The Criticism of the New Testament. Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener
bombycina, called also charta Damascena from its place of manufacture) may have been fabricated in the ninth19 or tenth century, and linen paper (charta proper) as early as 1242 a.d.; but they were seldom used for Biblical manuscripts sooner than the thirteenth, and had not entirely displaced parchment at the era of the invention of printing, about a.d. 1450. Lost portions of parchment or vellum manuscripts are often supplied in paper by some later hand; but the Codex Leicestrensis of the fourteenth century is composed of a mixture of inferior vellum and worse paper, regularly arranged in the proportion of two parchment to three paper leaves, recurring alternately throughout the whole volume. Like it, in the mixture of parchment and paper, are codd. 233 and Brit. Mus. Harl. 3,161—the latter however not being a New Testament MS.
3. Although parchment was in occasional, if not familiar, use at the period when the New Testament was written (τὰ βιβλία, μάλιστα τὰς μεμβράνας 2 Tim. iv. 13), yet the more perishable papyrus of Egypt was chiefly employed for ordinary purposes. This vegetable production had been used for literary purposes from the earliest times. “Papyrus rolls are represented on the sculptured walls of Egyptian temples.” The oldest roll now extant is the papyrus Prisse at Paris, which dates from 2500 b.c., or even earlier, unless those which have been lately discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie reach as far, or even farther, back20. The ordinary name applied in Greek to this material was χάρτης (2 John 12), though Herodotus terms it βύβλος (ii. 100, v. 58), and in Latin charta (2 Esdr. xv. 2; Tobit vii. 14—Old Latin Version). Papyrus was in those days esteemed more highly than skins: for Herodotus expressly states that the Ionians had been compelled to have recourse to goats and sheep for lack of byblus or papyrus; and Eumenes was driven to prepare parchment because the Alexandrians were too jealous to supply him with the material which he coveted21. Indeed, papyrus was used far beyond the borders of Egypt, and was plentiful in Rome under the Empire, being in fact the common material among the Romans during that period: and as many of the manuscripts of the New Testament must have been written upon so perishable a substance in the earliest centuries since the Christian era, this probably is one of the reasons why we possess no considerable copies from before the second quarter of the fourth century. Only a few fragments of the New Testament on papyrus remain. We find a minute, if not a very clear description of the mode of preparing the papyrus for the scribe in the works of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. xiii. 11, 12). The plant grew in Egypt, also in Syria, and on the Niger and the Euphrates. Mainly under Christian influence it was supplanted by parchment and vellum, which had superior claims to durability, and its manufacture ceased altogether on the conquest of Egypt by the Mohammedans (a.d. 638).
4. Parchment is said to have been introduced at Rome not long after its employment by Attalus. Nevertheless, if it had been in constant and ordinary use under the first Emperors, we can hardly suppose that specimens of secular writing would have failed to come down to us. Its increased growth and prevalence about synchronize with the rise of Constantinopolitan influence. It may readily be imagined that vellum (especially that fine sort by praiseworthy custom required for copies of Holy Scripture) could never have been otherwise than scarce and dear. Hence arose, at a very early period of the Christian era, the practice and almost the necessity of erasing ancient writing from skins, in order to make room for works in which the living generation felt more interest, especially when clean vellum failed the scribe towards the end of his task. This process of destruction, however, was seldom so fully carried out, but that the strokes of the elder hand might still be traced, more or less completely, under the more modern writing. Such manuscripts are called codices rescripti or palimpsests (παλίμψηστα22), and several of the most precious monuments of sacred learning are of this description. The Codex Ephraemi at Paris contains large fragments both of the Old and New Testament under the later Greek works of St. Ephraem the Syrian: and the Codex Nitriensis, more recently disinterred from a monastery in the Egyptian desert and brought to the British Museum, comprises a portion of St. Luke's Gospel, nearly obliterated, and covered over by a Syriac treatise of Severus of Antioch against Grammaticus, comparatively of no value whatever. It will be easily believed that the collating or transcribing of palimpsests has cost much toil and patience to those whose loving zeal has led them to the attempt: and after all the true readings will be sometimes (not often) rather uncertain, even though chemical mixtures (of which “the most harmless is probably hydrosulphuret of ammonia”) have recently been applied with much success to restore the faded lines and letters of these venerable records.
