Burgon's Damning Facts 6: The Early Heretical Corruption of the Texts

Burgon, The Revision Revised, p. 29:

But surely (rejoins the intelligent Reader, coming fresh to these studies), the oldest extant Manuscripts (B [Vaticanus], Aleph [Sinaiticus], A C D) must exhibit the purest text! Is it not so?

It ought to be so, no doubt (we answer); but it certainly need not be the case.

We know that Origen in Palestine, Lucian at Antioch, Hesychius in Egypt, 'revised' the text of the N.T. Unfortunately, they did their work in an age when such fatal misapprehension prehvailed on the subject, that each in turn will have inevitably imported a fresh assortment of monstra into the sacred writings. Add the baneful influence of such spirits as Theophilus (sixth Bishop of Antioch, A.D. 168), Tatian, Ammonius, &c., of whom we know there were very many in the primitive age, -- some of whose productions, we further know, were freely multiplied in every quarter of ancient Christendom: -- add, the fabricated Gospels which anciently abounded; notably the Gospel of the Hebrews, about which Jerome is so communicative, and which (he says) he had translated into Greek and Latin: --lastly, freely grant that here and there, with well-meant assiduity, the orthodox themselves may have sought to prop up truths which the early heretics (Basilides, A.D. 134, Valentinus, A.D. 140, with his disciple Heracleon, Marcion, A.D. 150, and the rest,) most perseveringly assailed;--and we have sufficiently explained how it comes to pass that not a few of the codices of primitive Christendom must have exhibited Texts which were even scandalously corrupt. 'It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound,' writes the most learned of the Revisionist body,

'that the worst corruptions, to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed: that Irenaeus [A.D. 150] and the African Fathers, and the whole Western, with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephens thirteen centuries later, when moulding the Textus Receptus.' *

[*footnote: Scrivener, Introduction, p. 453. -- Stunica, it will be remembered, was the chief editor of the Complutensian, or first printed edition of the New Testament, (1514).]

And what else are codices Aleph, B C D but specimens--in vastly different degrees-- of the class thus characterized by Prebendary Scrivener? Nay, who will venture to deny that those codices are indebted for their preservation solely to the circumstance that they were long since recognized as the depositories of Readings which rendered them utterly untrustworthy?

Only by singling out some definite portion of the Gospels, and attending closely to the handling it has experienced at the hands of A Aleph B C D,--to the last four of which it is just now the fashion to bow down as to an oracular voice from which there shall be no appeal, --can the student become aware of the hopelessness of any attempt to construct the Text of the N.T. out of the materials which these codices exclusively supply. Let us this time take S. Mark's account of the healing of 'the paralytic borne of four' (ch. ii. 1-12)--and confront their exhibition of it with that of the commonly received Text.

POST UNDER CONSTRUCTION.