Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/242

204 ally by the free manner or the special purpose of the citation. Patristic quotations in short, like versions, may easily seem to make up a composite attestation, when it is really nothing more than an accidental coincidence. Such deceptive attestations might conceivably arise in either direction: but in a large majority of cases they would be due to a paraphrastic impulse such as that which we find working in scribes; that is, for either process the original peculiarities of order or diction which tempt to modification would be the same. In like manner the intermingling of unconscious reminiscences of parallel or similar passages, a specially fruitful cause of corruption in patristic quotations, may easily result in readings identical with readings due in MSS to harmonistic or other assimilation, and thus produce a deceptive semblance of joint attestation. Accordingly quotations apparently opposed to the primary Greek MSS are oftener found to be for these reasons questionable representatives of the texts used by the patristic writers than those which seem to support the primary Greek MSS. Suspicions as to fidelity of quotation, unsustained by other evidence, by the nature of the case can never transpose attestation from one side to the other; they can only create uncertainty: but uncertainty suffices to destroy the force of the prima facie contrast between the presence of patristic attestation on the one side and its absence on the other.

279. Lastly, even the presence of tried and verified Pre-Syrian patristic evidence in opposition to the primary Greek MSS, in conjunction with its absence from their side, loses much of the weight to which it would otherwise be entitled, when the actual texts employed in the extant writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers are