiv Tpiouv) they
had suffered more, and they said from Ulysses " ;
now as this was nonsense, for the Trojans did
not suffer from the Trojans, nor was Ulysses one
of them, Barnes proposed to correct it, so as
to read, " from which of them the Trojans had
suffered most," (yrro oiroripov avT&v ol TpSes,)
whereupon Bentley handled him and the passage
in the following breezy style : "I'll give him the
true lection with altering half a letter ; xm-h orroripov
t5v 'Hpaluv, ' from which of the two heroes they
suffered most.' This is clear and neat. But our
Professor, besides his botching the words, has
sullied even the sense; for the captives were
not asked what all the Trojans, ot TpSes, thought,
but what they themselves thought." Bentley not
only carried a scalpel, but he supplemented it
with a bludgeon. One would like to see what
would have happened if Bentley had been able
' Od, xi. 546.

186 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
to apply his skill with unlimited freedom to the
text of the New Testament, though I do not
forget that mere classical learning is insufficient,
on the linguistic and philological side, at all
events, for the elucidation of that text. It is true
that he modestly disclaimed in his prospectus
any attempt to introduce conjectures into the text,
and stated that he would reserve what he had to
say for them to his Prolegomena. But I doubt
whether, if the proposed edition had ever come
off, he would have kept to his engagement: he
Would have been sure to put some stars or
daggers or other disturbing features in the text,
after the manner of Dr. Hort, to tell people
that they would never be comfortable till they
had deserted the text for the Prolegomena.^ And
Middleton, in criticising the famous Proposals,
says that Bentley broke his rule even in the
specimen sheets which he issued as prospectus,
and deserted the MSS. for his own better judg
ment in certain not very important points. If
that be so, the rule applies that he who is un
faithful in httle is unfaithful also in much, or as
1 I admit that this is not borne out by the Bentley MSS.
preserved in Trinity College ; but then these are not in their
final form, and the actual Prolegomena were never written.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 187
I put it in other words, those Prolegomena of
Bentley would have been uncommonly interesting
reading. Another reason why we should
probably have had a feast of fat speculations in
the book that never appeared is that Bentley
was suffering from megalomania when he issued
the famous proposals, and megalomania goes
very well with an over-fondness for textual emen
dations, every one of which suggests that its
author is wiser that all the rest of the scribes and
rabbis. Bentley was quite sure that his New
Testament was to be the last word on the
question ; he would consecrate it, in Thucydidean
language, " as a Keipu/jXiov, a KTrjpa is del, a
charter, a Magna Charta, to the whole Christian
Church; to last when all the ancient MSS, here
quoted may be lost and extinguished." That
is what I call megalomania in prospectus-writing.
And it consists very well with an undue zeal in
correction on one's own account, and an undue
approbation of the same.i
1 But perhaps the last part of the sentence may only
mean that a good edition is the best form of fire insurance :
for in his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury he writes
as follows:
" My Lord, if a casual fire should take either his Majesty's
Library or the King's of France; all the world could not

188 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
What remains of Bentley's work in the shape
of notes and collations was utilised by Ellis in
1862 for a volume entitled Bentleii Critica Sacra;
in which we shall find not a few emendations
both to the Greek Text and the Vulgate. One
which evidently pleased him, and may possibly
be right, was his suggestion that in the decrees
of the Apostles at Jerusalem for the regulation
of the new Churches we should read an injunction
to abstain " from pollutions of idols and swine's
Aesh and things strangled and from blood," thus
reducing the whole of the ordinance to taboos
on food.
I am satisfied that Bentley's admirers expected
that he would deal freely in conjectures. For
Dr. Francis Hare who wrote a pamphlet in
approbation of Bentley's Remarks on the late
do this (i.e. restore a complete text of the Nicene. period).
As I have therefore great impulse, and I hope not oBea.
to set about this work immediately, and leave it as a
iw,p.rjXiov to posterity, against Atheists and Infidels, etc."
But then a more satisfactory fire-insurance would have
been the reproduction of the MSS. and not the extracts
made from them by Bentley, a thing which he pleaded
for in his famous Epistle to John Mill. And there is the
same inflation of language about the value of the text
-which he was going to produce as we saw in the Proposals.
He evidently considered himself an inspired person.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 189
Discourse on Freethinking says plainly that " the
present text [of the N. T.] wants the help of
more MSS. than have yet been examined or the
assistance of critic [i.e. criticism] to supply the
want of them " : he says further that Bentley has
" given us a small specimen of this in your happy
conjectures upon three passages, which, as far
as I can find by my own conversation and my
friends, are universally liked by the men of
learning, who would be very glad so great
a master should turn his attention to the
Scriptures." Some people would say that this
was like inviting the wild-boar of the wood into
the Paradise. One wonders what were the three
trial passages which so moved the admiration of
Dr. Francis Hare and his friends. It may be
worth while to try and find them.
From the Prolegomena to Wetstein's N.T.,
p. 155, I find that he proposed to refer at the
proper points to the emendations made by Bentley
— both those which he had publicly brought
forward in the famous tract which he wrote under
the name of Phileleutherus Lipsiensis or in a
sermon which he preached on II. Cor. ii. 16
and those which he had privately communicated
to his friends of which Wetstein inserted

190 Side-lights on New Testament Research.

more than twenty in the first edition of his Prole
gomena. So we may be reasonably certain that
Dr. Francis Hare was alluding to what he had
read in Phileleutherns Lipsiensis.^
The emendations, then, to which we refer
are (i.) The completion of the sentence in
Acts vii. 59, " they stoned Stephen calling upon
 and saying. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,"
where Bentley suggests either that " God "
should be added, ®N having dropped after
e7rocaXoi;p,evov or " Lord " as if KN had been
absorbed in the following KAI. This at any rate
is harmless enough, and if an emendation be
necessary, is in the right direction, (ii.) The
attempt to emend the decree of the Jerusalem
Council in the three places where it occurs (Acts
XV., 20; XV., 29; xxi., 25;) by reading x^V^^"-^
for TTopvct'as.
(iii.) The third, as I suppose, is his proposal
to correct Euroclydon, the tempestuous wind, in
Acts xxvii. 14; and to read Euraquilo or some
thing similar. But this is not exactly a conjecture,
for it was already extant in the Alexandrian MS.
' Note in passing that Wetstein says of the Bentley emen
dations generally : " I am afraid they are not so certain as they
are ingenious." That is the way in which scholars let one
another down in the matter of emendations.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 191
and confirmed by the Vulgate; since Bentley's
day the Vatican and Sinaitic MSS. have come
to light with the same reading, and have justified
his judgment.
Well, there is nothing very terrible in all
this. On the contrary, if there should come con
firmation of any suggested emendation from
fresh scrutiny of the MSS. or versions, as in the
case just mentioned, the emendator takes high
rank, and the man is the equivalent of a very
good MS. Perhaps we may sum up the
merits of the case as regards Bentley in the
language of A. A. Ellis {Bentleii Critica Sacra,
p. xxii) : " Opinions of course will vary as to
the value that should be assigned to critical
conjecture upon the Sacred Text. But no Greek
Testament scholar can deny that it has its
legitimate field who considers by how many
degrees the oldest even of our Uncial Codices is
removed from an autograph of the writers, and
that an error once made by a copyist would
be propagated through whole families of MSS.
Of the merit of Bentley's conjectures every
scholar can now judge for himself: in some
instances he certainly was happy enough to
anticipate the readings of Codex B. At any rate

