Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/652

554 that the Western text represents faithfully the autographs in its omission of matter contained in all Non-Western documents. In these last exceptional cases, when they are considered together, internal evidence is peculiarly strong: and moreover, in the absence of special grounds to the contrary, erroneous insertion of matter is always antecedently more probable than its erroneous omission, owing to the constant tendency of scribes towards completeness of text and their equally constant unwillingness to let go anything which they have received. On the other hand the textual integrity of the Western text cannot rightly be upheld in the numerous places in which it has preserved interesting matter omitted in the other Pre- Syrian texts, yet manifestly not due to the inventiveness of scribes, much less to say of the ordinary incidents of transcription. All these places, it should be observed, occur in the historical books, and perhaps in the Gospels only. The paradox disappears when it is remembered that the causes of various readings originating in very early times need not all lie within the text itself. When the Western text was growing up, oral traditions and written memorials of the apostolic age were still current, doubtless mixed in character; while the reverence paid to the writings which ultimately formed the Canon of the New Testament had not yet assumed a character that would forbid what might well seem their temperate enrichment from other memories or records. A few of the more important of these peculiar interpolations from extraneous sources are inserted in the text of the Gospels, or appended to them, with a special notation; and it has likewise been thought worth while to print many of the rest in the margin within distinctive marks, along with some other interesting Western readings. But the accessory recognition of these classes of readings, in association with the books of the New Testament, not as originally forming part of their true text, does not affect the primary conclusion derived from genealogical evidence with reference to the chief ancient texts, that readings found either in the Western alone of the Pre-Syrian texts or in the Alexandrian alone of the Pre-Syrian texts must lie under a strong presumption of having been introduced by scribes.

Numerous variations remain in which the distribution of documentary evidence may be reasonably interpreted in more ways than one, so that a reference of the several readings to