Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1880-05-20
OLD BOOKS.
Some Interesting Facts About the
Early Copies of the Bible
Modern and Ancient
Book Making.
p~hiladelnhin Ledeer.l

BOOK Making.
Philadelphia Ledger
When a man is satisfied because he
can just read an English translation of
a foreign work. that he knows every
thing that is to be known about it,
and is as able to argue and enter into
all sorts of controversies as any man
on earth, despising all book learning"
beyond his own ken, we wish he could
only be made aware of his dependence
upon the labors and learning of whole
generations of students and critics on
every old book, and on every old
thought and figure Of importance that
has come down to us, from those in
the bible down to those in Shakes
peare. Take for instance the English
bible. There is hardly a century
since it has been completed, but has
contributed some important matter,
without which it would have been
impossible for its meaning to be made
known as clear to the English reader,
as it now is to the most of men.
The man who now takes it up, reads
it as one collection, one volume but
it was not until the time of Tertullian
A. ID. 200, that the writings of the
New Testament, were collected, or
even spoken of as one. Even then
some of the minor epistles were fire.
quently omitted, and by no means
universally known as belonging to it
at all. The text was written in
Greek, not only without any attempt
at punctuation or accents, but without
any space between the words. They
ran one at the end Of the other, there
being often no break from one end Of
a line to the other. All was n solid
work. The letters, too, were all rather
like i'll formed capitals, such letters as
a modern Greek scholar could with
difficulty and but slowly decipher.
The divisions into chapters and verses
were not made until the thirteenth
century, and many of the titles to the
books did not originally belong to
them.
AS to the Old Testament, it was
divided into three volumes of different
dates, consisting of the writings of
Moses, the prophets, and the Hagio-
graphs, or sacred writings. 1t was
written without any vowels (like our
shorthand in this %respect), and origin
ally in letters quite different from the
present Hebrew, and such as would
be almost entirely unintelligible to the
best modern Hebrew scholar. More
over, the language of Palestine had
undergone such changes that the He
brew of the Old Testament was not so
much like the spoken language of the
Jews in the time of Christ, as the
English of Chaucer is II like that of the
present day. The Jews out of Pales-
tine had almost entirely lost the
knowledge of it, using the Septuagint
Greek translation instead, parts of
which are very inaccurate. Philo,
though a well educated Jew of Alex
andria, could not read a line of He
brew; and Josephus derived nearly
all his knowledge from Septuagint.
Our present translation compre-
hends a vast number Of results, de-
rived from the learning and labors of
copyists and traRslators of all inter
mediate periods, making the sense
more clear and easy to be understood.
Since 1911, great changes have been
made. Then the bible was printed in
folio, in black letter, hardly legible to
many now. The spelling was by no
means uniform; in fact, the same word
would be spelled quite differently in
different parts of the same sentence.
There were at least two editions
published in 1911. and no one knows
certainly, to this day, which was
printed first. or which is really the
standard editions of the translators.
Both were much more inaccurately
printed than our best modern copies,
which are published probably at one
hundredth part of the cost. There
we're five or six translations before
this was made, some of which had to
be chained to the desks of the parish
churches so, great was the desire to
read them, and so hard we're the
copies to be got at.
All ancient books of merit have
had to go through processes somewhat
similar and the labor of critics on a
sentence or word has often been i'm
mense. Even Shakespeare has been
edited and corrected, and differently
printed in 50 many ways, that volumes
OF real learning are often necessary
fully to determine and bring out the
sense of the true reading.