It

errors and heresies were already springing up. The aged Apostle wrote a solemn and loving letter to the Churches (1st Ep. John), in which he warned them against these errors; and he also wrote his wonderful "Gospel," the most beautiful of all the Books which we have in our Bible. told the Christians a great deal that was new to most of them about the Lord Jesus and His teaching. They found that He was the Word of God (chap. i.), and the Bread of Life (chap. vi.), and the Light of the World (chap. viii.), and the Good Shepherd (chap. x.), and the True Vine (chap. xv.); they read His conversations with Nicodemus (chap. iii.), and the Woman of Samaria (chap. iv.), and many discourses at Jerusalem (chaps. v., vii., viii., x., xii.), and those beautiful farewell words to His disciples the night before He died (chaps. xiv., xv., xvi.), and much more besides. When a copy of this Gospel was taken to some distant city, how keen the converts there would be to hear what had been written by old John, the last of the Apostles, whom they had never seen! No doubt, by and by, copies came over to Britain,

and were read by the British Christians at London and Winchester and York!

All these New Testament Books were written in Greek, that wonderful language which, as I said before, God had ordained to be understood at that time by many nations in many lands. There are, however, here and there, a few words borrowed from other languages. For instance, we sometimes find the very Aramaic words which Jesus actually spoke, such as Talitha cumi, and Ephphatha, and Eloi lama sabachthani, which St. Mark, who gives us most of these, "interprets" or translates for his readers (see Mark v. 41, vii. 34, xv. 34). St. Mark also uses more Latin words than the others, which is one reason why we think he wrote for the Romans; thus he calls the executioner who beheaded John the Baptist, and the centurion who crucified Jesus, by Latin words (vi. 27, xv. 39).

The Four Gospels, and the Acts, and the Revelation, used to be read in the Churches, just as I said the Epistles were; and gradually the Christians came to see that these were really "Scriptures," books that should be added to the old Jewish Scriptures as parts of God's

inspired Word. The earliest case of this being understood we find in one of the inspired Letters themselves, in the 2nd Epistle of Peter (iii. 15, 16), where St. Paul's Epistles are called "Scriptures."1 Afterwards we find the good and learned men who lived after the Apostles quoting in their writings a host of passages from the Gospels and Epistles as having the authority of inspired Scriptures. There was Clement, who was an early Bishop of Rome, and wrote an Epistle to the Church of Corinth, which we still have; there were Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, and Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, and Justin, a Greek who was martyred at Rome, and Irenæus of Lyons (the city which we now know in France), and Origen of Alexandria, and a great many others. It is Justin, in the 2nd century, who tells us of the accounts of

1 The word "Scriptures" occurs fifty times in the New Testament, and everywhere else means the canonical Books of the Old Testament; so it is indisputable that 2 Peter iii. 16 intends to place St. Paul's Epistles alongside them. This, however, is one of the arguments used for a late date for 2nd Peter.

There are conveniently arranged lists of the Fathers and their quotations from the Gospels and

our Lord's life on earth being called "Gospels." These good men were not all quite sure which of the beautiful writings they had were really inspired "Scriptures." Some of them wrote lists, and these lists are not all alike. The Gospels and the Acts and most of St. Paul's Epistles were quickly recognized, but there were doubts for a long time about some of the others. Moreover, there were other writings which some thought might also be "Scriptures"; for instance, Clement's Epistle which I mentioned just now, and a book by Hermas called "The Shepherd." And it was more than three hundred years before the Canon of the New Testament, like the Canon of the Old Testament which I told you of in the last chapter, was finally settled. But we are quite sure now that the Holy Spirit guided the Church to choose rightly which books to put into the Canon and which to leave out; and there has been no dispute for more than fifteen centuries that our New Testament is a true part of God's great Book of Scriptures.

Epistles in Green's Revised Edition of Angus's Bible Handbook, and of course a fuller account in Westcott's New Testament Canon.

CHAPTER V

ABOUT THE NEW TESTAMENT: THE

MANUSCRIPTS AND VERSIONS

In our third chapter, I told you about the way in which the Books of the Old Testament were copied, and copied again, and copied again, by the Jewish Scribes; and that we have some copies about 900 years old. Also about the Hebrew language in which they were written, and the Aramaic language afterwards used, and the Greek Version called the Septuagint. Let us now see how the Books of the New Testament, which were all written in Greek, have come down to us.

Suppose we were to hear one day that St. John's Gospel, in his own hand-writing, the actual rolls of skin or paper on which he wrote it, had been found in some cave near Ephesus; and suppose we heard that it was being brought to England to be put in the British Museum; what a rush there would be to see