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174 vailing character of the text to which they belong: it may be added that they are seldom intrinsically of much interest. Others remain which by strong internal probability of some kind plead against summary rejection. The plea can never with prudence be set entirely aside: but the number of such readings which eventually make good a claim to a possible place in the apostolic text is, in our judgement, exceedingly small.

239. There are indeed some Western readings in the Gospels, and perhaps in the Acts, which cannot be explained by accidental error of transcription, or by any of the ordinary causes of textual corruption, such as paraphrase, or assimilation to other passages of the New or Old Testament; and in such cases an incautious student may be easily tempted by the freshness of the matter to assume that it must have come from the hand of the writer of the book before him. The assumption would be legitimate enough were the Western texts of late origin: but it loses all its force when we remember (see § 173) that in the second century oral traditions of the apostolic age were still alive; that at least one written Gospel closely related to one or more of the four primary Gospels, together with various forms of legendary Christian literature concerning our Lord and the Apostles, was then current in some churches; and that neither definition of the Canon of the New Testament nor veneration for the letter as distinguished from the substance of its sacred records had advanced far enough to forbid what might well seem their temperate enrichment from such sources as these. Transcriptional probability is likewise of no little weight here: the absence of Western readings of this kind from the Non-