Ill

The  eighteenth-century  criticism  of  the  New
Testament  was  opened,  as  has  been  already  re-
marked, by  Mill's  great  edition  in  1707.  Little  had
been  known  in  this  country  concerning  the  different
readings  of  the  MSS.,  though  they  had  not  been
unnoticed  by  Walton  in  the  Greek  Testament  of  his
Polyglot  in  1657,^  or  by  Bishop  Fell  in  1675.  But
the  30,000  variants  of  Mill  excited  great  alarm,  and
though  his  discussion  of  them  contained  many  sa-
gacious reflections,  he  laid  down  no  principles  by
which  their  value  could  be  estimated,  or  the  vast
mass  adequately  classified.  The  '  Proposals '  of
Bentley  in  1720  were  founded  on  two  sets  of  ma-
terial. There  was  in  the  first  place  the  precious
Alexandrine  MS.  of  the  fifth  century,  which  had  been
presented  to  Charles  I.  by  the  Patriarch  of  Con-
stantinople in  1628.     This  contained  originally  the

^  Their  disquieting  effect  may  be  seen  in  the  opposition  of  Dr.  John  Owen,
whose  retirement  from  the  Vice-Chancellorship  of  the  University  of  Oxford  in
1658  was  followed  by  the  publication  (1659)  of  his  treatise  Of  the  Divint
Original^  Authority ^  Self-evidencitig  Light  and  Power  of  the  Scriptures.  An
appendix  contained  '  Considerations  on  the  Prologomena  and  Appendix  to  the
late  Biblia  Polyglotta.*  Walton  replied  immediately  in  The  ConstdenUor
CoHsieured,


LECT.u.  THE    REVISED  VERSION  6l

whole  of  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  in  the  Greek
capital  letters  known  as  *  uncials.'^  Bentley  conceived
this  to  be  *  the  oldest  and  best  in  the  world.'  It  had
of  course  been  copied  from  a  text  still  more  ancient,
and  with  the  help  of  this  and  other  MSS.,  Bentley
believed  that  he  could  get  back  to  the  text  current
in  the  fourth  century,  say  at  the  time  of  the  Council
of  Nicea,  in  325  A.D.  But  the  Greek  MSS.  were  not
his  only  source.  The  famous  Latin  father,  Jerome,
had  rendered  the  New  Testament  into  Latin  towards
the  close  of  the  fourth  century,  with  a  faithfulness
which  sought  even  to  represent  the  very  order  of  the
Greek  words.  Bentley  proposed  to  recover  this  ver-
sion, and  use  it  to  confirm  his  Greek  authorities.
