Second, nor by the carelessness of scribes.
Second, nor by the carelessness of scribes.
§ 322. This, then, we have proved: that the Hebrew sources were not and could not have been corrupted by the malice of the Jews. The fact that they were not corrupted by the carelessness of scribes is proved: (1) By divine providence. “We are built upon the foundation not only of the apostles but also of the prophets” (Eph. 2:20), that is, on the doctrine included in the books of the prophets. Therefore divine providence did not permit those books to be corrupted and perverted; otherwise the foundation of the Church would be undermined and overthrown. Bellarmine says (De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 2): “It is not likely that God would have allowed the words of so many prophets to be falsified generally, especially because He has scattered the Jews throughout the entire world and wanted them to carry about the books of the Law and the prophets for this purpose, so that our foes would give a witness to the Christian truth.” As a consequence, Augustine calls the Jewish nation “the keepers and protectors of the Christians’ books” (Contra Faustum, bk. 12, c. 29; on Psalms 40 and 56; De civ. Dei, bk. 18, c. 46).
(2) By the authentic authority of Holy Scripture. If one were to grant that something in Holy Scripture was changed, most of its genuine authority would disappear. But on the contrary, Christ declares: “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). Also Luke 16:17: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the Law to pass away.”
(3) By the faithful protection of the Masorah. In the Masorah Gedolah, or the Great Masorah, added to the end of the major Bible published by Bomberg (whose authors were men of the Great Synagogue or consistory: Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, the priest Jeshua, and 120 other chief priests and Levites), are listed all together the verses, words, and letters of the Hebrew Bible. Every variant of these is noted and indicated in its own place, along with a recitation of each verse, so that a faithful and pure reading of the Hebrew text is preserved and fortified against any change or corruption. Elias Levita expresses the usefulness of this truly remarkable and inimitable diligence (preface to Masoreth Hammasoreth, bk. 3): “After that task that the Masoretes performed, it is impossible that a variant or change happened or could have happened later in any way in any book of Scripture. It is not in vain that our rabbinic scholars have said: ‘The Masorah is the fence of the Law (
).’ “Nicolaus Fullerus discusses this matter in this way (Miscell. sacr., bk. 3, c. 13):
With this plan (for protecting the Hebrew truth from corruptions), the most skilled teachers of the Jews developed a subtle and curious art that they have called the Masoreth, that is, the tradition or most accurate manner of handing down through the hands of posterity a pure and always complete canon of Holy Scripture. A benefit of this is that not only the words but also even the letters were numbered in such a way that no change, not even the slightest, can be introduced by unlearned, incautious, or rash people without being caught easily from its traces. Consequently, they quite fittingly call it, as it were, the fence of the Old Testament against every slip away from it, which removes and casts out the fear of corruption.
(4) By the singular vigilance of those who copied the Hebrew text either by pen or by type. A comparison of versions, either of manuscripts or of published editions, either of the oldest of these or of the more recent, clearly shows that those who copied the Hebrew text either by pen or by type always kept the work of the Masoretes before their eyes and were careful lest any change in words, letters, or punctuation catch them unawares; and if some change did by chance creep in, an added correction removed it immediately.
§ 323. We also use a reduction to the absurd. If the Old Testament codices were corrupted, the consequence would be: (1) That God either did not want or was unable to preserve the original text of Scripture unharmed. The first is repugnant to His goodness and wisdom by which He wanted to enlighten all people of every age to salvation by and through Scripture; the latter conflicts with His power. (2) That the one, supreme principle of our faith is no longer pure and uncorrupted because, when the streams never flow more purely from the springs, the translations will be more corrupt and perverted. (3) That Christ and the apostles will have to be called to the court of judgment because they never censured the Jews for that great sacrilege but only rebuked far less significant faults in them. (4) That the study is in vain which lovers of Hebrew apply to learning the sources and to a more accurate scrutiny of the Hebrew codices. (5) That all the things that Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and other fathers mention about the faithful protection of Scripture and the reverent attitude of the Jews toward it are false and fictitious. (6) That the apostle commends the Jewish nation with lying praise when he says that they were “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2). Because all of this is absurd and unproved, therefore that, too, will be absurd from which such ideas are concluded and deduced.
§ 324. Some of the Papists themselves give their approval to this statement of ours concerning the integrity and purity of the Hebrew text. Johannes Isaacus, formerly professor of Hebrew at the academy of Cologne, has refuted the error of his pupil Lindanus—that the codex of the Bible was corrupted by the Jews—as false and wicked and has defended the Hebrew truth against Lindanus’s calumnies. The title of this book reads as follows: “The Defense of the Hebrew Truth of the Holy Scriptures against Lindanus” (Defensio veritatis Hebraicae sacrarum Scripturarum adversus Lindanum). In that work, bk. 2, p. 77, he advises: “More than two hundred arguments that refute Jewish impieties are contained in the Hebrew text more plainly than in the Latin translation.” Andrada acknowledges the same thing in Defens. fid. Trid., bk. 4, where he writes: “Those who treat the Hebrew versions devoutly and reverently find more testimonies regarding Christ in them than in the Latin and Greek.” The previously mentioned Isaacus asserts: “So great is the consensus of the Hebrew Bible that not even a single book can be brought forward, written in a Jewish hand, that lacks something contained in others or to which something is added that the others lack” (bk. 4, p. 69). To the words of Augustine in De civ. Dei, bk. 15, c. 13: “God forbid, however, that any prudent person believe either that the Jews—however perverse and wicked—could have tampered with the enumeration of the years in Genesis 5 in so many and such widely scattered codices,” Ludovicus Vives notes the following: “We can make this same response to those who make the objection that the Jews falsified and corrupted the codices of the Old Testament and the Greeks those of the New so that the truth of the sacred books may not be sought from those sources.” Benedictus Arias Montanus, preface to vol. 1 of the Bible, writes: “The Hebrew books that we are using have not been corrupted by the deceit of the Jews. Even if some changes were made, there never was a word or element or vowel point that was not preserved in the thesaurus they call the ‘Masorah.’ “Thus he calls the Masorah the “faithful guardian.” Franc. Ribera, on c. 9 of Hosea, draws this conclusion: “If those manuscripts had been corrupted at the time when Jerome published his translation, the Church does not have the true Scripture because all are agreed that the Greek translation is faulty in many places. But if the Hebrew prototypes had been corrupted at the time when our edition was taken from them, then our edition has been totally corrupted, and the Church is without the true and uncorrupted Scripture.” Sixtus Senensis, Biblior. sanct., bk. 8, haer. 2: “One cannot say that the divine Scriptures of the Old Testament were falsified by the malice of either the Jews or the Christians.” Franc. Lucas Brugensis,57 in his Epistle ad Sirletum prefixed to his Annotat. in bibl., writes: “It is not strange to say that many faults have crept into the Latin version, because the same thing happened in the source of Scripture. This is quite clear in the Greek New Testament, for we want to say nothing about the Hebrew.” Therefore he did not dare make a claim that faults of this kind had overtaken the Hebrew text.
We can bring out more approval of this sort for affirming the integrity of the Hebrew text from Cajetan (commentary on Genesis), Johannes Reuchlin (Specul. ocular.), Eugubinus Steuchus, Marcus Marinus Brixianus (Arca Noae), Guido Fabricius, Sanctes Pagninus, Vatablus, etc.