192 Side-lights on New Testament Research.

it will be known what changes in the text he
did think probable: and future editors of the
Greek Testament will be spared the pain of
insulting his memory by ascribing to him con
jectures which he never made.''^
We, may now consider a volume, to which I
have already alluded, in which the learned printer,
William Bowyer, collected from all the books
he had studied and from all the scholars with
whom he was acquainted, materials for what he
entitled Conjectures on the New Testament. He
published this in 1772, in his old age, at a time
when palsy was on him and when calculus
racked him: and in spite of the adverse
criticisms passed upon its usefulness and its
accuracy, it is really an interesting book. Much
of it is concerned with punctuation and such like
editorial refinements, as we should expect from
a printer, and not with textual emendation
properly so called: some parts, too, are almost
dissertations on difficult passages, taken from
the margins of Bowyer's own Greek Testament;
but the greater part are genuine corrigenda et
emendanda. His learned friends are indicated
by letters of the alphabet, and no key for their
' The reference is to Alford and others on Acts xv. 20.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 193
identification is given in the book itself (at least
in the first edition) ; but from other sources I have
succeeded in identifying all of them but two,
and they made a very good phalanx of con
temporary 'scholarship. The British Museum
catalogue gives a list of persons who contributed
emendations to Bowyer, and names Bishop
Barrington, Mr. Markland, Professor Schultz,
Professor Michaelis, Dr. Owen, Dr. Woide, Dr.
Cosset and Mr. Weston; two of these names,
Schultz and Woide, have been erased with a pen.
With these two exceptions, the names are taken
from the second and third editions (posthumous)
of Bowyer's book, brought out by his partner, and
we may almost say his Boswell, J. Nichols. But
this does not exactly cover the initials in Bowyer ;
we have to identify B, L, O, R, S, Z and Anon.
Of these the commonest is R, which stands for
Jeremiah Markland,^ the commentator upon.
1 Markland's correspondence with Bowyer is published
and in it we find the following: July 30, 1770.
" In mine to you yesterday I expressed some unwilling
ness of having anything printed which is written in the
margin of my Greek Testament; I had not thought
ot an obvious expedient which has occurred since, viz.,
that my name may be concealed (the chief thing I aimed
at), and at the end of such note, if any be made use of,
13

194 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Euripides. O, is Dr. Henry Owen; L, is Bishop
Law (except in II.Tim. i. i8) where it is corrected
in the second edition to Bishop Sherlock; B (in
Hebrews x. 30) is Bowyer himself; and Anon
is Mangey, the learned editor of Philo, who had
made many successful corrections of that author.
So far we identify by the help of the second
edition, except S and Z; and the third edition
doesn't, I think, throw any further light on them.
So it is clear we are in very scholarly company.
And the book, which is interesting in itself, is
much more interesting when the names are filled
in. Bowyer himself is judicious in his treatment
of the subject: he will not suggest that any
emendation shall go into the text without con
firmation from MSS. Confirmation from versions
he does not consider sufficient ; and although he
thinks that many emendations are indubitable,
he tells us cynically that " they are not wholly
useless .... as they set in one view the in
genuity of the several writers' conjectures or
enable the reader to judge of the futility of them."
I wonder what Markland and Mangey would say
may be put the letter R." See also Nichols' Anecdotes of
Bowyer, p. 43 '•

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 195
to that ! But it would be a mistake to suppose
that Bowyer always left the matter to the judg
ment of the reader. For instance in Matthew
xvii. 3 a certain Dr. Bernard had expanded the
text to read " His face did shine as the sun, and
his garments became white as the light of the
moon." He justified the expansion by the sug
gestion that the word for moon ^eX-qvr/ had been
abbreviated by means of its first letter S, and
that this letter had been lost or ignored because
it repeated the last letter of the word for light (<^5s).
Upon which Bowyer remarks, " A moon-shine
emendation." At other times he explains why
a conjecture is not to be admitted: thus when
in Mark vi. 49 " Every one shall be salted with
fire," Joseph Scaliger proposed to read Trao-a
TTvpia, " every sacrifice of flour shall be salted,"
with reference to Lev. ii. 13, Bowyer remarks that
" for the word impia no authority hath yet been
found." And he continues in what must be meant
for irony, " others read Trupa, ' every funeral pyle
shall be salted,' a custom, for which, I believe
we have as little authority." One begins to
suspect that Bowyer was little short of being a
scholar and somewhat in danger of being a wit.^
1 He evidently enjoys telling a story of the pains his

196 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
The value, of course, of the Bowyer collection
is precisely the value of the separate brains from
which it has been made ; and of these Markland
is the ablest. His Greek Testament, or, as I
rather suspect, his Annotated Copy of Bengel's
Gnomon, was the mine from which Bowyer chiefly
worked; and some of the Markland corrections
are certainly felicitous. For example, in Acts
xvii. 14 we are told that the brethren sent Paul
away to go as if to the sea. Markland asks,
" To what sea ; in order to go whither ? Perhaps
©co-o-aXi'av, i.e. we are to read Thessaly for
Thalassa, the sea. Beza's MS., in the next verse,
after 'AOrjV&v reads, -jrap^XOe 8e tt/v ©eo-o-oXiav,
iKtoXve-ri yap eis airovi Krjpv^ai, &C. Whence COuld
this writer say St. Paul was hindered from
preaching in Thessaly, if Thessaly had not been
mentioned before ? " The force of this would
have been even greater if the parallel passage in
Acts xvi. 8 had been quoted : " they came over
late friend, Mr. Maittaire, had taken to make sense of a
bit of impossible Greek from which a preposition had
dropped in Bowyer's own printing office; he explains that
such errors at the beginning of lines are common, and
would ask his friend's pardon if ghosts know how to take
an apology : " I should ask pardon of this Gentleman
(scirent si agnoscere manes) for having been accessory
to creating him all this unnecessary trouble."

The Art of Conjectural Emendation, 197
against Mysia, and essayed to go into Bithynia,
but the spirit of Jesus suffered them not and they
passed by Mysia." Whether, therefore, we
accept the Bezan reading or not, the argument
that Thessaly should have stood in the text is
confirmed. But we must not spend more time over Bowyer ;
his book is a store-house of information on the
history of N.T. criticism, even if the conjectures
themselves suffer the fate of being unappreciated
by the succeeding days.
In our own time there has been a remarkable
reassertion of the right of conjecture both in
England and in Holland. I hope that here at
home we are past the stage where the practice
is considered illicit, and that we shall not be
deterred from going some way with it, because
the Dutch are considered to have gone too far
in the same direction. Amongst those to whom
attention may be drawn, we may select : Dr.
Taylor, the late Master of St. John's College,
Cambridge, and Dr. Hort.
Of Dr. Taylor's skill in emendation, always
founded upon great and wide erudition, the best
instances may perhaps be found in the region
of Patristic literature: but there are some

