Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/172

134 one was made,—indeed it is difficult to see how under the circumstances it could have been made,—as entitled to supremacy by manifest superiority of pedigree. Each text may perhaps have found a patron in some leading personage or see, and thus have seemed to call for a conciliation of rival claims: but at all events, if a new measure was to be adopted for promoting unity of text, no course was so natural and convenient as the acceptance of the traditional authority of each text already accredited by honour and use, at least in an age when any really critical perception of the problem involved in the revision of a written text would have been an anachronism. It would have been no less an anachronism at each variation to find reasons for the preference to be given to this or that text in specialities of documentary attestation or again in consideration of Transcriptional Probability. The only grounds of selection, affording any true means of advancing towards textual purity, that could find place in the conditions of the time, or that can now be discerned in the resulting text, depend on a rough and superficial kind of Intrinsic Probability. But the governing impulses, just as in the case of nearly all licentious as distinguished from inaccurate transcription, unquestionably arose from a very natural failure to distinguish between the purity of a text and its present acceptability or usefulness.

187. The qualities which the authors of the Syrian text seem to have most desired to impress on it are lucidity and completeness. They were evidently anxious to remove all stumbling-blocks out of the way of the ordinary reader, so far as this could be done without recourse to violent measures. They were apparently equally desirous that he should have the benefit of in-