Two Millennia Dedicated to the Preservation of the Text

The various Books of the Bible were apparently written in rolls, cf. Psalm 39:8, "in the roll of the book," and Jeremiah 36:2, 23. The first mention of the written record appears apropos of the battle with the Amalecites, Exodus 17:14; cf. Deuteronomy 17:18, 31:24-26. In this last passage we see that these Writings were delivered to the custody of the priests. That some official book was kept appears from Joshua 24:26, and 1 Samuel 10:25. The story of the discovery of "the Law" in the time of Josias is told in 4 Kings 23-24. In the Prologue to Ecclesiasticus we find mentioned three times over the threefold division into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. When we come to the days of the Maccabees, the Sacred Books are regarded as precious, and their destruction is demanded by Antiochus as a means for rooting out the religion of the Hebrews.

Apart from the actual committal of these Books to writing, three important stages should be noted:

a. - the formation of the versions,
b. - the invention of the Hebrew vowel-system,
c. - the invention of printing.

The earliest version is the so-called Septuagint (LXX), or Alexandrian Greek version. Its appearance was the signal for increased care for their Sacred Books on the part of the Jews, and from about the second century B.C., we find a body of Scribes whose duty it was to watch over the text, for further details see s.v. Hebrew Bible.

After the close of the first century of the Christian era, the Christian versions began to be made, at first from the Greek, later, by St. Jerome, from the Hebrew itself. Meanwhile the laborious work of the Scribes did not cease, and from the seventh to the ninth centuries A.D. we have the Massoretes who created the cumbersome but invaluable system of vocalization which has preserved the traditional reading of the old Hebrew text. But long before this there had arisen the monastic copyists whose life's work it was faithfully to transcribe the text of the Bible. To their labors we owe the present well-nigh incredible number of MSS. of the Bible, whether in Greek or in Latin. And it was not only the monks who made these copies: it is interesting to find a wealthy Spaniard, Lucinius, sending his own servants to St. Jerome to copy the Saint's translations of the Bible. St. Jerome writes to him: "I have given them (the translations) to your servants to transcribe. I have seen the paper copies which they have made, and have repeatedly ordered them to correct them by a diligent comparison with the originals. ... if you find errors or omissions which interfere with the sense, you must impute these not to me but to your own servants, for they are due to the ignorance or carelessness of the copyists who write down not what they find, but what they take to be the meaning, and who expose their own errors when they try to correct those of others." Ep. lxxi.

In our account of the Vulgate version we have described the labors of Alcuin who revised the Latin text; as also the "Correctories" of the thirteenth century. With the fifteenth century came the invention of printing.

From all this it will be apparent that the Bible has been preserved in a way in which no other book in the world has ever been preserved. For many classical works, for example, we are dependent on but one or two MSS. which, in some cases, date from a time long posterior to the date at which the original was written. And while it is unfortunately true that we have few and only late MSS. of the Hebrew Bible, this lack is counterbalanced by the immense number of early MSS. of the different versions.


by
Very Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., S.T.M.
Doctor in Sacred Scripture,
Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and
late Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the Collegio Angelico, Rome.