Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/255

Rh the internal character of identical readings. If some of the identical readings are manifestly wrong, and if they further are of such a nature that accidental coincidence will not naturally account for their having the double attestation, they must have had a common original later than the autograph; and it becomes probable that some at least of those other identical readings which afford no clear internal evidence of the intrinsic kind had likewise only that later MS than the autograph for their common original. But this negative fact is all that we learn; and it is compatible with even the extreme supposition that the common source of the identical readings was the original of all extant documents, though itself but imperfectly representing the autograph, and thus that these readings, wrong though they be, were the ancestors of all other existing variants of the same variations (see §§ 86,  87). If on the other hand some of the wrong identical readings are manifestly derived from other existing readings, the common original must of course have been later than the common original of the other readings; but the question of its remoteness or proximateness to the two extant MSS remains undecided.

294. The only quite trustworthy evidence from internal character for derivation from a common proximate original consists in the presence of such erroneous identical readings as are evidently due to mere carelessness or caprice of individual scribes, and could not easily have escaped correction in passing through two or three transcriptions. To carry weight, they must of course be too many to be naturally accounted for by accidental coincidence of error in two independent scribes. Now, to the best of our belief, and Β have in common but one such reading, if we set aside the itacisms, or permutations of