1 Tim. ii. 5, 6; 2 Tim. ii. 8. (Cont. Apollinar. ii. 2.) Thus he refers repeatedly to 1 Pet. iv. 1, where we read that "Christ suffered for us in the flesh." (See Or. iii. cont. Arian. cc. 31, 34; Cont. Apollinar. ii. 18, 19.) It is just because the word cós, without modification, does not, like xprós, suggest "the flesh," in other words, because it is dixa σapkós, that Athanasius regards such expressions as αἷμα θεοῦ and ὁ θεὸς ἔπαθεν καὶ ἀνέστη as senseless and blasphemous (see above, p. 332).

B. ON THE READING OF THE PESHITO SYRIAC AND THE

AETHIOPIC VERSIONS.

Before entering upon this subject, I wish to express my hearty thanks to Dr. William Wright, Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, for very important and interesting information, most kindly communicated, concerning the Syriac and Aethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum. The statements here made respecting their readings in Acts xx. 28 all rest on his authority. For a detailed account of the manuscripts, his Catalogues are of course to be consulted.

Of the SYRIAC manuscripts in the British Museum the following read in Acts xx. 28 "the church of God":

Addit. 14473 (6th cent.); 17121, f. 59a (6th cent.); 14472, f. 39b (6th or 7th cent.); 18812, f. 35" (6th or 7th cent.); and 14470, f. 160 in its later supplement (9th cent.). It is also found in Addit. 17120 (see below) as a late correction; and in 14681 (12th or 13th cent.) as a marginal variant, the text reading" of Christ."

The reading"God" is also found, as is well known, in a Syriac Lectionary in the Vatican Library, No. 21, dated A.D. 1042 (see Adler's Novi Test. Verss. Syr. p. 16 ff.), in a manuscript brought by Dr. Buchanan from Travancore, "Codex Malabarensis," now in the Library of the University of Cambridge, Oo. 1. 1. 2, which Dr. Lee considers 500 years old; and a мs. in the Fodleian Library, "Dawk. 23," which he regards as "much older."1 Dr. Lee admitted the reading "God" into the text of his edition of the Syriac New Testament in 1816 on the authority of these three manuscripts.

Of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Museum the following read "the church of Christ" (or the Messiah):

Addit. 17120, "written in a good regular Estrangelā of the sixth

1 See the letter of Dr. Lee in Hug's Introduction, trans. by Wait, i. 368–370, and his Prolegomena in Bibl. Pol. Lond. min., iii. § 4, c. 14.

century"; altered "at a much later period into 'of God'" (Dr. Wright); 14448 (A.D. 699-700), f. 143; 7157, f. 121a, "a very fine Ms. of the year A.D. 768" (Wright; see also Scrivener, Introd., 2d ed., p. 279, n. 2); 14474 (9th cent.); 14680 (12th or 13th cent.); 17124 (A.D. 1234); and 14681 (12th or 13th cent.) in the text, but with "of God" as a marginal variant. -The two MSS. numbered 7157 and 14448 are Nestorian.

Respecting the Syriac manuscripts in other libraries I have little information. We may set down, I suppose, as supporting the reading "of Christ" the manuscripts on which the printed editions that have that reading were founded, or in which no variation was noted by the collator; but our knowledge of them is imperfect. Among these editions are those of Widmanstadt (1555), resting on one or two Jacobite manuscripts; the edition of Tremellius (1569) who used a Heidelberg manuscript; that of Le Fevre de la Boderie (Fabricius Boderianus) in the Antwerp Polyglot (Vol. v. 1572), in which he used a manuscript, dated 1188, brought by Postel from the East; that of Rapheleng (1575), who used a "Cologne manuscript," but Marsh thinks this was probably identical with the one just mentioned; that of Gutbier (1664), who had a manuscript borrowed from L'Empereur; and that published by the Propaganda at Rome in 1703 from a copy made by Antonius Sionita in 1611 from three мss. belonging to the College of Maronites. (See Hug's Introd., Part 1. § 69, p. 215, Fosdick's trans.) Two Nestorian manuscripts in the Vatican Library, No. 16 (al. 10), assigned by Assemani to the thirteenth century, and No. 17 (al. 9), dated A.D. 1510, described by Adler (ubi sup. p. 20 ff.) also have that reading. To these I can only add the мs. Ff. 2. 15 in the Library of the University of Cambridge, Ridley's No. 14, who says that it is dated A.D. 1524; and what is more important, "a Syriac мs. of about 1000 years old, belonging to Mr. Palmer of Magdalen College," mentioned by the Rev. J. B. Morris (Select Works of S. Ephrem the Syrian, Oxford, 1847, p. 395, note).1

