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of Alexandria, in the holy monastery of the Enatonians", with which he states that he carefully compared his predecessor's version. In this case the readings noted in the margin might well be those which he did not see fit to adopt, but thought it best to place on record in a secondary place. The Non-Antiochian readings in the text, with or without an asterisk, have the same general character as the marginal readings, and can mostly claim a very high antiquity: many of them are distinctively Western, and they include a large proportion of the peculiar Western variations and interpolations in the Acts. In the Catholic Epistles the readings of the Harklean Syriac have a more mixed character than in the other books.

216. The Jerusalem Syriac Lectionary has an entirely different text, probably not altogether unaffected by the Syriac Vulgate, but more closely related to the Old Syriac. Mixture with one or more Greek texts containing elements of every great type, but especially the more ancient, has however given the whole a strikingly composite character. Variations occur to a certain extent between repetitions of the same passages in different parts of the Lectionary, and also between the several MSS in the few places where the new fragments contain the same portions with each other or with the principal MS. These differences are probably caused by mixture with late Greek MSS; which is indeed likely to have affected this Syriac text in all the extant copies: but for the most part the same peculiar text presents itself throughout.

217. The Egyptian versions are substantially true to their prima facie character. The main body of both versions is founded on a very ancient Non-Western text, sometimes affected by the Alexandrian corrections, sometimes free from them. Neither of them however has escaped mixture. Syrian readings are rare, even in the printed editions, and it is probable that they belong only to a late and degenerate state of the versions: the variation which Dr Lightfoot has found as to the presence or absence of some conspicuous interpolations, Syrian by either origin or adoption, in different Memphitic MSS, and the appearance of a series of them in the margins but not the text of the leading Oxford MS, suggest that this element may have been wholly wanting in the first few centuries. The Western influence is more deeply seated, but is probably of two kinds. The Memphitic no less than the Thebaic has Western readings, but they are