THE COMING CAMBRIDGE SEPTUAGINT: A PLEA FOR A PURE TEXT

THERE are few works whose appearance is more anxiously looked forward to by scientific theologians than the great edition of the Greek Old Testament upon which Mr Brooke and Mr McLean have been working for many years. Recent criticism has made it plainer and plainer that the decision of the Reformation divines to substitute what they called the Hebrew Verity, by which they meant the Masoretic text of the Bible, for that once accepted by the Jews themselves as well as by all members of the primitive Christian Church, namely the Septuagint text, was at least a doubtful experiment and one which might reasonably claim revision. The opinion of the relative value of the Septuagint text, as compared with the Hebrew, has indeed been revolutionized even since the last great revision of the English Bible, and there can be little or no doubt that if that work had to be done again now, the new revised version would shew a very much larger infusion of Septuagint readings tbaD the present one does. This being so, those of us who have tried in late years to champion the Septuagint text as against the Hebrew are naturally very anxious that the great Cambridge Bible shall be (what it was, I take it, meant originally to be) a collection of all the manuscript materials available for the reconstruction of the Septuagint text in its original purity, and a sifting out of all those materials by which the true Septuagint text has been sophisticated at different times, and more especially by the synaetic handiwork of the initiator of Biblical criticism, Origen. I am not quite sure, however, that this most admirable aim will be secured by what I understand to be the intention of those responsible for the new Cambridge corpus of Old Testament readings. They apparently contemplate, not as complete a collection of Septuagint variants as they can secure, but merely a more complete and elaborate edition of Professor Swete's admirable Greek Bible. Professor Swete's Greek Bible has on its title-page this inscription: 'The Old Testament in Greek according to the SeptuaginL' As a matter of fact, it is merely a careful edition of the Vatican Codex, with various readings from all the uncial MSS and in certain parts from some cursives, and it confessedly contains at least one work which has nothing to do with the Septuagint at all, namely Theodotion's Greek translation of Daniel. This appears in the book, I take it, merely because it is contained in Codex B and the other uncials, but no one now believes that it formed part of the Septuagint Bible, and to print