Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/253

Rh readings belonged, can in fact, so far as it can be determined at all, be determined only by the internal character of these readings, and by the genealogical relationships to other documents disclosed by these and the other readings.

290. As soon as the test furnished by the most elementary analysis of attestations, and consequently of genealogies, is applied, the supposition that the texts of and Β as wholes are in any one book or chapter of the Testament derived from a single near ancestor falls to the ground. It is negatived at the first glance by the multitude of variations in which they are divided, while each is associated with a variety of attestation. Apart from the associated attestations the diversities of reading would be inconclusive: they might have been produced by the independent carelessness or licence of two transcribers of the same exemplar. But where each discrepant reading has other witnesses, and there is no room for accidental coincidence, the discrepancies in two transcripts of the same exemplar can have no other origin than mixture; that is, at least one of the transcripts must be virtually a transcript of two different originals. In this restricted sense alone is the hypothesis of a proximate common origin of and Β worthy of being seriously examined; that is, in the sense that a single proximate original has supplied a large common element in their texts.

291. To examine the hypothesis in this shape, we must put out of sight all the elements of each MS which it owes to undoubted mixture with texts capable of being recognised through a long succession of variations, and which may therefore easily have come in together; that is, every clearly Western and every clearly Alexandrian