CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT VERSIONS AND QUOTATIONS.

1. Various Early Versions. § 2. An ancient "Revised Bible." § 3. How Revision was regarded fifteen centuries ago. § 4. Advantage of this investigation. § 5. Quotations from Ancient Fathers.

1. WE are to examine now our second pile-the ANCIENT VERSIONS, i.e., the translations of the Bible into the languages of early Christendom long before the oldest of our present Greek manuscripts were written. These were the Bibles used by men, some of whose parents might easily have seen the apostles themselves, and therefore it is evident that, even though only translations, they must often be of great value in determining the original text.

There are the old Syriac Scriptures, which were probably in use about fifty years after the New Testament was written, a Version representing very nearly the language of the people among whom our Lord moved. Those discoloured parchments beside them are Egyptian, Ethiopic, and Armenian Versions, which would be more useful if our scholars understood these languages better; and the beautiful silver-lettered book,

Photographed from an OLD LATIN Bible Manuscript, belonging to Archbishop Ussher, now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

with its leaves of purple parchment, is the Version of Ulfilas, bishop of the fierce Gothic tribes about A.D. 350.1 Here are the old Latin, which, with the Syriac, are the earliest of all our Versions, and the most valuable for the purpose of textual criticism.

But what is this Version piled up in such enormous numbers, far exceeding that of all the others put together, some of its copies, too, ornamented with exquisite beauty?

2. It is a Version which just now should possess very special interest for English readers-St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate, the great "Revised Bible" of the ancient Western Church. This is its story.

Towards the end of the fourth century, so many errors had crept into the old Latin Versions, that the Latin-speaking churches were in danger of losing the pure Scripture of the apostolic days. Just at this crisis, when scholars were keenly feeling the need of a revision, there returned to Rome from his Bethlehem hermitage one of the greatest scholars and holiest men of the day, Eusebius Hieronymus, better known to us as St. Jerome, and his high reputation pointed him out at once as the man to undertake this important task. Damasus, bishop of Rome, applied to him for that purpose, and Jerome undertook the revision, though he was deeply sensible of the prejudice which his work would arouse among those who, he says,

1 Gibbon says: "He prudently suppressed the four books of Kings, as they might tend to irritate the fierce spirit of the barbarians."

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"thought that ignorance was holiness." His revision of the New Testament was completed in 385, and the Old Testament he afterwards translated direct from the original Hebrew, a task which probably no other scholar of the time would have been capable of. We shall better understand the value of his work if we remember that it is almost as old as the earliest of our present Greek manuscripts, and since Jerome of course used the oldest manuscripts to be had in his day, his authorities would have probably extended back to the days of the apostles.

No other work has ever had such an influence on the history of the Bible. For more than a thousand years it was the parent of every version of the Scriptures in Western Europe, and even now, when the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts are so easily accessible, the Rhemish and Douay Testaments are translations direct from the Vulgate, and its influence is quite perceptible even on our own Authorised Version.

3. How do you think the good people of the fourth century thanked St. Jerome for his wonderful Bible? Remembering the prejudice which our Revised New Testament excited only a few years ago, it is interesting to recall the story how the Revision of the old monk of Bethlehem was received.

It was called revolutionary and heretical; it was pronounced subversive of all faith in Holy Scriptures; it was said to be an impious altering of the Inspired 1 See Diagram facing the title-page.