Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/226

188 this particular group of documents are of great antiquity, we examined them successively in order to ascertain their prevailing internal character by means of variations in which the internal evidence is morally free from doubt.

257. Now a moment's consideration shews that the essentials of this process are independent of the historical adjuncts here attached to it, and remain the same for every possible combination of documents; and that therefore its power of employing easy variations as a key to difficult variations is of universal range. So applied, it is essentially a particular mode of using Internal Evidence of Documents; only not continuous extant documents but, as it were, fragmentary lost documents. Whenever a particular detached combination of documents is of sufficiently frequent occurrence to give room for generalisations, and those of its readings which admit of being provisionally accepted or rejected on Internal Evidence of Readings, Intrinsic and Transcriptional, are found to be all or nearly all apparently right, we are justified in anticipating that its other readings, as to which our judgement has thus far been suspended, or even on the whole adverse, are right too, and in requiring on re-examination very strong local internal evidence to rebut the favourable presumption. A similar recurrence of numerous apparently wrong readings will throw suspicion on the other or doubtful readings of the same group, provided that it remains in all cases literally or practically detached: we say practically, because the accession of a group containing no document outside the habitual attestation of such a text as the Syrian violates detachment in appearance alone. Either the favourable or the unfavourable presumption may also