We have thus an interesting question respecting the primitive reading of the Peshito in this passage. A majority of the oldest

1 The passage of Ephrem which gave occasion to Mr. Morris's note reads: “Flee from it [Judaism], thou that art feeble; a light thing is thy death and thy blood to it; it took [upon it] the Blood of God, will it be scared away from thine? ... It hung God upon the Cross, and all created shook to see Him.”. Rhythm i. concerning the Faith, c. 46 (Opp..Syr. et Lat., iii. 189f).

manuscripts, so far as our information at present extends, support the reading "the church of God"; and as xploroû is found in no Greek manuscript, and in but few patristic quotations, is it not probable that coû was originally read by the Syriac translator?

This is a question on which I am not qualified to express a confident opinion; but I will state the considerations which incline me to a different view.

(1) The manuscript evidence for both readings extends back to the sixth century; but it is important to notice that all the Nestorian manuscripts have the reading "Christ," while the Jacobite or Monophysite manuscripts are divided, the majority in point of number, including one of the sixth century, also supporting that reading. In the controversies of the fifth century, when it became known that some Greek мss. supported the reading coû, and after the Philoxenian Syriac, prepared at the instance of a leading Monophysite bishop, had adopted this reading in the text, it is not strange that some of the Jacobites or Monophysites should have corrected (as they thought) their copies of the Peshito by the Greek or by the Philoxenian, and that thus the reading "God" should have found its way into a considerable number of мss., since it is a reading which would especially favor the Monophysite doctrine.1 Latin influence, so far as it went, would also tend in the same direction. I lay no stress upon the fact that the Nestorians (as Sabarjesus at the end of the tenth century) charged their adversaries with corrupting this passage and Heb. ii. 9 (see Assemani Bibl. Orient. III. i. 543). Such charges amount to little on one side or the other. But we must consider the probabilities. Had "God" been the original reading, the Nestorians were not likely deliberately to change it to "Christ," which must have been found in few if any Greek manuscripts; they would rather have substituted "Lord," which has so much very ancient authority; but passing this by, if they had thus corrupted the text, how could their reading, in opposition to the text which had been handed down for centuries, have found its way into a majority of the manuscripts of the hostile sect, after controversy had become bitter? 2

1 "Iacobitarum codices post editam versionem Philoxenianam ad textum Graecum corrigi coeptum est."-Wichelhaus, De N. T. Vers. Syr., p. 231; comp. p. 190: “Haec versio [Philoxeniana] nacta est haud exiguam apud illos famam et auctoritatem, ita ut plurimum transscripta sit et variis temporibus a Iacobitarum doctoribus laudata."

...

2 "Fuit ni fallor haec rerum conditio, ut Nestoriani omnes legerent' Christi,'

That the Nestorians were not the authors of the corruption appears probable from the similar case of Heb. ii. 9, where their manuscripts and some Jacobite manuscripts also read, "For he apart from God (χωρὶς θεοῦ for χάριτι θεοῦ) tasted death for all men ” ; while most of the Jacobite manuscripts read, "For God himself, in his grace, tasted death for all men." That the reading xwpis coû was not invented by the Nestorians is shown by the fact that it was current two hundred years before they existed, being found in the manuscripts of Origen and many other ancient fathers (see Tischendorf, and Bleek in loc.), whereas the Jacobite reading has in Greek no manuscript support.

