Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/206

168 reading to an Alexandrian reading is not exclusively Western.

232. A large proportion of variations still remains in which the assignation of the readings to different types of ancient text is in various degrees difficult or uncertain. The difficulty arises chiefly from two causes, the mixed composition of some of the principal extant documents, especially Greek uncials, and the not infrequent opposition of documents habitually agreeing as witnesses for one of the aberrant types, resulting in apparent cross distribution. Owing to the former cause Western readings, for instance, which were saved from the extinction which befel their parent texts in the Greek East in the fourth century by their reception into eclectic texts of that period, must naturally be often found attested by documents lying outside the properly Western group. Almost all our better uncials occur singly in their turn as supporters of very distinctly Western readings, and therefore it would be surprising if two or three of them were never to hold the same position together; so that a reading which two or three of them concur in supporting may quite possibly have had a Western origin. But where there is no clear inequality of number and also of predominant character in the attestation which documents of this kind give to the two rival readings of a variation, it may be difficult or impossible to say whether the opposition is between a Western and a Non-Western, or between a Non-Alexandrian and an Alexandrian reading. The cases of apparent cross distribution, of which the Old Latin evidence furnishes the most conspicuous examples, are of course equally due to mixture, and especially to the mixture produced by revision of versions after Greek MSS. Latin MSS known to contain revised texts may