The Reign of the Manuscript by Perry Wayland Sinks

Author:Perry Wayland Sinks [Sinks, Perry Wayland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 4064066138943
Google: o-omGAwF--sC
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

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XV

MECHANICAL AND ARTIFICIAL DEVICES OF LITERATURE

Table of Contents

The universal divisions of modern literary productions into books, chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, and members of sentences, together with capitalization and the system of punctuation, are so important and so enthralled with modern composition and rhetoric that we could hardly appreciate or understand literature apart from them. Apropos to this observation, Professor Dobschütz says: "If we look at the earliest manuscripts of the Bible which have come down to us, we shall almost think that supernatural assistance was necessary for reading them; no punctuation, no accent, no space between the words, no breaking off at the end of a sentence. The reader has to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it well."61

These distinctions of literature are mechanical and artificial devices for clarifying and making emphatic a writer's thoughts as expressed in written or printed language and they are comparatively modern devices. Punctuation marks are indispensable in legal documents and in all the commercial operations of the times. The altered position of a comma gives a changed meaning to scripture texts and to legal documents. (As an illustration of the changed position of a comma, note the varying punctuation of Hebrews 10:12 as contained in different editions of our Authorized Version. In all pulpit Bibles which we have examined, the comma is placed after the word "sins," while in the various teachers' Bibles the comma follows the word "forever." By the former punctuation an important New Testament doctrine is negatived.)

Imagine yourself trying to read a philosophical treatise, a technical or abstruse discussion, a scholarly or scientific essay, a thrilling romance, or a legal document, in which there were no distinctions of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or even individual words—no capitalization and no punctuation-marks of any kind to assist in determining a writer's thoughts or the exact meaning of his composition—and you must recognize the obstacles which confront the researchers of ancient literary documents. The difficulties encountered in the literature of the Bible are in no wise diminished when we recall the fact that the originals of our sacred writings, both Hebrew and Greek, were written, for the most part, in solid blocks of letters analogous to our capitals, without any of the distinguishing limits or relief which come from chapters, verses, pause-marks, or words. It was only by degrees and at slow stages that individual words were separated from one another by a spacing between them; then, later, came the grouping of words into sentences by means of pause-marks and other mechanical devices of literature.

The division of the books of the Bible into chapters and verses is of comparatively modern origin. The chapters of the Bible are associated with the name of Cardinal Hugo who, at about the middle of the thirteenth century, divided the Latin Bible into chapters in order to facilitate reference, for comparison of scripture with scripture, and to make available a commentary which he had prepared. The system of verses, so useful for reference in Bible

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