Those who have any acquaintance with modern researches into the history of the Canon of the New Testament, are well aware that a little before the middle of the last century, the learned Muratori, in collecting materials for his great work, Antiquitates Italicae Medii AEvi , discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, a curious fragment written in barbarous Latin, which contained a list of books used in the early Church. This he gave to the world in the year 1740 at Milan, in the third volume of his work, where it formed ...
Read More
Those who have any acquaintance with modern researches into the history of the Canon of the New Testament, are well aware that a little before the middle of the last century, the learned Muratori, in collecting materials for his great work, Antiquitates Italicae Medii AEvi , discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, a curious fragment written in barbarous Latin, which contained a list of books used in the early Church. This he gave to the world in the year 1740 at Milan, in the third volume of his work, where it formed a part of his forty-third Dissertation, "On the State of Letters in Italy subsequent to the Incursion of the Barbarians down to the year of our Lord 1100." Of the MS. as he found it, Muratori has given a full and interesting account . It had been brought to the Ambrosian Library, with many other literary treasures, from the older convent of Bobbio, founded at the beginning of the seventh century, in the neighborhood of Pavia, by the Irish monk Columbanus. From the form of the writing, in large, square characters (Literis majusculis et quadratis) , Muratori inferred, that the actual transcript must have been made somewhat less than a thousand years before his time, which would carry it back to the first half of the eighth century after Christ . The list itself must of course be much older, not referable, on grounds to be presently stated, to a later date than some time in the second, or at most the earlier years of the third century. In the same transcript with this fragment are contained extracts from other writers, Eucherius Lugdunensis and Ambrose; the whole collection being attributed by the title prefixed, but without any reason, to John Chrysostom. "It seems," says Dr. Tregelles, "as if it must have been a kind of commonplace-book, in which some monk, possessed of more industry than learning or critical tact, had written out various things which came in his way, without his having any definite reason in his selections, and without there being any relation between the things so brought together. Many, however, of the astonishing mistakes found in the fragments did not originate with him, though he may perhaps have increased them, partly from ignorance, and partly from that frequent cause of the corruption of ancient texts, the attempt at emendation." The list, as we now have it, is defective at both ends. Possibly it might have been imperfect when it fell into the hands of the scribe at Bobbio. This curious relic of Christian antiquity soon attracted the attention of scholars on the continent, among whom Mosheim, Stosch, Freindaller, Zimmermann and Eichhorn, may be specially named; though even in Germany, owing to the extremely corrupt state of the text, and the uncertainty about its date and authorship, it was hardly perhaps subjected to the amount of critical investigation that it deserved, till the time of Credner. In England, though Dr. Routh inserted it, with a full and learned commentary, in the first edition of his Reliquiae Sacrae (Oxford, 1818), it has remained almost unnoticed to the present day, when Dr. Wordsworth, Mr. "Westcott and Dr. Tregelles, have at length made it the subject of criticism in their respective publications.... - The Theological Review , Vol. 6 [1869]
Read Less
