Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/127

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amples: parts of some of Cyril of Alexandria's dogmatic writings, especially the Thesaurus, have nearly the same character. A Latin collection of a similar kind, the Speculum which wrongly bears the name of Augustine, but is of unknown authorship, has usually been placed with Old Latin MSS under the signature m, and contains an interesting but not early Old Latin text. Of much the same structure are the three books of Testimonia by Cyprian, and indeed a large part of his little treatise De exhortatione martyrii addressed to Fortunatus.

127, 128.&emsp;Documentary preparation for this edition

127. It is right that we should here explain to what extent we have thought it our duty to take part ourselves in the indispensable preparatory work of collecting documentary evidence. Great services have been rendered by scholars who have been content to explore and amass texts and readings for the use of others; or again who have discussed principles and studied documents without going on to edit a text. On the other hand an editor of the New Testament cannot completely absolve himself from either of these two preliminary tasks without injury to his own text: but the amount of personal participation required is widely different for the two cases. If he has not worked out at first hand the many and various principles and generalisations which are required for solving the successive problems presented by conflicts of evidence, the resulting text is foredoomed to insecurity: but the collection of evidence is in itself by no means an indispensable apprenticeship for the study of it.

128. We have accordingly made no attempt to follow the example of those editors who, besides publishing critical texts of the New Testament, have earned the gratitude of all who come after them by collation of MSS and accumulation of registered evidence in the form of an apparatus criticus. As we have never proposed to do more than edit a manual text, so we have no considerable private stores to add to the common stock. The fresh evidence which we have obtained for our own use has been chiefly patristic, derived in a great measure from writings or fragments of writings first published during the last hundred years, or now edited from better MSS than were formerly known. While in this and other respects the evidence already accessible to all students has been to a