Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/649

551 Testament of the Greek East. To carry the history one step further, the printed 'Received Text' of the sixteenth century, with the exception of scattered readings commended in most cases by Latin authority to Erasmus or his successors, is a reproduction of the Syrian text in this its mediæval form.

Such being in brief the history of the text, the first endeavour of the critic must evidently be to penetrate beyond the time of mixture, and ascertain as far as possible what readings were to be found in the several lines of tradition while they still preserved their distinctive characters. For this purpose it is necessary to ascertain how far the texts of the several existing documents correspond with the principal ancient texts. No satisfactory result was attainable so long as even our oldest documents were assumed to be constant and faithful representatives of ancient texts or 'recensions'. Yet they will yield up indirectly to careful criticism the evidence which is vainly sought from them by direct inspection. A double process is necessary; first to discover the outlines of the history, as it has just been sketched, from the sum total of evidence of all dates and all kinds, and then to apply the standard so obtained to determine the origin and character of each principal document by means of the numerous variations in which the grouping of documents is tolerably free from obscurity. A document may have transmitted one ancient type of text in approximate purity; or it may be directly or indirectly derived by mixture from originals of different defined types; or it may have arisen from a more comprehensive mixture. What has to be noted is, first, the presence or absence of distinctively Syrian or distinctively Pre-Syrian readings; and secondly, among Pre-Syrian readings, the presence or absence of distinctively Western, or distinctively Alexandrian, or distinctively neutral readings.

When the texts of existing documents are tested in this manner, it becomes evident that they are almost all in some sense mixed. One Greek MS in most chapters of the Gospels and Acts (l). two in St Paul's Epistles (D2 G2), one in the Epistle to the Hebrews (D2) have approximately Western texts. Of the two oldest MSS. א is Pre-Syrian and largely neutral, but with considerable Western and Alexandrian elements, B is Pre-Syrian and almost wholly neutral, but with a limited Western element in the Pauline Epistles.