198 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
striking examples in the New Testament itself.
Perhaps the best of these is the obscure text in
Colossians ii. i8, where the erroneous worshipper
or incipient heretic is denounced who practises
a cult of angels a edpa/c«v i/x^aTcSeiv. The
language is rhetorical as well as obscure. What
does Paul mean by in this connexion? Does he
mean invading or merely prying into or investi
gating! Was the Authorised version right when
it translated, with the assistance of a negative
from the received text, " intruding into those
things which he hath not seen " : or the Revised
version in rendering, " dwelling in the things
which he hath seen," with a sense of hopeless
perplexity reflected both in the weak word
dwelling and in the marginal alternative, " taking
his stand upon the things which he hath seen " ?
Here Dr. Taylor comes to our aid : the passage
had already invited emendation at the hands of
Alexander More, who was followed by Curcel-
laeus,! in the suggestion that we should read
(C£vep,)SaTcu'a)v for ip-Pareimv, on the ground that
a repeated syllable had been dropped. The
restored word would mean that the person
1 Curcellaeus in loc: quidam conjiciunt sic_ legendum
hunc locum . . . a p,ii itapaxf Kevefi^areuuiv.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 199
denounced was " walking on the air and talking
the air " : we might perhaps render the passage,
" talking windily of what he has seen." At this
point, after a modification proposed by Lightfoot,
Dr. Taylor proposed to read aepa Keve/i/Sareutov,
which gets rid of the repeated syllable, and differs
only by a single letter from the MS. reading, a
charming simplification : we might now translate
" walking, as it were, on the wind." This
passage is particularly profitable to study,
because it shows how the problem passes
from mind to mind, each scholar making some
improvement on the suggestion of his pre
decessor, until at last a very simple and convin
cing solution is reached. You will like to know,
however, what Dr. Burgon said about this, and
he was almost bound to say something, after he
had ordered all conjectural emendations and all
conjectural emendators to the door. Here is
his comment: " The ' not ' was sometimes accidentally
omitted in some very ancient exemplar. This
happens not unfrequently in codices of the
type of N and B. A famous instance occurs
at Colossians ii. l8 (a p.^ ciopaxcv ifi^areviov,
prying into the things he hath not seen);

200 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
where « * A.B.D.* and a little handful of
suspicious documents leave out the ' not.'
Our Editors rather than recognise this blunder
(so obvious and ordinary!) are for con
jecturing a iopaKev ep,ySaTevW into depa Kevep^arevmv
which (if it means anything at all) may as well
mean, ' proceeding on an airy foundation to offer
an empty conjecture.' "
That was very witty, but not very wise. For
several very good hands helped in the making
of the final conjecture in its varied stages from
More to Taylor, and amongst the editors from
Curcellaeus to Hort.
Of Dr. Hort's own skill in this direction, one can
only say that, as far as it went, it was very high,
and in some respects comparable to Bentley's.
It was, however, skill within too narrow a circle :
Dr. Hort was so sure that the text which he edited
from the MSS. was in the closest approach to the
original autographs, that he allowed himself no
room to move in making conjectures. And on
that account his emendations have a tendency
to be either unduly microscopic or somewhat
wooden. Yet I believe he really enjoyed a good
emendation, whether made by himself or by
others. My own intimate acquaintance with him

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 201
began over an emendation in the text of Hermas
on the name of a Jewish angel, which he at
once seized upon to prove that Hermas had used
the text of Daniel in the translation of Theo-
dotion ; and this led to a battle of giants in
which I was a mere looker-on, (engaged like
Rosalind in As You Like It with the desire to be
invisible and " catch the strong fellow by the
leg.") Alas ! the problem started is still unsolved,
in part; and of those that fought over it. Dr.
Salmon and Dr. Hort are gone, and only Dr.
Gwynn and myself remain, neither of whom
expects to have the last word.
When I was editing, very imperfectly, some
fragments of Philo which I had found, I remem
ber Dr. Hort made one lovely emendation for me,
by reference to a passage in Plato, but he would
by no means allow his name to be attached to it.
I ought, of course, to have explained that the
correction came from a learned friend. I do
acknowledge my fault this day, and pull off my
peacock's feather.
One of the simplest and most interesting
of Hort's conjectures is that which he made
in a passage in II Maccabees (iv. 4). It has
been incorporated in the Revised Version;

202 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
where we are informed on the margin
that " The Greek as commonly read means
Apollonius as being the Governor of Coele-Syria
and Phoenicia did rage and increase." For did
rage, &c. ixaivea-Oai etos, Dr. Hort suggested the
very simple correction Meveo-^ews, according to
which the Revisers translate " Apollonius the
Son of Menestheus, the Governor of Coele-Syria
and Phoenicia, was increasing Simon's malice."
The only objection to this is that in iii. 5,
Apollonius is called the son of Thraseas: so
the Revisers have to announce on their margin
that this is probably a corruption, or else they
could not follow Hort in iv. 4. Thus one con
jecture leads to another!
So much having been said with regard to
English emendators, we ought not entirely to
neglect the Continental scholars. The Dutch, in
particular, have made this their special field, and
one has only to recall the names of Cobet, of
Bakhuyzen, of van Manen and Naber and Baljon,
the brilliant Utrecht professor who was recently
taken from us, to make it clear that in the field
of conjectural criticism from the Dutch point of
view, no small commodity of brains has been
engaged. But it is interesting to note that even

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 203
in Holland the emendators do not always agree :
for instance Naber says of van Manen that " van
Manen would have done better to have passed
over a certain emendation in silence, but, that
is van Manen's eternal fault: you would say
that in his garden the tree of knowledge of good
and evil was absolutely sterile. "^
And in connexion with that severe and
sarcastic judgment, it is interesting to note
that Naber^ is as sure of his own corrections
as he is doubtful of those of others. He handles
Acts xix. 1 6, for instance, where the seven sons
of Sceva appear to reduce to two, because the
evil spirit that they are trying to cast out over
masters them both, and declares that we must
replace dp.<l>oT€pwv (both) by dipvio (suddenly).
" Let us not doubt," he says, " for a single
moment. I do not think there will be those who
now contradict me." One does not see how it
is so obvious that dp^oripayv Can be a corruption
of a<^v(i) !
Others of his emendations appear to me to be
very wooden, as when he says that he cannot
understand why in James v. 7 the husbandman
' Mnemosyne, 1881. p. 278.
' Ihid, p. 289.

204 Side-lights on New Testament Research.

should wait for the precious fruits of the earth.
Why precious fruit? "Correct it," says Naber,
" from Tt/iiov {precious) to ereiov {annual)."
Sometimes, however, Naber can be fas
cinatingly simple in the changes he proposes, and
can do it, as Bentley would say, with the altering
of half a letter. I noted one case in Acts xxvii.
38, where he proposes to read " we lightened
the ship, by throwing with our own hands the
main-mast overboard," reading tordv {mast) for
<rtTov {wheat). If we are to have emendations,
that would seem the likeliest fashion in which
to make them successfully.
In conclusion I have to apologise for certain
attempts of my own to mend the text of the New
Testament without the aid of MSS. Versions or
Fathers : whether they are destined to be verified
by subsequent discoveries, or to live by their own
excellence without verification, is not for me to
say. One form a modern scholar's ambition
takes is that he may see his name at the bottom
of a page with the words " Optime conjecit "
against it. But then some one else must be
responsible for the words.
One of my latest emendations was provoked
by a reading of Luke xiv. 5, which has the en-

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 205
dorsement of Westcott and Hort and of the
English Revisers, according to which we are
asked " What man of you whose son or ox shall
fall into a pit, will he not straightway pull him
out on the Sabbath ? " The conjunction " son or
ox " lands us in an intolerable bathos, whatever
the MSS. and the Editors may say; and the MSS.
are themselves in evidence for all sorts of
attempts to get rid of the bathos, such as by
reading " an ox or an ass," " a sheep or an ox."
So one had to try and divine an initial reading
in Luke from which all this menagerie of various
animals and readings had started. Nor was this
all. The problem was connected with that of
the Synoptic Tradition, like so many textual
problems in the Gospels, for Matthew had a
similar saying (xii. ii) about a man who has
one sheep which falls into a pit on the Sabbath.
Either then the sheep is the original reading, ia
whole or in part; or it is on the way to it.
Well, when we ask the question what is the
objectionable animal for which all these varieties
are substitutes (since certainly no one would
have wanted to correct away an innocent
original sheep) the only answer seems tO'
be that the missing animal is a pig. And since

