Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/639

 The text of this edition of the New Testament has been formed exclusively on documentary evidence, no account being taken of any printed edition. Wherever the documents vary from each other, criticism is needed to determine which readings are to be retained as genuine, and which are to be rejected as errors that have arisen in the course of transmission. In the Introduction which forms part of the accompanying volume an attempt has been made to examine at some length the true principles of textual criticism generally, and the leading results which follow from their application to the New Testament; and a summary of the contents of the Introduction is appended to the present volume. A brief and general explanation may however be useful to some readers of the text, who may not care to study in detail the discussions and statements of evidence upon which the various conclusions set forth in the Introduction are founded.

Wherever there are more readings than one, two classes of evidence are available for making the decision between them. We may compare the probability of the readings themselves, that is, employ internal evidence; and we may compare the authority of the documents which attest them, that is, employ external or documentary evidence.

Internal evidence is itself of two kinds, the consideration of what an author is likely to have written, and the consideration of what a copyist is likely to have made him seem to have written. The former kind, resting on 'intrinsic' probability, valuable as it sometimes is, has little force in the innumerable variations in