Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/220

182

Pamphilus; and the whole world is set at discord by this threefold difference. In the second passage, already cited (§ 190), he is stating vaguely to what Greek sources he proposes to have recourse in correcting the Latin Gospels. "I pass by", he says, "those volumes which bear the names of Lucianus and Hesychius, and are upheld by the perverse contentiousness of a few men": he adds in obscure language that 'they had neither been allowed to make corrections (emendare) after the Seventy in the Old Testament, nor profited by making corrections in the New Testament'. The latter quotation, enigmatic as it is, distinctly implies the existence of copies of the New Testament or the Gospels bearing in some way the names of Lucianus and Hesychius, and supposed to have in some way undergone correction; and likewise associates the same names with some analogous treatment of the LXX. As they appear in company with Origen's name in a similar connexion in the first quotation, Hug supposed that Hesychius had made a recension of both Testaments for Alexandria, Lucianus for Antioch, and Origen for Palestine. He had next to discover descendants of the supposed recensions in existing groups of documents, and had no difficulty in assigning the Constantinopolitan text to Lucianus: but since Hesychius plausibly claimed the 'Alexandrian' text, he could find no better representation of Origen's supposed work than an ill defined and for the most part obscure assemblage headed by AKM.

249. Origen's quotations prove conclusively that no such text as these documents present can ever have proceeded from him: and it is hardly less certain, as Griesbach shewed by the implicit testimony of various passages, that he never made anything like a recension of the New Testament. It does not follow that the same can be said of Lucianus and Hesychius. As we have already observed (§§ 185, 190), the Syrian text must have been due to a revision which was in fact a recension, and which may with fair probability be assigned to the time when Lucianus taught at Antioch. Of the Alexandrian corrections more than one stage can certainly be traced: whether the primary corrections were due to a distinct revision cannot, we think, be determined, and it would be little gain to know. That Hesychius had no hand in any revision which can have produced them is proved by the occurrence of many of them in Origen's writings, at a much earlier date. But it is quite conceivable that Hesychius made or