Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/214

176 it would be rash to condemn absolutely, the attestations being precisely similar to those of the non-interpolations which we accept, and the internal evidence, intrinsic and transcriptional, being open to some doubt; in other words, an intermediate class of Western omissions that may perhaps be non-interpolations must be admitted. Examples will be found in Matt. (vi 15, 25;) ix 34; (xiii 33;) xxi 44; (xxiii 26;) Mark ii 22; (x 2;) xiv 39; Luke v 39; x 41 f.; xii 19, 21, 39; xxii 62; (xxiv 9;) John iii 32; iv 9. With the difficult question of notation here involved we are not for the moment concerned: it is enough here to repeat that we find ourselves wholly unable to believe some of the clauses and sentences omitted by Western documents to be genuine, while in other not obviously dissimilar cases our judgement remains suspended.

241. These exceptional instances of the preservation of the original text in exclusively Western readings are likely to have had an exceptional origin. They are easily reconciled with the other phenomena if we suppose, first, that the text which became fixed at Alexandria, and in due time was partially adulterated by Alexandrian corruptions, was an offshoot from the text which we have called the neutral text, and which had parted company from the earliest special ancestry of the Western text at a yet earlier date; and secondly, that the interpolations which give rise to the appearance of Western omissions took place in the interval, if not at the actual divergence, and thus stand in all Non-Western texts, whether derived through Alexandria or not. These interpolations are for the most part quite unlike Alexandrian interpolations, and have much more of a 'Western' character; so that the hypothesis which might at first