Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/216

178 G.&ensp;243.&emsp;Recapitulation of genealogical evidence proper

243. To sum up what has been said on the results of genealogical evidence proper, as affecting the text of the New Testament, we regard the following propositions as absolutely certain. (I) The great ancient texts did actually exist as we have described them in Sections II and III. The main line of neutral and comparatively pure text was from an early time surrounded and overshadowed by two powerful lines containing much aberration, the 'Western' being by far the most licentious and the most widely spread, and the Alexandrian being formed by skilful but mostly petty corrections which left the neutral text untouched, at all events in the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, except in a very small proportion of its words. Late in the third century, or soon after, MSS came to be written in which the three main texts were mixed in various proportions, and the process went forward on a large scale in the following century, when all the unmixed texts began to die out. The Western, hitherto the most influential of all texts, now disappeared rapidly, lingering however, it would seem, in the West. One of the mixed texts was formed in Syria with care and contrivance, modifying as well as combining the earlier texts, and by the middle of the fourth century was established in influence. For some centuries after the fourth there was in the East a joint currency of the Syrian and other texts, nearly all mixed, but at last the Syrian text, the text of Constantinople, almost wholly displaced the rest. (II) In the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, and to a less extent in the Acts, all the four principal forms of text are fairly represented in extant documents; in other books the representation of