The closing verse of the chapter seems to have given the commentators much trouble. There is something very harsh in regarding it as spoken of the dead, on any view we may take of their condition; and yet many have given it this interpretation. "He speaks figuratively," says Rosenmüller, "of his body, as though it felt the gnawing of the worm, and of his soul, as though it felt grief for its separation." We cannot help thinking this exceedingly unnatural, repulsive, and improbable. Even on his own hypothesis, it would be strange that such a figure should come directly after Job is supposed to have spoken of death as a state in which there was no recollection. The reference by Rosenmüller to Num. vi. 6 is unworthy of his scholarship. The use of there for a dead body is on a different principle altogether. It is merely an elliptical expression for what visibly remains of man after dissolution, or the departure of the spirit, and which is taken as the true representative of what was once the whole humanity. So the Greeks sometimes use x by way of ellipsis for death, or the loss or departure of the soul; as in Euripides, Iphig. in Aulid., 1443,

οὐ πενθεῖν με σὴν χυψὴν χρεών.

By a similar, though inverted use of a part for the whole, Vexpoí, which literally means dead bodies, is sometimes put for the souls in Hades, or the dead generally; as in Eurip. Hecuba, 552,

The true explanation of the connection here may be found in what has been already said of the meditative, musing, soliloquising, and ejaculatory nature of Job's discourse. May we not here also imagine a pause of impressive silence? He reviews the whole ground of his former meditations, and then comes the closing thought,-not intended to be in immediate logical connection with what just precedes, but as a sort of moral, or summing up, to the whole chapter containing this rhapsody on morality, or rather to the general picture of human frailty presented in the latter part. As though he had said, "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter,Such is man. His life is a scene of perpetual conflict. Death conducts him to the ghostly land of forgetfulness. Such is his mere physical condition in this world. It is sorrow, and labour, and a sore travail, and a heavy yoke for all the sons of Adam, from the day in which they come forth from their mother's womb, until they return to the earth, the mother of all." As the son of Sirach thus sums up human life, " Anxious thought, fear of heart, passion, zeal, commotion, fear of death, little or nothing of rest;" so Job most concisely expresses it all in

reference to both departments of human nature, His flesh upon him has ever pain; his soul within him ever mourns. The one is ever the seat of disease in some of its various forms; the other of care and grief alleviated by comparatively little of rest or enjoyment. In other words, Flesh and heart (Y 22, body and soul) both fail. Here closes the picture as drawn by desponding Job. The stronger and steadier faith of the Psalmist could append the triumphant finale, But thou, O God, art the strength of my soul (the rock of my heart) and my everlasting portion.

A strong, though not conclusive argument for this view of the verse, is derived from the use of the futures, which the whole style of the passage requires us to take in what has been called the frequentative or habitual sense, as referring to that which is done continually or uninterruptedly,-a good example of which may be found in Job i. 5, in the future, So here they refer not to what takes place in the future strictly, or after death, but to what is commonly experienced by both soul and body upon earth.

.יעשֶׂה

ART. V.-The Text of the New Testament.*

I. HISTORY OF THE WRITTEN TEXT.

Or the whole original manuscripts of the New Testament books, every trace was lost in a remote antiquity. All the stories that, after the example of Theodorus Lector in the fifth century, have been told about the discovery of the original copy of the gospel of Matthew, are nothing better than fables; as also is the case in regard to the pretended discovery of John's Gospel, related by Philostorgius and Nicephorus Callisti. And with these must be classed the statement of the Chronicon Paschale, that the same Johannine original continued to be faithfully preserved in the congregation at Ephesus, and similar statements of a much later period. The assertion that the old Aquileian manuscript of the Latin translation of Mark's gospel was by the evangelist's own hand, though keenly maintained even at the end of last century (by Ant. Comoretti, in his Epistolaris Dissertatio, addressed to Dobrowski), rests upon an obvious error. And even the traces of the New Testament autographs supposed to have been discovered in the Epist. ad Philad. of Ignatius (8), and in the De Præscript.

* Translated from an article contributed by Tischendorf to Herzog's Real Encyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, (Zweiter Band, Erste Hälfte, Art. Bibletext des N. T.)

Hæret. of Tertullian (36), are not so in reality; for the ap (or ȧxaîa) of Ignatius must be referred to the Old Testament as opposed to the New, and the literæ authentica of Tertullian to the Greek text as opposed to the Latin. The fact of the early loss of those autographs is proved, not only by the cir cumstance that in the first centuries, although the appeal to them would often have been quite conclusive, especially on the occasion of the charge of falsification of the text made against Marcion, no one ever thought of them for such a purpose, but also from this, that Origen was unable to refer, for the text of John's gospel, to any older authority than that of the exemplar of Heracleon.

If it be asked, how the early loss of these precious documents is to be accounted for, we must first of all take into account the fact, that the life of the first congregations, supported as they were by the living spirit of the Lord and of the apostles, stood in a relation to the written letter quite different from that of later times. And again, as it is beyond question true that the apostle Paul usually did not even write his own letters, compare Rom. xvi. 22; 2 Thess. iii. 17; 1 Cor. xvi. 21; Col. iv. 18; and also Gal. vi. 11,-so in the case of the other apostles also, this is far from being improbable. But especially we must consider the material on which these compositions were written. Very probably, after the manner of those times, they were written on papyrus (xápons, 2 John 12); and if this, on any occasion, was not the case, the very delicate parchment* (usucpávas, 2 Tim. iv. 13) of that time was used instead of the papyrus. Hence it follows, that the tear and wear of frequent use, and changing from hand to hand, must have destroyed, within a very few years comparatively, those manuscripts which, with more or less reason, were esteemed apostolic originals. This assertion is not inconsistent with the fact that, at the present day, we have papyrus and parchment manuscripts more than a thousand years old; for not to mention the much greater durability of the later parchments, the preservation of such documents is chiefly owing to this, that they not only were not in daily use, but frequently, as especially was the case with the papyrus manuscripts preserved in sarcophagi,-were never used at all. As already intimated, we may regard the New Testament originals as having been written chiefly in the form of papyrus rolls, with the pencil or calamus, with black ink (dià méλaves xai xaλápov, 3 John 13; 2 John 12), and in columns. The writing itself was in the character called uncial, which usually

