The Editor and the Publishers would like to acknowledge the courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the John Rylands Library, Manchester, the Trustees of the British Museum and of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Oxford University Press, Pelican Books Ltd., and others who have assisted in the provision of photographic materials and blocks.
INTRODUCTION
BY G. R. DRIVER Fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Semitic Philology, Oxford
Sir Frederic George Kenyon, the author of this book, came of a family distinguished in several fields, notably in the army and in the law; but two of his ancestors had been outstanding scholars in their time. His maternal grandfather Edward Hawkins, botanist and numismatist, the author of a well-known work on English coins, was Keeper of Antiquities in the British Museum, and his father, John Robert Kenyon, was an eminent lawyer who became Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford.
Kenyon was born in 1863. He became in turn a scholar of Winchester College and of New College, Oxford. At both he greatly distinguished himself and at both he early showed his interest in the Bible, of which his mother read a chapter every day after breakfast to the family, winning the Moore-Stevens Prize for Divinity at school and the Junior Hall-Houghton Prize for the Greek Testament at the University. After a brilliant undergraduate career, he was placed in the first class in both Classical Moderations and the Final School of Literae Humaniores; and in 1888 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He had, owever, little inclination for an academic career, and in 1889 he entered the British Museum as an Assistant in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books. There he spent the rest of his working life, eventually becoming one of the most distinguished Directors that the Museum has ever had. At the same time, he never forgot the colleges in which he had been brought up; he was a frequent and welcome visitor at Magdalen College, and he became a Fellow and in time Warden of Winchester College.
Heredity and upbringing thus marked Kenyon out for a career of scholarship; and the good fortune that had smiled on him in his early days continued her favours till the very years of his retirement; and few men can have done more to deserve their good fortune by putting it to the best possible use.
Entering the Museum in 1889, as already said, Kenyon was summoned in January 1890 to the departmental laboratory, where a number of papryus rolls were spread out under glass under a table, and he was told to examine them. He was able to identify them as containing the lost treatise of Aristotle on the Athenian Constitution, one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of papyrology. The work of decipherment was not easy, since the text was written in a very curious hand and employed a number of abbreviations; but he persevered and was successful in publishing it in the next year. His edition was a remarkable achievement for so young a scholar, and it received much praise from the learned world, although not without blemishes; these, inevitable in a pioneering work, were removed in the course of successive reprints, and a new epoch in Greek scholarship might almost be said to have begun. Equally remarkable works of the same sort followed one after the other with surprising rapidity: for example, Trypho's treatise on the Art of Grammar, a long medical work by an unknown author, and several lost speeches (more or less imperfectly preserved) of Attic orators. The most interesting perhaps were the Mimes of Herodas, at that time an unknown genre of Greek literature and correspondingly difficult for the modern interpreter, and the Poems of Bacchylides, a classical poet akin to Pindar. Further, he published in 1893 the first and in 1898 the second volume of the catalogue of Greek Papyri in the British Museum. During these years he was also continuously engaged in official duties, which sometimes took him far afield, as in 1892 to Vienna to negotiate the purchase of a collection of Greek papyri for the Museum.
Less technical works were not overlooked. In 1899 Kenyon produced his Palaeography of the Greek Papyri, which had grown out of an essay for the Conington Prize at Oxford; this is still probably the only monograph on the subject in the English language and has therefore not lost its value, although it has been superseded in many respects by works in other languages.
Kenyon had now won so high a reputation in the world of scholarship and had shown such outstanding ability in the running of a department that his promotion to the highest office in the Museum became inevitable; already in 1907 he had been compelled practically to surrender the completion of the third volume of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum to a younger colleague, and in 1909, he was appointed Director; this volume of the catalogue was therefore his last work on papyrology till his retirement.
Kenyon had at the same time a share in many other undertakings in the Museum as well as many interests, both practical and scholarly, outside it; these might have seemed a full enough occupation even for a man of his energy when combined with an exacting official routine, and they cannot be described here except in so far as they have a bearing on his Biblical studies. So another considerable task was his share in the preparation of the great catalogue of the Royal manuscripts, planned and begun in 1894 and brought to a successful conclusion in 1921; in this his work was done mostly in the early parts, comprising Bibles and Biblical commentaries, for which he described some 360 manuscripts. His interest in this particular field of study led to his being charged to prepare the volume entitled Facsimiles of Biblical Manuscripts in the British Museum (1900) and the manuscript portion of the Guide to the Manuscripts and Printed Books exhibited in celebration of the Tercentenary of the Authorized Version (1911).
