Note 169 — Chapter III · THEORY AND PRAXIS OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.[129]

Not only does the Old Testament promise to shed some light upon an obscure problem in the New, but the converse may also be true—viz. that the history of the text of the New Testament may contribute to a better understanding of that of the Old. It was long observed that many peculiarities of the Lucianic revision of the Septuagint occur also in the witnesses to the Old Latin version (see especially Driver, Notes on Samuel, p. li; Urt., 78). No proper explanation of this phenomenon could be given so long as the Old Latin version of the Old Testament was looked upon as homogeneous and of great antiquity. But the New Testament, for which we have far more Old Latin manuscripts than for the Old, shows that the Old Latin pre-Jeromic version had a chequered history, and in particular that at a certain time a revision was undertaken, the result of which is found especially in Codex Brixianus (f, see p. 112), and which “non solum interpretationem veterem stilo elegantiori emendabat, sed etiam lectiones novas protulit. Notatu certe dignum est, in ista emendatione Itala eminere lectiones quae in maiori parte codicum Graecorum apparent, quas Recensioni Syrae vel Antiochenae adiudicant Westcott et Hort.” So say Wordsworth and White, p. 654. If the same thing holds good of the Old Testament, then the relationship between the Old Latin and Lucian at once becomes evident, and the supposition is not so absurd that the marginal glosses of Codex Legionensis (called Codex Gothicus in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, iii. p. 50b.) which are particularly striking on this view of the case, may have been translated into Latin from Lucian. These considerations, moreover, may possibly throw fresh light on the question that I have raised elsewhere (Urt., p. 78), whether Lucian may not also have used the Peshitto in his recension of the Old Testament. I see that it has been taken up by J. Méritan, in his little book, entitled, La Version grecque des Livres de Samuel, précédée d’une Introduction sur la critique textuelle (Paris, 1898). On pp. 96-113 he discusses the same question—whether Lucian knew and used the Peshitto. He answers the question in the affirmative: “It is therefore probable that as regards certain passages of the Books of Samuel, in his work of revision, or rather of correction, Lucian did not follow the Hebrew text as his sole and infallible guide, but availed himself of others also, and that one of those principal authorities was the Syriac version.” We often enough find ὁ Σύρος cited as an authority in the Greek Commentaries on the Old Testament. Whether it is also mentioned for the New Testament is a point that seems not yet to be looked into.

I may add that Bickel concludes his short article in the Zeitschrift für kath. Theol., iii. 467-469, entitled, “Die Lucianische Septuagintabearbeitung nachgewiesen,” by saying: “In establishing the recensions of Lucian and Hesychius for the Septuagint, we may be held as settling the question whether traces of these may not also be found in the New Testament.”

In his Einleitung, ii. 240, Zahn says: “Without a doubt many readings which had a considerable circulation in the second and third centuries, some of them being of no small importance and extent, were gradually ousted from their place in the text from the fourth century onwards, and some of them dropped out of the later tradition altogether. And it is equally true that many interpolations were current in these later centuries which were unknown in the second. But whatever our judgment be in doubtful cases, we are still always in a position to support it with extant documents.”