Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/648

550 all. It would be doing violence alike to all that is known of ancient criticism and to the evidence supplied by a comparison of the results with the antecedent materials to imagine that the Syrian revisers would have any trustworthy means of learning which of the various texts, MSS, or readings had the best pedigree. They could only be guided by 'intrinsic' probabilities of a vague kind, and were not in a position to distinguish between the purity of a text and its present acceptability or usefulness. They evidently wished their text to be, as far as possible, easy, smooth, and complete; and for this purpose borrowed freely from all quarters, and as freely used the file to remove surviving asperities.

In the fourth century mixture prevailed almost everywhere: nearly all its texts, so far as they can be seen through the quotations of theologians, are more or less chaotic. In the early years the persecution under Diocletian and his colleagues, and then the reaction under Constantine, must have affected the text not less powerfully than the Canon of the New Testament. The long and serious effort to annihilate the Scriptures could not be otherwise than unequally successful in different places, and thus the texts current in certain districts would obtain rapid extension in the next generation. Moreover various tendencies of that century of rapid innovation were unfavourable to the preservation of local peculiarities. It is therefore no wonder that the ancient types of text are seldom to be discerned except in fragments intermingled with other texts. Meanwhile the Syrian text grew in influence. For some centuries after the fourth there was in the East a joint currency of the Syrian and other texts, nearly all mixed; but at last the Syrian text almost wholly displaced the rest. The causes of this supremacy are not far to seek. Western Christendom became exclusively Latin, as well as estranged from Eastern Christendom: with few exceptions the use and knowledge of the Greek language died out in the West. The ravages of the barbarians and Mahometans destroyed the MSS of vast regions, and narrowly limited the area within which transcription was carried on. On the other hand Greek Christendom became centralised, with Constantinople for its centre. Now Antioch is the true ecclesiastical parent of Constantinople; so that naturally the Antiochian text of the fourth century would first acquire traditional if not formal authority at Constantinople, and then become in practice the standard New