Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/254

216 reading of in such books as are preserved in B, and every clearly Western reading of Β in the Pauline Epistles. The residue would then approximately represent each text reduced to the form which it must have had just before the great final independent mixture, upon the hypothesis that antecedent to this mixture the two texts had a common proximate origin. To make comparison clearer, we may further leave out of account every reading of either MS singly which has no other attestation whatever.

292. The resulting text however would still entirely fail to shew the imagined agreement. Multitudes of discrepancies between and Β would remain, in which each MS would have some very early documentary evidence supporting it. Doubtless the hypothesis might still be rendered possible by supposing all the readings in which and Β differ to have been taken simultaneously in one of these MSS from a single accessory original, or each MS to have its own accessory original. But the same conjectural mode of composition might be imagined with equal propriety for any other pair of MSS having at least an equal number of coincidences peculiar to themselves and no greater number of discrepancies. It is only one among an almost infinite number of at least equally probable contingencies, and has therefore no a priori probability of its own, though it would have no inherent improbability if other textual phenomena pointed to it. The problem cannot possibly be solved on the ground of attestation alone: but, so far as the phenomena of attestation contribute to its solution, they do not suggest a near common origin for even the residuary portions of and B.

293. We now come to the indications furnished by