5. We need say but little of a practice which St. Jerome23 and others speak of as prevalent towards the end of the fourth century, that of dyeing the vellum purple, and of stamping rather than writing the letters in silver and gold. The Cotton fragment of the Gospels, mentioned above (p. 23), is one of the few remaining copies of this kind, as are the newly discovered Codex Rossanensis and the Codex Beratinus, and it is not unlikely that the great Dublin palimpsest of St. Matthew owes its present wretched discoloration to some such dye. But, as Davidson sensibly observes, “the value of a manuscript does not depend on such things” (Biblical Criticism, vol. ii. p. 264). We care for them only as they serve to indicate the reverence paid to the Scriptures by men of old. The style, however, of the pictures, illustrations, arabesques and initial ornaments that prevail in later copies from the eighth century downwards, whose colours and gilding are sometimes as fresh and bright as if laid on but yesterday24, will not only interest the student by tending to throw light on mediaeval art and habits and modes of thought, but will often fix the date of the books which contain them with a precision otherwise quite beyond our reach.
6. The ink found upon ancient manuscripts is of various colours25. Black ink, the ordinary writing fluid of centuries (μέλαν, atramentum, &c.) differs in tint at various periods and in different countries. In early MSS. it is either pure black or slightly brown; in the Middle Ages it varies a good deal according to age and locality. In Italy and Southern Europe it is generally blacker than in the North, in France and Flanders it is generally darker than in England; a Spanish MS. of the fourteenth or fifteenth century may usually be recognized by the peculiar blackness of the ink. Deterioration is observable in the course of time. The ink of the fifteenth century particularly is often of a faded grey colour. Inks of green, yellow, and other colours, are also found, but generally only for ornamental purposes. Red, either in the form of a pigment or fluid ink, is of very ancient and common use, being seen even in early Egyptian papyri. Gold was also used as a writing fluid at a very early period. Purple-stained vellum MSS. were usually written upon in gold or silver letters, and ordinary white vellum MSS. were also written in gold, particularly in the ninth and tenth centuries, in the reigns of the Carlovingian kings. Gold writing as a practice died out in the thirteenth century: and writing in silver appears to have ceased contemporaneously with the disuse of stained vellum. The ancients used the liquid of cuttle-fish. Pliny mentions soot and gum as the ingredients of writing-ink. Other later authors add gall-apples: metallic infusions at an early period, and vitriol in the Middle Ages were also employed.
7. While papyrus remained in common use, the chief instrument employed was a reed (κάλαμος 3 John ver. 13, canna), such as are common in the East at present: a few existing manuscripts (e.g. the Codd. Leicestrensis and Lambeth 1350) appear to have been thus written. Yet the firmness and regularity of the strokes, which often remain impressed on the vellum or paper after the ink has utterly gone, seem to prove that in the great majority of cases the stilus made of iron, bronze, or other metal, or ivory or bone, sharp at one end to scratch the letters, and furnished with a knob or flat head at the other for purposes of erasure, had not gone wholly out of use. We must add to our list of Writing materials a bodkin or needle (acus), by means of which and a ruler the blank leaf was carefully divided, generally on the outer side of the skin, into columns and lines, whose regularity much enhances the beauty of our best copies. The vestiges of such points and marks may yet be seen deeply indented on the surface of nearly all manuscripts, those on one side of each leaf being usually sufficiently visible to guide the scribe when he came to write on the reverse. The quill pen probably came into use with vellum, for which it is obviously suited. The first notices of it occur in a story respecting Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and in a passage of Isidore's “Origines”26 (vi. 13).
8. Little need be said respecting the form of manuscripts, which in this particular (codices) much resemble printed books. A few are in large folio; the greater part in small folio or quarto, the prevailing shape