206 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
the word for " son " in a MS. is commonly
abbreviated by two letters Y C which exactly
express " pig " {hyios being abbreviated as hys),
we have at once the explanation of the reading
" son or ox " and of the bathos resulting]
from it. Probably, then, the original reading
was simply " pig." And when we restore this
to the saying of Jesus which the Evangehsts are
trying to reproduce, we "have the most beautiful
case of irony in the New Testamentj For it
means that our Lord said in the first instance
to the objecting Pharisees " Why, if even your
pig ( !) fell into a pit on the Sabbath, you would
pull it out ! " The picture of the Pharisee and his
pig must have caught the fancy of the people,,
at all events they lived before the time when it
had become impious to think of our Lord as
humorous or ironical!
Perhaps the most useful of my own emen
dations, in the long run, will be those which are
derived either directly or indirectly fr6m the
Book of Enoch. Every one, I suppose, knows
by now that the Book of Enoch is a piece of pre-
Christian Apocrypha, of which traces exist in
the New Testament (in Jude, for example)
although few realize how widespread those traces

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 207
are. It was the discovery of the first part of
the Book of Enoch in Greek in an Egyptian tomb
that made the starting jjoint for an important
correction in I. Peter i. 12. Enoch tells us in
his opening sentences that he saw a vision of
the Holy One and that he understood the things
which he heard in the vision, and he goes on, " I
contemplated them not for the present generation
but for one that was far distant." We recall
at once what Peter says about prophets " to
whom it was revealed that not unto themselves,
but unto us, they did minister (8n;Kdvow) the
things which are now reported unto you."
And this suggests that for " minister " we should
read the word in Enoch contemplate (SievooBvro)
so that the passage will now run o^x «<^wots, vplv 8e
StevooijvTo a vSv dvryyyeK-q . . . and the correction
is at once justified by what follows in the
thirteenth verse, " Wherefore girding up the
loins of your own contemplation (Siavotas), and
being wide awake, hope for the grace that
is brought to you in the revelation of Jesus
Christ." Here the emendation was invited
by the obscurity of the text, suggested by
the parallel in Enoch and justified by the
context. And it becomes clear that Peter was

208 Side-lights on New Testament Researcn.
a student, and a close one, of the Book of Enoch.
If this be established, the way is made very
much easier for another correction which I had
proposed to I Peter iii. 19: "By which also he
went and preached to the Spirits in prison, which
some time were disobedient, when once the long-
suffering of God waited in the days of Noah,
while the ark was a preparing." On this famous
passage was built (to a large extent at all
events) the doctrine of the descent of Christ
into Hell, the disobedient sinners to whom He
is sent being antediluvians and probably fallen
angels. The quaintness of the doctrine is suffi
ciently obvious, and it is almost as incredible as
it is quaint. It has all arisen out of a scribe's
blunder in dropping some repeated letters; he
should have read ev & koI 'Ev^x, he actually
transcribed ev & Kal and left Enoch out; and
then subsequent students, who did not realise
that the Petrine formula iv u had nothing
relative about it,i referred the whole series of
statements about Enoch's descent into Tartarus
to Christ, and on this perverse text and inter
pretation there has been built up a mass of
superstition which starting from the Creed filled
1 cf. I Peter iv. 4.

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 209
the mind of the middle ages with masses of
legendary and apocryphal stories, and still
corrupts the popular Christian imagination. In
emending this passage I was, like my friend. Dr.
Blass, endowed with antecedents. There was,
without my having known it, a triad of previous
conjectures on the part of scholars who had
seen that the subject of the verbs had dropped
and who had, by various suggestions, restored it
either as Noah or as Enoch. As far as I have
been able "to trace the matter, the emendation is
first heard of in Bowyer's collection, from a
friend whose identity is covered by the initial S.
This mask I have not been able to penetrate:
but I hope I may regard him as a very acute
and enlightened person, one of my own ancestors
whose mantle I am quite pleased to wear.i
1 It must not be forgotten that when the emendation is
made in the text something has still to be done to restore
continuity to the argument: and we shall have to admit
that the text of Peter generally is in an unsatisfactory
state, worse, I think, than most of the N.T. Epistles. It
may be doubted whether it can be brought very near to
its autograph, although something can be done to clear
it. We find a curious blunder in i Peter ii. 8, where
Peter is commenting on certain passages in which our
Lord is spoken of as a stone of stumbling and rock of
offence: he picks up word after word out of his prophetic
testimony, as thus 14

210 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
It must not be supposed, however, that
the whole history of the supposed descent
into Hades turns on a single passage.
There are too many descents into Hades
in ancient folk-lore and mythology for this
one to be altogether ignored or explained away.
Whatever impetus may have been given to the
Christian descent into Hell by the corruption,
of a single passage, the real impetus cam©
from the side of popular fancy and imagination
which would have made a Descenus ad Inferos
out of nothing; the advantage of our correction
lies in this, that a doctrine which once needed no
Biblical support, because it was so congenial to
the popular ideas of the world to come, is now
supported by Church teaching and tradition
which profess to go back to the Apostles and the
Apostolic writings: and it is, therefore, very
" a precious stone " to you that believeth
and he that believeth, &c." He \% precious"
(So the A.V. freely but correctly)
and finally comes to the statement that " they stumble
at the word, being disobedient; whereunto also they were
appointed." But this misses the argument which is in
tended to carry one back to the opening of the prophetic
passage, "Behold I set in Zion; " so we must not read
" they were appointed," but " for which purpose he was
set there" {iriQi\ for iTfOrjcrav).

The Art of Conjectural Emendation. 211
important to rectify that tradition and re
construct our ideas of the next world. For, after
all, the battle to be fought for purity of religion
cannot be waged except as a conflict against
superstition, which even at the present day, is
so largely mistress of the minds of men. And
it is only as we abandon, and persuade others to
abandon, the untenable part of the traditions
of the Church that we shall be able to preserve
the Church itself, and shall once more convert
the admiration and worship of mankind from the
perversions of priestcraft to the simple and august
and adorable Figure of Him from whom the
Church derives its name.

LECTURE VII.
Side-Lights from the New Testament on
THE Relation of Christiani-ty to
THE Greek World.
WHEN we are searching for points of
contact between the Christian religion
and the older religions amongst which
it emerged, the eminence on which we stand is
commonly Mars' Hill, that rocky knoll at Athens
where a wandering Jew once stood, with as was
supposed, a commodity of new deities- in place
of old ones — an elevation from which one could
physically look up to the Acropolis and its
glories, and from which, if the Jew was right,
one could spiritually look down on the Parthenon
and all temples made with hands. Here the Old
and the New meet, the Old somewhat faded, the
New somewhat flushed ; the Old anticipating the
formula which the Roman Empire will some day
apply to the intruding propagandists and saying
" Non licet vos esse," " you are too young to have
212

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 213
a right to be : back with you and your new deities
into non-existence! " and the New anticipating
by prophecy the applied test of time that " that
which grows old is on the verge of dis
appearance." And then, the short interview
being over and the Jew released, he goes his
way and they go theirs, and the sum total of it
seems small ; he has gained a convert or two, one
man of mark, one woman without mark, and they
have gained a day's dialogue and the excitement
of an ephemeral debate ; and the published report
of the proceeding has a headline to the effect
that there had been a dispute between a New
Preacher and the representatives of the State
religion, and that the New Preacher quoted good
authors, and expects to leave to-morrow.
And then I suppose we re-inforce this
result of the Athenian mission of St. Paul,
by showing other places in his writings in which
he betrays an acquaintance with Greek literature,
and a possible University education with a
Tarsus D.Litt. in the background, and finally
conclude that there was one man, and probably
not a second, through whom Christianity could
have been carried to the Gentiles.
Now I have no wish to disparage or under-

