E. W. Vacher, of Beeville, Tex., sent me some weeks ago a list of nineteen questions, which would require, for full and satisfactory answers, a whole volume, and I have been puzzled to know what to do with them. I have at last decided to answer them in these columns by taking a few at a time and giving to every one as brief an answer as I can. I do so under the impression that many others as well as he may be struggling with some or all of the same questions.

      1. Name the oldest Greek manuscript texts of our Bible now extant.

      There are two of which it is a little uncertain which is the oldest of all. One is called the Sinaitic, because it was found in 1859 in the convent at the foot of Mount Sinai. This convent was founded in the sixth century of our era, and it has been occupied ever since by a succession of Greek monks, all of whose bones, it is claimed, are preserved and piled up in the cellar of the ancient building. When printed books came into use they no longer used their manuscript books, but they still kept the most of them on the shelves of their old library, and among these they had this Greek Bible, though the present generation of them knew not the fact till Constantine [239] Tischendorf, who was engaged in searching for such documents, found it. He was at the time making his researches at the expense of the Czar Alexander, and consequently, when he obtained possession of the book, he took it to St. Petersburg, and it is now preserved there in the imperial library. Three hundred fac-simile copies were made by the order of the Czar, and distributed as presents to leading libraries in Europe and America. Five of these are in this country, one in the National Library at Washington.

      The other is commonly called the Vatican manuscript, because it is kept in the library of the Pope in the Vatican palace at Rome. It has been in that library more than four hundred years, but where it had been kept previously is now unknown.

      Both of these were originally complete copies of the Greek Bible, containing for the Old Testament, part the Septuagint translation made before the birth of Christ; but the Sinaitic has lost some leaves of Genesis and some of the Book of Psalms. It contains the whole of the New Testament. The Vatican has also lost some leaves, especially all from the ninth chapter of Hebrews to the end of Revelation.

      By applying to these documents all the tests by which the age of an ancient manuscript is determined, it has been decided, with the consent of both believers and unbelievers, that they were written about the middle of the fourth century, or about A. D. 350.

      There are two other MSS. of the Greek Bible, only about half a century younger than these two. One is called the Alexandrian, because its history is traced back to Alexandria in Egypt, and it is preserved in the library of the British Museum in London, where it was deposited by Charles I. about two hundred and forty years [240] ago. The other is kept in the National Library of France in Paris, and is called the Codex Ephraem.

      2. "Note any differences in them from our present Bible."

      There are many differences between them individually, and between each of them and our present Greek Bible. These differences consist in the spelling of Greek words chiefly, in the position of words in the sentence, in the omission or addition of small words not affecting the sense, and in various other minutiæ of Greek grammar. A few of them affect the sense of particular passages, but not seriously. All that affect it in the least are indicated on the margin of the Revised English Testament. If Bro. Vacher has not a copy of the Revised Version, or, if he has, and has failed to study its preface and its marginal readings, he has lost a great deal in the last sixteen years. No man can afford to be without it, or can afford any longer to depend on the old English version.

      In answering these two questions I have answered the first five; for the other three are involved in these.

      6. "When do we first hear of a canonical list of Scriptures?"

      The earliest council which we know to have taken action on the subject was that of Carthage, which consisted of the bishops in the Roman province of Africa, and which met A. D. 397. It adopted a rule against the reading in the churches of any but canonical books, and in order that all might know what books were canonical, it gave a list of them. This act did not make any of them canonical, but it simply gave for information, as the Westminster Confession does, and the Methodist Discipline, a list of those already known to be canonical. Before this we find in the extant writings, of early [241] Christian writers, such as Eusebius, Athanasias, Cyril of Jerusalem, Origen and Clement, reaching back to the beginning of the third century, lists of books which were acknowledged by Christians in general as apostolic. Then, back of these we have translations made in the second century containing all the books, and also quotations from them by writers of that early period. These, together with the internal evidences of the books themselves, settle the question in the minds of all but skeptical scholars, and the most candid of even these are just now beginning to acknowledge more of them as genuine than did the skeptics of thirty years ago. So much for the New Testament. The earliest proof of the existence and acceptance of the Old Testament as a whole, is its translation into Greek, which was begun about two hundred and eighty years before Christ, and completed within the next hundred years. Later there were three other translations into Greek, two into Aramaic, one into Latin and one into Syriac. All these were in use before the close of the second century A. D.

[SEBC 239-242]