It must be confessed, however, that the authority of the Synod of Diamper is against them. In the Acts of that Council (A.D. 1599) the Nestorians are charged with maliciously corrupting both Heb. ii. 9 and Acts xx. 28. "Nam ipsi Nestoriani, a Diabolo acti, veritatem Catholicam scilicet Deum pro nobis passum sanguinemque fudisse fateri nolunt." (Mansi, Concil. Coll. Nova, seu Supplementum, etc. tom. vi. col. 24.) That very learned and judicious body also restored to the Syriac text the passage about the Woman taken in Adultery, the reading "the love of God, because he laid down his life for us," 1 John iii. 16, the Three Heavenly Witnesses, 1 John v. 7, 8, and some other gems from the Clementine Vulgate.1 Should it be urged that the majority of the oldest manuscripts in the British Museum collection support the reading "God," though very ancient manuscripts are found on both sides, I would call attention to the fact that most or all of these manuscripts come from the monastery of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian desert, a Jacobite establishment, and that what is really remarkable is the fact that they do not all have that reading. The tendency to alter the reading "Christ" to "God" is illustrated by the manuscripts Addit. 17120 and 14681; see above, and note the changes in Rich's Ms. 7157, described by Tregelles (Textual Criticism, p. 262, n. 2). Iacobitarum alii codices Christi' exhiberent alii 'Dei,' quam Graeci textus lectionem genuinam et veram habemus."- Wichelhaus, ibid. p. 150.

1 See La Croze, Hist. du Christianisme des Indes, 1758, i. 341 ff.

2 "Neque id mirum est, quod Iacobitarum potissimum libri in Europam translati sunt. Etenim qui in Nitriae deserta confugerunt ibique in monasterio Mariae Deiparae sedes fixerunt, Monophysitae erant et codices attulerunt ex Iacobitarum monasteriis; deinde plus omnino commercii fuit ecclesiae occidentali cum Iacobitis quam cum Nestorianis, qui interioris Asiae tractus incolebant." - Wichelhaus, ubi sup., p. 147.

(2) The genuineness of the reading "Christ" is favored by its existence in the Erpenian Arabic, made from the Peshito.

(3) It is also favored by the fact that all or most of the earlier fathers of Syria and its neighborhood, as Eustathius of Antioch, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, Nestorius, Amphilochius of Iconium, the Gregories, and Eutherius of Tyana, appear to have been averse to such expressions as "the blood" or "the sufferings of God;" see p. 319 f. Perhaps Ephrem is an exception; see the note quoted above; but he was a poet, and fond of extravagant and paradoxical language. Moreover, Sabarjesus quotes him as saying, "Deus Verbum neque passus, neque mortuus est." (Assemani Bibl. Orient. III. i. 542.)

Such being the state of the case, I incline pretty strongly to the belief that "Christ" was the original reading of the Peshito in

Acts xx. 28.

The AETHIOPIC VERSION as printed in Walton's Polyglot, as has already been mentioned (see p. 323), uses a word regarded by Griesbach, Tischendorf, and others as ambiguous, but which seems to me to support the reading "God." But the Polyglot text (from the Roman edition of 1548-49) represents but a single manuscript, parts of which in the Acts were defective, and supplied by the native editors from the Greek or the Vulgate. Thomas Pell Platt's edition, printed for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1830, was also made, in the Acts and Epistles, from a single manuscript. (Tregelles, Textual Criticism, p. 318.) This edition reads "Christ." In this uncertainty about the text, the following account, for which I am indebted to Dr. Wright, of the readings of the Aethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum, is of special interest:

Orient. 526, f. 67; 527, f. 111; 529, f. 93°; 530, f. 39; and 531, f. 78a, agree in reading "church of Christ." Or. 532, f. 116, omits the word Christ altogether. Or. 528, f. 18a, has "church of God," using the word egziabher.

"These manuscripts," Dr. Wright remarks, "are all of the

1 I would add, in further illustration of the statement that the word egziabher appears to stand for kúpios only when kúpios was regarded by the translator as equivalent to Jehovah, and that it is the common representative of cós, the examples of its use in 1 Cor. ii. In vv. 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, it stands for eós; in ver. 16 for kúpios; but not for kúpios in ver. 8—" they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."