The record of scholarly publication during these years was amazing; but it was not everything. Kenyon never forgot that the purpose of the Museum was not to be merely a stronghold of private research but that it had also another and equally important function as a national centre of education and culture. He might indeed be quite unfairly described as ' a bit of a journalist'; but, if he was such, it was only in the highest sense, and that as a means to an end. His works of popularization were on the same level as those of advanced research; but they were set out in a form to attract and hold the attention of a different class, that of the educated and intelligent layman. The best known of his works in this category is undoubtedly Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, which was commissioned by the publishers to meet the growing demand for an authoritative account of the subject; it first appeared in 1895 and went through four editions during the author's lifetime. As he himself admitted, much of the work in this book could not be and was not original; and his own knowledge was comparatively limited at the time (for he was only thirty-two years old when it came out). None the less, it was widely appreciated and was immediately followed by a request from another publisher for a similar work on the New Testament; this new work came out under the title of the Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament in 1901 and also went into more than one edition. Both these works, he said in a brief autobiographical note, were written during his evenings at home while his wife was practising her singing in the same room.
Kenyon's retirement from the post of Director of the Museum in 1930 released him from a weight of official duties and allowed him to devote himself with renewed energy to the work of scholarship. Although, however, he had officially retired, he was able to play a prominent part, to which his pre-eminent position in the learned world entitled him, in the negotiations which resulted in the purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus for the nation.
The fortune which had favoured the young scholar so soon after his entering into the Museum treated him with equal favour at his departure from it. Kenyon had in fact not long left it when Mr. Chester Beatty acquired his famous collection of Greek papyri ranging from the second to the fourth century a.d. and forming one of the most important groups of Biblical manuscripts ever acquired by a single person. Being approached as the obvious editor, he accepted the invitation with alacrity and eventually became responsible for the publication of the whole of Mr. Chester Beatty's lot; the series of volumes, which came out in 1933-41, ran to eight volumes of text with the corresponding volumes of plates.
These works of arduous editorial labour did not exhaust Kenyon's energy but were accompanied by a number of popular books, chiefly on Biblical subjects; in fact, these very papyri inspired several of them. Such were Books and Readers in ancient Greece and Rome (1st ed., 1932; 2nd ed., 1951), the Schweich Lectures entitled Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek Bible (1933) and The Western Text in the Gospels and Acts (1938). Mr. Chester Beatty's papyri have thrown doubt on some of the opinions expressed in the last two works; but the subject is developing rapidly under the impact of new discoveries and the problems are so baffling that few if any writers are not at times convicted of error and compelled to change their minds, whether under criticism from others or as a consequence of their own investigations. Kenyon was fully aware of this and never shrank from abandoning or modifying an opinion in the light of modern knowledge. Other works of the same period were The Story of the Bible (1936; five times reprinted), The Text of the Greek Bible: a student's Handbook (1937), The Bible and Archaeology (1940), Reading the Bible (1944; twice reprinted), The Bible and Modern Scholarship (1945), in which he combated the late Bishop Barnes's scepticism regarding the historical evidence of the Gospels both vigorously and effectively (although the author's views on the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel would now hardly be generally accepted) and Literary Criticism, Common Sense, and Modern Scholarship (1948). All these books, even though the consensus of opinion is not what it was on every point discussed in them, can still be read with pleasure and profit.
Sir Idris H. Bell says of Kenyon in a memoir published by the British Academy that he could not be regarded among the very earliest papyrologists but certainly belonged to the pioneer age when a worker could carry in his head a fairly complete knowledge of all the texts then available, and that he was among the founders of papyrological studies as a separate discipline. He was certainly one of the great editors of documentary no less than of literary texts, both as a decipherer and as an interpreter; for he had great lucidity and clarity of mind which enabled him to grasp the essential points of a document and to assess its significance. This gift, as it appears in the present work, was accompanied by an economy of words which, while bringing out everything that was important, left no space for trivialities or verbosity. His genius was essentially practical. So too "with no touch of mysticism and little taste or aptitude for philosophical speculation", as the same biographer says, "he was yet a man of strong religious convictions and genuine, if unobtrusive, piety", a vein of which runs through all his work.
Those who use the work of such a man may rest assured that it is, so far as humanly possible, accurate and trustworthy; but Kenyon would himself have been the first to admit that mistakes are apt to slip in unawares, that there were parts of the vast field covered by this book in which a papyrologist could not be as securely at home as in the Greek texts of which he had expert knowledge gained at first hand by years of intensive study, and that no book can remain fully up to date. Indeed, Kenyon's own work had done much to render his own book out of date!
The publishers have therefore invited the Rev. A. W. Adams, Fellow and Dean of Divinity of the author's own college, to revise the text by putting right whatever seemed amiss and generally by making it abreast of the most recent advances in knowledge. The reviser, as Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint in the University of Oxford and one of the editors of the edition of the Old Latin version of the Old Testament which is being prepared under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society, is well qualified to carry out this task. It falls into two parts. On the one hand, for example, there were deficiencies in the author's treatment of the secondary ancient (notably the Arabic and Ethiopic) versions of the Scriptures; on the other hand the recent discovery of the now famous Judaean Scrolls from caves overlooking the Dead Sea bids fair to revolutionize current opinion on the history and form of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The reviser, while doing all that is necessary, has been careful to make no changes of such a nature that the essential character of the book is altered.
G. R. Driver
Magdalen College, Oxford