AN OLD TESTAMENT PAPYRUS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2413, 18 October 1892, Page 3

AN OLD TESTAMENT PAPYRUS.

A curious document will be submitted to the Congress of Orientalists about to assemble in London. It is a papyrus manuscript discovered a few months ago in Egypt, and is supposed by some authorities to be the oldest copy extant of portions of the Old Testament books of Zeohariah and Malachi. These pages of papyrus when intact were about lOi». high and Tin. wide, each containing 28 lines of writing, both sides of the sheet being used. The complete line contains from 14 to 17 letters. The sheets arc bound together in the form of a book, in a, primitive though careful manner, with cord and strips of old parchment. The Greek of this document is written without intervals between the words, a custom observed both in old Greek and old Hebrew maimscripts. The papyrus is in fair preservation, and Ui believed to date from the third or fourth century. It

. thus ranks in nge with the oldest Greek | manuscript.-! of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament in London, Rome, and St. Petersburg. It has boon shown to several of the University professors in Vienna, who, The Times correspondent is told, consider it to be genuine. _ The British chaplain there, a distinguished Orientalist, has examined it, and will give an account of it at the congress. The differences in this papyrus tend to the conclusion that it was copied from some excellent original of the Septuagint Bible, which was first translated about the year 280 8.C., for the use of the Hellenistic Jews in Egypt, who, having gradually forgotten the Hebrew tongue, had learned to speak Greek. The first summary examination has shown that it has several new readings which surpass some of the other Septuagint texts in clearness of expression and simplicity of grammar. It would also appear that it was copied from another Septuagint Bible, and was not written, as was frequently the case, from dictation. A second scribe has occasionally corrected some mistakes of orthography made by the original copyist. These are still to be distinguished by the different color in the ink.