Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/148

110 of the New Testament; and thus the power of using a directly genealogical method is much limited.

155. The variations here mentioned between different parts of the New Testament are, it will be noticed, of two kinds, being due partly to the varying amount and distribution of documentary evidence which happens to be extant at the present day, partly to the facts of ancient textual history disclosed by the evidence. It is important to observe that, wherever the evidence is copious and varied enough to allow the historical facts to be ascertained, the prevalent characteristics of the ancient texts, as regards both their readings and their documentary attestation, are identical or at least analogous throughout, the diversities which exist being almost wholly confined to proportion.

156. Patristic evidence, which we have now to examine for indications of the ancient texts, needs at all times to be handled with much circumspection, for it includes data of every degree of trustworthiness. The uncertainty which affects many apparent patristic attestations, that is, the difficulty of knowing how far they can safely be taken as conveying to us the readings of the MSS used by the Fathers, arises from two causes. First, what a Father actually wrote is very liable to be falsified by the proneness of both scribes and modern editors to alter the text before them into conformity with the written or printed text most familiar to themselves; and since a text substantially identical with that of δ was unquestionably the only text likely to be known to transcribers generally throughout the centuries to which existing Greek patristic MSS with the rarest exceptions belong, as also to the authors of nearly all the