Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/167

Rh ern texts in various regions throughout the Ante-Nicene period is contained in the varied texts of Fathers and versions of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is true that the only considerable text of a Father or version of this later period which closely approximates to a Non-Western Pre-Syrian text, that of the younger Cyril, has again Alexandria for its locality. It is true also that it is not absolutely impossible for the large Non-Western Pre-Syrian elements which enter into many mixed texts of the later period to have all radiated from Alexandria in the third century. Nevertheless the preservation of early Non-Western texts in varying degrees of purity in different regions would account for the facts much more naturally than such a hypothesis. On the one hand there is no reason to think the prominence of Alexandria in the extant evidence accidental: nowhere probably was the perpetuation of an incorrupt text so much an object of conscious desire and care, and the local influence of Origen's school for some generations after his death was likely to establish a tradition of exceptional jealousy for the very words of Scripture. On the other hand our documentary evidence, taken as a whole, equally suggests, what historical probability would have led us to anticipate, that in various and perhaps many other places the primitive text in varying degrees of purity survived the early Western inundation which appeared to submerge it.

180. Such being the facts, we have not thought it advisable to designate Non-Western Pre-Syrian readings generally as 'Alexandrian', although this, or something like this, is the sense in which the term 'Alexandrian' is commonly used, when it is not extended to all ancient readings alike that are not found in the later Greek MSS.

11