Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/171

Rh areas, the great lines of transmission had been to all appearance exclusively divergent. Now however the three great lines were brought together, and made to contribute to the formation of a new text different from all. As we have seen, the reading now of one, now of another was adopted, such adoption being sometimes a mere transcription but often accompanied by a varying amount of modification not rarely resulting in an entirely new reading. Occasionally also the readings of two of the antecedent texts were combined by simple or complex adaptations. The total process to which these operations belonged was essentially different from the preceding processes of change. In itself the mixture of independent texts might easily be, and perhaps usually was, fortuitous or even unconscious. But the complexity of the Syrian text as derived from three distinct sources simultaneously, the elaborate manner in which they are laid under contribution, and the interfusion of adjustments of existing materials with a distinctly innovative process, shown partly in verbal transformation of adopted readings, partly in assimilative or other interpolations of fresh matter, belong to a manner of change differing as widely from change of either the Western or the Alexandrian type as even Western change from ordinary careless transcription. The Syrian text must in fact be the result of a 'recension' in the proper sense of the word, a work of attempted criticism, performed deliberately by editors and not merely by scribes.

186. The guiding motives of their criticism are transparently displayed in its effects. It was probably initiated by the distracting and inconvenient currency of at least three conflicting texts in the same region. The alternate borrowing from all implies that no selection of