214 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
estimate Paul or his mission, either at Athens
or anywhere else ; but we may safely say that he
would himself have repudiated the idea that there
was no point of contact between Hellenism and
Christianity except at the single electrical dis
charge that was transmitted through his own
personality. True, he was the great apostle of
the Gentiles, but there were others beside him,
and even before him. For the Jews were, in a
certain sense, apostles of the Gentiles long before
Paul was bom: they were a missionary people
and a successful missionary people in all the
great cities of the world, and had encircled their
synagogues by a clientele of more or less closely
attached converts. They had the real missionary
art, to take as well as to give, to learn as well as
to teach, and even in Alexandria where they
opened their treasure house of Scriptures to the
Greek world, they took back, in exchange, the
knowledge of Homer and much of Plato and of
the Greek dramatists. Some of them did so, half
apologetically, pointing out that Plato had really
stolen his ideas from Moses, and that, therefore,
what was his was theirs by the law of pre
scription: and the more they proved Plato an
intellectual thief and plagiarist, the more they

Relation of Christianity to the Greek "World. 215
showed that they were absorbing his teaching
and its methods, and incorporating Greek ethics
and philosophy with their own historical traditions
and revelations. And it is just because the Jews
were in such close contact with the intellect of
the Greek world (and not merely with its trade)
that Christian doctrine entered through a
hundred doors to all the great cities around the
Mediterranean. Yet if this be true, how strange
it is that no Greek teacher is named in the New
Testament (not even Philo, who was its nearest
intellectual neighbour), that there is only a stray
is only implied ;by the Epicureans, that Zeno is not
hinted at, except through the Stoics, and the
Divine Plato is not even mentioned. How are we
to explain the silence? Was it intentional or
unintentional ? Why should Philo, who is almost
a Christian, defer so constantly to Plato, and
Paiil who "has almost ceased to be a Jew (for
all his protestations to the contrary) barely
mention philosophy, and then only to disparage
it? Was Alexandria really so very far from
Jerusalem as the Church History would suggest,
instead of being, as Stevenson used to say of
Samoa, the first house on the left after passing
San Francisco — I mean Jaffa?

216 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Paul tells us that the Greeks seek after wisdom,
and that the said ,wisdom had no better name than
foolishness with God. He must have been in the
search himself to some extent, or how could he
have known what the Greeks were after? One
must follow the hounds, if only with one's eyes,
to find out that they are fox-hunting : and it takes
some reading to tell that a book or a system
is rubbish. Is it wrong to speculate that perhaps
Paul might have, in the studies of his earlier
years, had an experience like that of Justin
Martyr, to whom Plato held out the torch in the
pathway of Divine Illumination, and who passed
through the porch of the Academy as if it were
the peristyle of a Christian Church and almost
a part of the building itself? Was it perhaps
from Plato that Paul learnt that the things which
are seen are temporal, and the things which are
unseen are eternal? But in that case why does
he not mention his teacher ? He is proud enough
of Gamaliel, who perhaps led him nowhere except
into Rabbinical subtleties and hair-splittings;
can he make so much of a contemporary teacher,
and so little, if he had known him, of one who
held all the best men at his feet before Christ
came, and a good many of the best men long

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 217
after that event? Would Paul appeal to his
Athenian audience concerning the witness of
their own poets, and be absolutely silent if he
found corroborations of his doctrine in certain
of their own philosophers ? To this last question
we may perhaps return a partial answer: it is
easier to recognise a quotation from a poet,
because there is a change in the style of writing
and therefore something which answers to
quotation marks and invites attention ; but when
a philosopher is quoted there is no need of a
formal introduction, because one is borrowing
ideas, and not necessarily appropriating the
language in which those ideas were expressed.
Even in borrowing from Greek poets Paul is
studiously anonymlous; he leaves it to the
erudition of Alexandria to identify his passages
and say this is Aratus or that Menander or Epime-
nides. If he had been a pedant, he would have
given you the author, the book and the verse !
But to return to our problem; we have
suggested that there are many ways in which'
the first Christian thinkers, such as St. Paul,
may have been in contact with Greek thought
in its most noble systems : but we are still
entirely in the region of hypothesis. We have not

218 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
found as yet in the New Testament anything that
may fairly be said to be interpenetrated with the
spirit of Greek philosophy and traceable to its
immediate influence. And it is quite open to any
one to maintain that there was, at the beginning,
no direct interchange between Greek and
Christian thought, and that even the literary
allusions of St. Paul to the Greek poets do not
amount to much more than the conventional
quotations which we put at the headlines of copy
books. So let us first turn to the New Testament
itself and look at it a little more carefully and
closely. We are quite sure that it was not
possible to go into the Greek world and
ask " What think ye of Christ ? " without some
times meeting the counter-question " What think
ye of Plato ? " But whether they did think
anything of Plato is a matter to be decided by
direct investigation from the literature. And we
may simplify the enquiry by the following
considerations. Of the main body of early
Christian teachers there are only two or three)
that come under review, as having special or
extended knowledge. The average Christian
man (whether Apostle or not), and then as now.

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 21?
knew very little in regard to religion except
what he had heard from his own Master or about
him. He had one formula, " Jesus said," as our
early collections of Logia show. He did not
borrow that formula from the disciples of Pytha
goras with their outos %.<^a, it lay in the nature
of the case. If he knew anything at all of Soc
rates, for example, it was comparable with what
an average Baptist or Quaker knows of Buddha —
the thinnest residuum of conversational tradition.
Only in three directions does there seem a proba
bility of special knowledge, in the cases of Paul,
Luke and John: Paul, because he was well-
educated and probably a University man ; Luke,
because he was a medical student and had to
know Ionic Greek, and because he occasionally
uses Homeric language; and John, because the
Gospel shows a Logos-doctrine, and so does the
Apocalypse, whether there be one John or more
than one.
Suppose, then, we begin to test for average
and popular knowledge about Plato. What did
they have in their minds, these primitive
Christians, when any one brought up the name of
Plato? The answer is that (i.) they had a series
of proverbial Platonic expressions which passed

220 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
current in common speech and were understood
by everybody; (ii.) they had, perhaps, heard that
the visible world was connected with an ideal
world, of which it was the outward stamp or
expression; (iii.) they knew a little of the
Republic which Plato had planned in the name of
Socrates, and of the various social reforms which
it involved. Now under these three heads, as
we shall see, the early Christians expressed
themselves, sometimes in approbation and some
times in blame. We are able to get some
idea of their acquaintance with and their
mental attitude towards Platonic teaching, by
watching what the early Christian fathers
and the early Christian martyrs say on
the various points involved. For example, it
was matter of common knowledge that Plato
had taught that the best government of a State
would only be attained when " kings became
philosophers and philosophers kings " : here is
one of the commonest proverbial saws from Plato.
Accordingly when Justin addresses his Apology
to Antoninus Pius, and to Marcus Aurelius and
Lucius Verus and the Rbman senate, he begins
by observing that they pass under the name of
" pious " and " Philosopher," but that he means

