Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/642

544 for two readings into a simple arithmetical balance; and this arithmetical proceeding must be hopelessly vitiated by the impossibility of assigning to each document a numerical value proportional to its ascertained excellence, as well as by the fragmentary nature of many documents, and the large element of consequent fortuitousness in the amount of extant attestation for this or that reading. A more or less distinct sense of these difficulties has doubtless had a considerable influence in encouraging a dangerous reliance on the direct use of 'internal evidence of readings' in the New Testament. But unfortunately this is an expedient which succeeds only in disguising the uncertainty, not in removing it.

There is but one way through the chaos of complex attestation; and that is by tracing it back to its several causes, in other words, by enquiring what antecedent circumstances of transmission will account for such combinations of agreements and differences between the several documents as we find actually existing. All trustworthy restoration of corrupted texts is founded on the study of their history, that is, of the relations of descent or affinity which connect the several documents. The importance of genealogy in textual criticism is at once shown by the considerations that no multiplication of copies, or of copies of copies, can give their joint testimony any higher authority than that of the single document from which they sprang, and that one early document may have left a single descendant, another a hundred or a thousand. Since then identical numerical relations among existing documents are compatible with the utmost dissimilarity in the numerical relations among their ancestors, and vice versa, no available presumptions whatever as to text can be obtained from number alone, that is, from number not as yet interpreted by descent.

When, as often happens, the extant copies of an ancient work can be distributed into definite families having each a single common ancestor, the task of tracing textual genealogy is comparatively easy. In the New Testament the problem is one of much complexity, not only from the amount and variety of evidence, but from the early and frequent confluence of different lines of descent by mixture. Instances of immediate derivation of one extant document from another are extremely rare. But the combined evidence of agreements and discrepancies clearly discloses the existence of many sets of extant documents, deriving a greater or less part of