* That in the New Testament, and immediately following times, the use of the light destructible papyrus prevailed, and that the more durable parchment did not take its place till a later period, is also proved by Jerome (see Epist. 34), when he tells us that Acacius and Euzoius transcribed the Cæsarean library on parchment.

was by no means so handsome when executed on papyrus as that of our oldest parchment manuscripts. These uncial manuscripts went on continuously, or without separation of the words; they had no interpunctuation, no initial capitals, and but very rarely any break whatever; they also wanted the accents and breathings, the iota subscriptum, and even the iota adscriptum. The evangelists themselves might probably enough have given to their writings the name of "Gospels," in the form either of titles or of subscriptions. Justin's habit of referring to them as ἀπομνημονεύματα τῶν ἀποστόλων (once, with the addition, ä naλsîraι švayya) is, however, against this supposition; and Luke i. 1 and Acts i. 1 are not in favour of it. The additional words, as xarà Mardatov, are, at all events, of later origin, and presuppose the collection of the four gospels. In the epistles, only the addresses, as πρὸς 'Ρωμαίους, προς Κορινθίους (from which pòs 'Elpaíus is perhaps an exception), are to be regarded as titles or subscriptions belonging to the first edition. Yet the beginning of the text itself, as it stands. in almost all the epistles, may have supplied the place of an address. The name, "Apocalypse," was given, at a later period, by the transcribers of the beginning of the book; and also that of the "Acts of the Apostles," though it does not fully correspond with the contents of the book, as contrasted with the gospels. The first appearance of the title, "general (catholic) epistle," must be referred to the end of the second century; and its application to the whole of our catholic epistles was much later.

From the remaining manuscript monuments of the thousand years that preceded the discovery of the art of printing, we may somewhat confidently judge what was the fortune, in external respects, of the New Testament text, so long as it continued to be transcribed by the hand. Before the formal completion of the canon, towards the end of the fourth century, scarcely a single copy had been made which contained the whole of our New Testament. In subsequent times, such copies still continued to be rare, and most of those that did exist also contained the Greek Old Testament; such as the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Alexandrinus, (and the Codex Ephraimi.) The oldest manuscripts of this kind contained, moreover, one or other of those writings whose claims to canonical rank long remained contested; e. g., the two epistles of Clemens Romanus, found at the end of the Alexandrian manuscript. The four gospels were most frequently transcribed. The Pauline epistles were copied more frequently than the catholic ones; and these latter generally formed one volume with the Acts of the Apostles, though very often both they and the Pauline were bound up along with the Acts. The Apocalypse

was least frequently copied. The arrangement of the books was, in the case of the gospels, at an early period, the same as our present arrangement,-as we learn from Melito, Irenæus, Origen, Augustin, and Jerome. But of the Latin copies (including one Greek-Latin copy, the Codex Cantabrigiensis), several of the oldest (the Vercellensis, Veronensis, Palatinus, Corbejensis, and Brixianus) put John immediately after Matthew, and after them Luke and Mark. This arrangement was also found by Druthmar in an exemplar of Hilary of Poictiers. And a similar order exists in the very ancient stichometry of the Codex Claromontanus, viz., the following: Matthew, John, Mark, Luke. After the Acts of the Apostles were usually placed the catholic epistles. They are so placed, after the example of Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem, not only in our three oldest, but in almost all our Greek copies. Eusebius, on the contrary, has put the Pauline epistles after the Acts; and in this his example has been followed by the Latin church. In the order of the Pauline epistles, great variety prevailed. The three oldest manuscripts are at one with Athanasius and Epiphanius in placing the Epistle to the Hebrews after the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. The Greek-Latin Coder Claromontanus, on the other hand, shows the early universal custom of the Latin church to have been, to place the Epistle to the Hebrews after the Epistle to Philemon. Finally, the catholic epistles, as soon as they were admitted into the canon, were reduced to the order now in use. We have this upon the authorities of Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, and also of the Council of Laodicea. Yet the Apostolical Canons arrange them thus: Peter, John, James, Jude. The Apocalypse first received from Athanasius its position in the full enumeration of the canonical books, and that, as in all succeeding times, in the last place of the canon.

As early as the first centuries of the Christian epoch, parchment superseded papyrus. It appears generally to be the

more delicate the older it is. From the fourth to the eleventh century it remained almost exclusively in use. From that time cotton paper was more frequently employed than parchment, and, soon after, linen paper also. The greater scarcity of parchment gave rise to the practice of using the old skins a second time, after destroying the old writing upon them by washing or scraping. But the text of the Bible is more frequently thus covered by other writings* (viz. patristic), than

To the oldest specimens of such palimpsests belong the Old Testament fragments lately brought home by me from the East, written probably in the fifth century, and over the face of which are patristic writings in the uncial characters of the ninth century. The most famous New Testament palimpsest is the Codex Ephraimi, written over in the twelfth century. But even Cicero makes mention of palimpsests (ad Trebat. vii. 18), and so does Plutarch.