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 221
to find out whether they really are so. Rulers
who are set to judge in a matter ought not to use
violence or tyranny but to follow the leading of
piety and philosophy. For one of the ancients
has somewhere said that " Unless rulers and ruled
philosophized, states can never be really happy."
Of course Justin knew, as well as those whom
he was addressing, that he was quoting Plato's
Republic (v. 473); and he was leading up to
the quotation from the very opening sentence :
but it suited him to quote anonymously, and
leave the quotation to produce its own effect.
For he knew also that this was the great maxim
of the Antonines, and that in their days Plato's
rule was held to have been verified.
Now there is no trace of this favourite
quotation in the New Testament — probably
(i.) because the Christians were not im-
, mediately engaged in the reconstruction of
civil society but in the amendment of their
own fives and the lives of others; (ii.) because
if they had been so engaged, they would not
for a moment have exchanged their faith that the
saints shall judge the world for a maxim that philo
sophers ought to be in high places. So we need
not expect to find anything in the New Testament

222 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
that illustrates Platonic doctrine on this matter.
The next bit of Platonic teaching which caught
the Christian imagination, and in early times
made them elevate Plato to the rank of a Divine
prophet, was the study of Justice and Injustice
in the Republic, and the way in which the Just
man is overborne, victimized and destroyed by
the successful unjust man. Glaucon has under
taken to prove to Socrates that the life of the
unjust man is preferable to that of the just man;
and in order to make the decision between the
two characters quite certain, he proposes to
perfect them for their assigned parts, the just
man is to be made perfectly just, and the unjust
man perfectly unjust. " Let us," he says, " make
no deduction either from the injustice of the
unjust or from the justice of the just, but let us
suppose each to be perfect in his own line of
conduct! And since the unjust man must not
he found out, for that would prove him a mere
bungler in his art, he must ever appear to be
just when he is most unjust." And so Glaucon
goes on elaborating his characters until at last
Socrates interrupts with the remark " Heavens !
my dear Glaucon, you are polishing them up as
if they were a couple of statues." " I do my

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 223
best," says Glaucon: and then he proceeds to
tell Socrates what the end of it will be. He begs
Socrates to forgive the coarseness of his des
cription. He is really speaking for the eulogists
of injustice, who will tell us that, " the just man
will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have his
eyes gouged out, and at last, after suffering every
kind of torture, will be impaled (or crucified);
and thus he will learn that it is best to resolve
not to be just, but to seem to be so."i
It is not surprising that early Christian
writers were impressed by this language, and
regarded it as almost a prophecy of Jesus Christ's
sufferings and death. Indeed Clement of
Alexandria quotes the passage with the
remark that Plato was only just short of
being a prophet.* But then Clement was
an omnivorous reader as well as a philoso
pher and was sure to quote the passage, and
could hardly miss the prophetic suggestion, and
he does actually quote it twice. No doubt many
other Christians did the same. Perhaps we
can get a fair idea of the impression which
this great passage in the second book of the
' Plato Rep. ii. 362.
^ Clem.-Alex : Strom v. 714.

224 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Republic may have made on early Christian
readers by observing how it has affected a great
scholar of our own day. M. Salomon Reinach,
who has been trying to prove that Jesus Christ
was never really crucified, actually takes this
passage, or at all events the popular opinions
which it enshrines, as being the tons et origo
of the Christian belief that Jesus Christ died upon
the Cross. I will quote you his very words :^
" The idea of the Just man put to death on
the Cross was certainly popular in antiquity. In
fact Glaucon expresses himself as follows in the
Republic [then comes the quotation]; so this is
no invention of Plato ; he is simply alluding to a
popular story which testifies to the impotence
of virtue before human villainy. This story, like
so many others in Plato, may be of Orphic origin :
the conclusion which results is the necessity of
supra-terrestrial sanctions. We have here an
evident proof that the story of the Crucified Just
man was known long before the Passion."'
We need not spend time in discussing M.
Reinach's reduction of the Christian history to
zero on the faith of a supposed Orphic pre
diction. I quote him simply to show that it
' Cultes Mythes et Religions iii. 21.

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 225
would not be strange if an early Christian reading
his Plato or hearing it quoted or read, should
have said that the passage in Plato was very
like a prophecy of the Passion. I am not able,
however, to produce any early instance to prove
that the passage about the Crucified just man had
made an impression in New Testament times.
But let us in the study of the passage quoted
go back a little further to where the antithesis
is being developed by Glaucon between the Just
and the Unjust man. " We must," says he,
" perfect them before we can rightly estimate
their characters." Have you ever read in the
New Testament anything like that? Will this
be a free rendering of Glaucon's hypothesis?
" He that is unjust, let him do injustice still
more : and he that is filthy, let him be made still
more filthy; and he that is just, let him do
justice yet more; and he that is holy, let him
be made still more holy " {Apoc. xxii. ii).
Our Revisers, following too closely the Autho
rised Version, translated " He that is unrighteous,
let him be unrighteous still," but they put on
the margin the proper translation " yet more,"
which makes the parallel with Glaucon.
Here then is the key to the mysterious passage, 15

226 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Revelation xxii. 1 1 : it is an expansion of the
Platonic suggestion, " good must be better and
bad worse, and then we will judge." It occurs
very abruptly in the Apocalypse, without any
obvious connection fore or aft; it seems to be
quoted as something which every one would
understand ; when we know where it comes from,
perhaps we can see why the Judge stands at the
doors in the next verse and why His reward is
with Him.
Moreover we now begin to see daylight in a
new direction. The closing chapters of the
Revelation are the vision of the New Jerusalem,
and the writer has shown by his quotation that
he has the Republic of Plato in his mind when he
is building his City. The ideal State of Hellenism
and the ideal City of Christianity are now defi
nitely brought into connexion. This is very
important and will lead to some further in
teresting observations. The conception of a
New Jerusalem, or of an upper Jerusalem is not
to be derived, in the first instance, from any
Greek attempt at State or City-structure. The
doctrine of a New Jerusalem was the outcome
naturally of the many Old Jerusalems which were
destroyed, and it is always on a ruin that the

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 227
New City rises. But there are no ruins like those
of the Jewish War under Vespasian and Titus,
and from them the flight was perhaps finally
taken from the actual to the ideal, from the Jeru
salem below to Jerusalem above : it had indeed
been taken before, for Paul has it in his Epistle to
the Galatians, and we can find it elsewhere; but
at the last it was the great disaster that made
the great faith. When the early Christians
began to write on the subject in detail, they
drew on many sources, canonical and apocry
phal; one amongst their number drew on the
oracles of the Greeks.
We have now alluded to certain sayings and
passages of the Republic which passed into
popular use. Our next point is the theory of
ideas generally, and here it is very difficult to
say whether any given New Testament passages
have been directly coloured by the Platonic
doctrine or not. There was so much Platonism in
the air, that it is difficult to say whether anything
can be defined which should imply literary
dependency. But if there was Platonism in the
air, then we prove contact generally between
Christianity and Hellenism without an appeal
to special cases.

