Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/163

Rh origin. To this head belong not only quotations from the Old Testament, but parts of Ephesians and Colossians, and again of Jude and 2 Peter, and, above all, the parallel records in the first three Gospels, and to a certain extent in all four. It is difficult to exaggerate the injury thus inflicted upon the resources for a right understanding of the Gospel history by the destruction of many of the most characteristic and instructive touches contributed by the several narratives, whether in the form of things otherwise said, or of additional things said, or of things left unsaid. A sense of the havoc wrought by harmonistic corruption in the Old Latin texts, in their origin Western texts, has been already mentioned as one of the primary motives alleged by Jerome for his revision; and though his effort had only a limited success, the Vulgate contrasts favourably with prior Latin texts of the Gospels in this respect. It should be observed that the harmonistic changes in the Western as in all other texts were irregular and unsystematic. Nor is it rare to find Western changes proceeding in an opposite direction; that is, to find paraphrastic or other impulses followed in the text of one Gospel in unconsciousness or disregard of the creation of new differences from the language of a parallel narrative.

176. It must not be supposed that the liberties taken by the authors of the Western readings, though far exceeding what we find appearing for the first time in other texts of the New Testament, are unknown in other literature transmitted under not unlike circumstances. Several books of the Apocrypha of the Old Testament exist in two forms of text, of which one is evidently an amplified and interpolated modification of the other. Analogous phenomena in various manners