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The very fact that these corruptions originated at Alexandria implies that MSS free from them, as well as from Western corruptions, existed previously at Alexandria; and there is no apparent reason why this earlier form of text should not have been propagated in greater or less purity at Alexandria by the side of the altered text or texts. If it was, and if any existing documents represent it, their text, whatever its value may be, has not the defects of a distinctive Alexandrian text. But further there is no apparent reason why documents should not exist derived from sister MSS to those which originally came to Alexandria, and which thus were the parents of later MSS current at Alexandria, including those in which the Alexandrian corrections originated; and if so, no ordinary internal evidence can enable us to decide whether the ancestry of any given existing documents having this character of text was altogether independent of Alexandria, or had its home at Alexandria but was unaffected by any distinctive Alexandrian corruption. Griesbach seems however to have tacitly assumed both that Alexandria had but one Non-Western text, and that no early Non-Western text survived except at Alexandria; and accordingly in most variations the critical problem which virtually presented itself to him was merely whether it was more likely on internal grounds that the (assumed) Western reading was a corruption of the (assumed) Alexandrian or the Alexandrian of the Western, the characteristics of each 'recension' and the special probabilities of the immediate context being considered together.

252. Thus owing to an imperfect conception of the process of transmission, leading to a misinterpretation of quite the most important evidence, unchecked by attention to grouping, Griesbach was driven to give a dangerously disproportionate weight to internal evidence, and especially to transcriptional probability, on which indeed for its own sake he placed excessive reliance: and this, not his wise anxiety to discriminate the ancient sources of readings before counting or weighing authorities, is the chief cause of the inferiority of his own text of the New Testament, which stands in singular contrast to the high qualities of his criticism. The other great cause of its insufficiency we have already mentioned (§§ 16, 17), his use of the Received Text as a basis for correction. To have taken as his basis those ancient texts in which he himself placed most confidence would have increased