228 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Our third point relates to certain Platonic
opinions which must have been in the minds of
any who talked on philosophical subjects at all,
opinions which could not fail to provoke either
Opposition or approbation. And if we try to
put ourselves in the position of the primitive
Christians, I think we can realize what kind of
doctrines they were likely to pass judgment
upon. Or, if we prefer, let us ask ourselvesi
what we consider objectionable features in
the Platonic reconstruction of society, and what
we think of them; for we may be reasonably
certain that the early Christians thought the
same. Three main points are the following:
(i.) The doctrine of Communism, especially
in the matter of women and children.
(ii.) The right to tell lies conceded to
governors and rulers.
(iii.) The relaxation of the laws of chastity
in the case of persons past middle life.
On the first of these points Socrates says, in
the opening of the eighth book of the Republic :
" We agree, Glaucon, upon these points —
namely, that if the constitution of the state is
to be carried to perfection, it must recognise a
community of women, a community of children

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 229
and of education in all its branches ; and in like
manner, a community of pursuits in war and in
peace; and that its kings must be those who
have shown the greatest ability in philosophy
and the greatest aptitude for war."
Here we have the doctrine again of kings as
philosophers, and a summary of a long dis
cussion as to the marriage laws in the ideal
community, and the Platonic doctrine of a com
munity of wives and children. It was this
doctrine that provoked the curiosity and interest
of the young men who were listening to Socrates,
and they held him fast and would not let him
go until he had explained to them what were
the methods under which the population of the
new and ideal city was to be maintained and its
excellence guaranteed. And this must always
have been one most interesting feature in the
development of the Republic : it remains so to
day: it can hardly fail to have been so in early
times. Let us hear then what a famous early Christian
says on the point. Tertullian gives us the judg
ment of the Church in a single epigram:
Omnia indiscretasunt apud nos, praeter uxores :
We have everything in common, except our wives.

230 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
Communism at certain stages is almost a
natural form of Christian expression. Christianity
appears to have started from it, and in almost
all subsequent religious revivals and reforms,
it returns, more or less fitfully to its original
programme. When the Christian religion
declines, it drags its communistic ideas painfully
behind it, as if it were not wholly able to dis
engage itself from them. For example, the
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which is in
many respects a down-grade book, continues
the rule :
" Thou shalt not turn away the needy, but thou
shalt share all things with thy brother, and
shalt not say that they are thy own: for if ye
are communists in things immortal, how much
more in things that perish."
I consider it certain that Tertullian's epigram
directs the sting in its tail at Plato and the
Republic: and the emphasis in the sentence is
on the last clause.^ We may be sure that many
an early Christian said the same thing, only
perhaps not quite so succinctly. Here, then, is
' Tertullian : Apol. 39. It is amusing to observe that the
Paris Tertullian of 1625, instead of recognizing the Platonic
reference, employs the passage against the Anabaptists : "facit
hie locus contra Anabaptistas.''

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 231
one of the points of contact of the popular mind
with the Republic of Plato.
The second point is the question of truthfulness
in the ideal State. Should they speak every man
truth with his neighbour and put away lying?
It is one of the subjects that is most carefully
dealt with by Plato. He examines the nature
of the gods, and the nature of good men. Some
of his sentences are noble :
" To lie and to be the victim of a lie, and
without knowledge in the mind and con
cerning absolute realities, and in that
quarter to harbour and possess the lie, is the
last thing any man would consent to; for all
men hold in special abhorrence an untruth
in a place like that."^ " God is a being of
perfect simplicity and truth, both in deed
and word, and neither changes in himself
nor imposes upon others."^
But then after his noble defence of truth as
characteristic both of God and the good man,
he adopted the theory of the medicinal lie, to be
kept in the hands of the guardians and physicians
of the State, and out of the reach of unpro-
' Rep. ii. 382.
2 Rep. ibid.

232 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
fessional men: and he sums the matter up as
follows :
" To the rulers of the State, then, if to any,
it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive
either enemies or their own citizens, for the
good of the State: and no one else may
meddle with this privilege. Nay, for a
private person to tell a lie to such magistrates,
we shall maintain to be at least as great a
mistake as for a patient to deceive his
physician or a pupil his trainer, &c., &c."i
Lying, then, is a reserved art, practised by
the guardians of the community upon the rank
and file, presumably for their good. The rulers
have reserved rights in untruthfulness.
Now it is quite certain that the Christian
conscience as a whole is in revolt against the
lying rulers whom Plato, postulates. There are,
of course, some exceptions. Origen for instance
justifies the medicinal lie, but advises us to be
very cautious in the use of it, for fear we should
fall under the condemnation of Him who said,
" I am the tmth " ! But then Origen is under
the influence of Plato on this point and carried
away by him. I do not think he was carried
' Rep. iii. 389.

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 233
very far. Christianity was not so corrupt in his
days as to produce a Saint who should also be
a Scientific Liar: and Plato himself must never
be brought into comparison with Alphonso de
Liguori, whose ethics, and the ethics of the
Church which canonised him. Dr. Robertson
Nicoll has so faithfully and so ruthlessly exposed
in recent days.
The lying which Plato inculcated was not of the
pitiful degraded kind which Liguori patronises
and which Cardinal Newman was so hard put to
it to defend. But whatever was covered by the
Platonic doctrine, the Christian Church generally
repudiated it, and I think we can now see that
it is expressly repudiated in the Apocalyptic
sketch of the New City. For if we take together
the two points at which our conscience and the
primitive Christian conscience revolt in Plato.
the communistic marriage and the lie by
authority, and remember our grounds for
believing that the Apocalyptist had one eye on
Plato when he wrote, we should see a new
emphasis in the words (Apoc. xxi. 27) :
" There shall in no wise enter into it anything
that defileth, and he that makes pollution and
lying (o TToicov /3SeXvyp,a Kal {j/evSoi). This is

234 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
accentuated again in the judgment denounced
upon " all liars " (xxi. 8) and upon " every one
that loves and makes a lie" (xxii. 15).
And I conclude that in the vision of the New
Jerusalem, the Apocalyptic writer definitely
assails and contradicts the doctrine of the
Republic of Plato on the points involved. He
builds his City on the foundations of purity and
truth. There remains one final point to be dis
cussed in this connexion, viz: the latitude in
morals allowed to persons who are past the prime
of life. It is a difficult matter to speak of, and
requires a certain amount of paraphrase; but as
it has an important bearing on the question
before us and upon a particular passage in the
New Testament, I may allude to it.
According to Plato, women were to be con
sidered as in their prime, and in that sense
serviceable to the re-inforcement of the com
munity, up to the age of forty years and men
up to the age of fifty-five. After that time the
guardians relax their vigilance, " and as soon
as the men and women are past the prescribed
age, we shall allow them," says Plato, " free
association," subject to certain necessary restric-

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 235
tions and with the approval of the priestess at
Delphi. Moreover as the context shows, he held
infanticide in reserve, in case infanticide should
be necessary. It may well be imagined that such
a social doctrine, weighted by such a practice,
would provoke the deepest hostility on the part
of the first Christian teachers. I am now going
to show you that the protest against it is in the
New Testament and that it can be read as
directly addressed to the Platonists who held by
the teaching of the Republic. I shall be obliged
to paraphrase a little, but I will keep close to
the sense of what I quote : it is in Ephesians
iv. 17: " You are not to walk any more as the
Gentiles do, with vain mind and darkened
understanding and in alienation from the
Divine Life . . . they gave themselves up,
after the prime of life was over, {dirr)Xyy\Kdrf.i)^
to impiety in living shamelessly without
restraint. But you did not learn that from
Christ, you who heard him and were taught
by Him, according to His law of truth, to put
1 That, surely, must be the meaning of the passage:
but is there any chance of emending the difficult word to
aTTrjKptjKOTes ?

