In the course of writing my last post, I came across a curious quotation, which I give as follows, although I have overparagraphed it. The discussion is about to a “long quotation” in Romans 3:10 f., “made up of a number of passages taken from different parts of the O.T.”:
As a whole this conglomerate of quotations has had a curious history. The quotations in N.T. frequently react upon the text of O.T., and they have done so here: vv. 13-18 got imported bodily into Ps. xiv [xiii LXX] as an appendage to ver. 4 in the ‘common’ text of the LXX (ἠ κοινή, i.e. the unrevised text current in the lime of Origen). They are still found in Codd. ℵa B R U and many cursive MSS. of LXX (om. ℵca A), though the Greek commentators on the Psalms do not recognize them.
From interpolated Mss such as these they found their way into Lat.-Vet, and so into Jerome’s first edition of the Psalter (the ‘Roman’), also into his second edition (the ‘Gallican,’ based upon Origin’s Hexapla, though marked with an obelus after the example of Origen. The obelus dropped out, and they are commonly printed in the Vulgate text of the Psalms, which is practically the Gallican.
From the Vulgate they travelled into Coverdale’s Bible (A.D. 1535); from thence into Matthew’s (Rogers’) Bible, which in the Psalter reproduces Coverdale (A.D. 1537), and also into the ‘Great Bible’ (first issued by Cromwell in 1530, and afterwards with a preface by Cranmer, when it also bears the name of Cranmer’s Bible, in 1540. The Psalter of the Great Bible was incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer, in which it was retained as being familiar and smoother to sing, even in the later revision which substituted elsewhere the Authorized Version of 1611.
The editing of the Great Bible was due to Coverdale, who put an * to the passages found in the Vulgate but wanting in the Hebrew. These marks however had the same fate which befell the obeli of Jerome. They were not repeated in the Prayer-Book ; so that English Churchmen still read the interpolated verses in Ps. xiv with nothing to distinguish them from the rest of the text.
Jerome himself was well aware that these verses were no part of the Psalm. In his commentary on Isaiah, lib. XVI, he notes that St. Paul quoted Is. lix. 7, 8 in Ep. to Rom., and he adds, quod multi ignorantes de tertio decimo psalmo sumptum putant, qui versus [στίχοι] in editione Vulgata [i.e. the κοινή of the LXX] additi sunt et in Hebraico non habentur (Hieron. Opp. ed. Migne, iv. 601; comp. the preface to the same book, ibid. col. 568 f.; also the newly discovered Commentarioli in Psalmos, ed. Morin. 1895, p. 24 f.).
I came across this in something called “Romans (International Critical Commentary)” online here. But it actually comes from W. Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, A critical and exegetical commentary on the epistle to the Romans (1902), p.77-8, on Rom. 3:9-10. (Online here).
It is not at all improbable that such things should happen. But this is now very old scholarship. There must be more recent studies of this phenomenon in the 122 years that have passed since.
