The Text and Canon of the New Testament

THE chief justification for the appearance of the present work is that a series of the comprehensiveness of ‘Studies in Theology’ would not be complete without some treatment of the Text and Canon of the New Testament. There is a further reason in the fact that the progress made in these subjects is such, that every ten years or so, a brief treatment of them, an attempt to gather together the results of multitudinous books and articles, is a necessity, if any beyond the narrow circle of experts are to be put in possession of the new facts. The writer gained some knowledge of these facts during the eight years in which it was his privilege to teach those subjects in Mansfield College, Oxford. The preparation, also, of an up-to-date critical apparatus to the New Testament, which has been published by the Clarendon Press in conjunction with the ‘Revisers’ Text’ (November 1910, and later), gave him some acquaintance with the materials of New Testament textual criticism. The first part of the present book is intended not merely to present as briefly as possible what students ought to know, but also to act as an encouragement to them to take up some branch of the textual criticism of the New Testament. For this reason some repetition in the course of the work may be excused. I would fain allure some Churchmen from the fascinating pursuit of liturgiology, and some Nonconformists from the equally if not more fascinating pursuit of speculative theology, to the study, say, of the abundant manuscript materials which exist for the writing of the history of the Latin Bible. Why, for instance, should we still lack a scientific edition of the biblical commentaries of our countryman, the Venerable Bede? The materials exist in abundance and are of superlative quality.