236 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
off the corrupt old nature and put on the
new man, the just and the holy and the true.
And further let us put away lying and be
true to one another in our common life."
The passage is one that has perplexed
translators and interpreters, and neither the
Authorised nor the Revised Version shows any
perception of the leading word in the sentence,
which I have rendered by the paraphrase,
" Being past the prime of life." Paul is
not criticising Ephesian Christians for their
moral laxity, but pointing out that they sit under
another teacher than the one who gave lax
laws to the Greeks, and that His teaching is
purity and truth. The sentence, " Ye did
not learn that of Christ," implies that the
Gentiles, whom he denounces, had learnt it of
some other teacher, and it can only be Plato of
whom they had so learned. We notice, too, the
connexion with the doctrine of truthfulness which
we found in the passage in the Revelation.
I think it is fair to say, after so much of in
vestigation, that both Paul and John antagonize
the doctrine of Plato at its weakest points. From
Luke I can find nothing bearing on the subject,
but then Luke, although a scholar and perhaps

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 237
a philosopher, has nothing to say of his own
opinions, and we ought, therefore, not to be
surprised that evidence, similar to what we de
tected in Paul and John, does not readily turn up.
For Paul and John the influence seems to be clear.
They reaci their Plato, or at all events they
know the salient points of his teaching. Whether
they had a closer knowledge than the popular
knowledge involved in the points we have been
considering, is the next thing to be investigated.
We must come back to the study of the doctrine
of Ideas, and of the Logos, who is the Idea of
Ideas, to discover whether there is any definite
overlapping of Christianity and Platonism.
We may, I think, be quite sure that the con
demnations involved in the passages we have
been studying, do not commit either Paul or
John to an anti-Platonic attitude. There was
too much that was great and high in Plato's
teaching for it to be possibly disowAed, except
in offensive details. If it be true that the
Christian doctrine of immortality owes much to
Plato (and some say that Christianity went wrong
in following Plato too closely in this direction)
we can hardly suppose that the Church disowned
or denied the teacher whose influence has been

238 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
so profound. And we are perfectly free to
examine for traces of Platonic teaching, without
any preliminary suggestion that the earliest
Christian teachers antagonised Plato from the
outset. They opposed him, indeed, but it was
at the points where he had to be opposed. But
the affection of Justin Martyr for Plato is a suffi
cient illustration of what a hold the Greek teacher
could have on the Christian saint. There is not
the least reason to suppose that Justin had any
affection for the ethical aberrations of the
Republic : but Plato was greater than his mis
takes : he was, for Justin and for many another,
a Christian born before due time : he and Soc
rates and all their kith and kin who believed in
the Logos and walked by his teaching, were
reckoned to belong to the great company of the
good and wise whom Christ fathers.
In what has preceded, our attention has been
fixed on minute points and coincidences of
thought and expression rather than on the
general question of the agreement in philoso
phical conceptions or io psychology between
Plato and the New Testament writers. The
question of the doctrine of the Logos is some
thing very different from the microscopy in

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 239
which we have been indulging. Here we have
the human mind in its highest flights, and we
cannot avoid the discussion of the action and
interaction between Greek philosophy and Chris
tian thought. When the fourth Gospel makes
its prologue with " In the beginning was the
Logos," we are obliged to ask where the writer
found the Logos. Did he evolve the idea himself
and make the term to express the idea : or did
he take it from Plato : and if from Plato, did he
derive it immediately or may there be a connect
ing link or links, due to other teachers who have
been engaged in similar speculations ? Now
these questions are not new, nor have they, as
yet, been finally answered. If in these magni
ficent words Christianity became a philosophy,
and if in the connected statement about the Logos
becoming flesh, it became in the highest sense
a theology, we are obliged to an enquiry how
far outside materials have been used in the
philosophic or the theologic structure. In an
interesting article in the Bibliotheca Sacra for
January, 1908, Professor Baljon, of Utrecht,
gave the results of his enquiry into the in
debtedness of Christianity to other religious
systems. As I have said, the study is an

240 Side-lights on New Testament Research,
interesting one, both in itself, and on account
of the range it covers in the possible relation of
Christianity to Buddhism, Mithraism or Hellen
ism : but the article has also a pathetic interest in
being the last piece of work that dropped from his
pen. Let us extract a few sentences from Prof.
Baljon on the doctrine of the Logos. " Here "
says he, " we have the known doctrine of the
Logos, developed in the prologue of the Fourth
Gospel, and which I take to be the subject of
the entire Gospel. The theme is summarized
in the well-known verse ' And the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us.' This Logos doctrine
is derived from the Logos doctrine of Philo,
the well-known Hellenist. Although this
philosopher was a Jew, his speculation is
not immediately derived from the Old Testament,
since, in its entirety, the Old Testament contains
... no formulated philosophy. Here Philo built
upon foundations that were laid by Plato. . . .
The revelation of God is the Logos, the embodi
ment of the thoughts of God. God, in so far
as He reveals Himself, is called Logos. The
Logos, however, in so far as he reveals God, is
called God. ... In several points, such as in
its well-known antithesis between flesh and spirit.

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 24t
light and darkness, being, from above and from
beneath, the Fourth Gospel joins itself to
Alexandrian Hellenism, &c."
This seems a very fair and moderate state
ment of the most pronounced piece of Platonism
in the New Testament ; but it must be confessed
that there are many missing links before we can
state a complete argument.
Now if we are right in the assertion that
John derives his Platonic doctrine through a
Philonic medium,, it will be interesting to compare
his attitude of mind with that of his assumed
teacher. When Philo writes, he has one eye
on Plato and the other on Moses. He is inter
preting the one teacher by the other, with a
view to an inviolable agreement between them.
In the end, Philo will have held his brief for
Moses, as the philosophic ancestor of Plato, so
adroitly and so systematically that we shall have
to say " Either Plato is Philonizing or Philo is
Platonizing," so close will be the underlying
agreement. Now the difference between the
attitude of the Christian teacher and that of the
great Jewish teacher is that the former is moving
away from Moses, and taking Plato en route,.
while the latter is holding fast to Moses, and
i6

242 Side-lights on New Testament Research.
drawing Plato into his own position.
We may illustrate this by an observation which
I recently made when I was looking at the text
of the Book of Deuteronomy in one of these!
recently found Detroit manuscripts. Thercy
before my eyes, were the opening sentences :
" These are the words which Moses spake
to the people in the wilderness,"
and on looking at them I was at once struck
by their parallelism with the opening sentences
of the recently found Sayings of Jesus :
" These are the words (the wonderful
words) which Jesus the living One spake, &c."
It was natural to suggest that the Christian
writer had imitated the opening of Deuteronomy.
In that case, there was an intention: we were
being called from the words of Moses to the words
of Christ. The very name of Deuteronomy to a
Jew is taken from its opening Hebrew words ; Elle
Debarim is what they call it, or " These be the
words " : and it follows that every Jew would
catch the meaning of the form in which the Book
of Sayings was cast. They are an intimation
that we are leaving Moses for Christ. Now turn
to the Fourth Gospel. Here again we have some
thing of the same kind. Every one sees that

Relation of Christianity to the Greek World. 243
the opening is similar to that of Genesis. Is this
a mere literary device, or is there an intention in
it? Is the author replacing the Pentateuch,
and displacing Moses, or only imitating him?
If it had been Philo who was writing, we should
have at once said, the author is keeping as close
to Moses as possible : there is no antithesis : he
corresponds rather than contradicts. But when
we examine the Fourth Gospel the context tells
us what was in his mind who wrote it : for we
see a little lower down the words,
" The Law was given by Moses :
Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ."
So there can be no doubt that, like the writer
of the Book of Sayings, he is moving away from
Moses, and that he intends to leave him presently
far behind. And in imitating the language of
the " Law given by Moses," he intimates that
we are no longer under that Law but under the
Grace of Christ. Thus the literary structure of
the Fourth Gospel is like the literary structure
of the Book of Sayings; they both answer to
the Voice that came from heaven and said
" This is My beloved Son, hear Him."
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