Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/258

220 of constraint from internal evidence, to imagine a different origin for those readings of B which have no other attestation. It might indeed be suggested that both sets of readings were obtained from a single proximate common source, but that the one set originated there, while the other was transmitted. But against this contingent possibility must be set the comparative inconstancy of the members of the smaller groups containing B, and the consequent probability that occasionally they would all be found ranged against readings having the same parentage as those which they elsewhere concur with Β in supporting (see § 280).

297. These considerations shew that the common original of Β for by far the greater part of their identical readings, whatever may have been its own date, had a very ancient and very pure text, and that there is no sufficient reason for surmising that the rest of their identical readings came from any other source. They prove that one of three alternatives must be true: either the respective ancestries of and Β must have diverged from a common parent extremely near the apostolic autographs; or, if their concordant readings were really derived from a single not remote MS, that MS must itself have been of the very highest antiquity; or, lastly, such single not remote MS must have inherited its text from an ancestry which at each of its stages had enjoyed a singular immunity from corruption. For practical purposes it is of little moment which alternative is true. The second and third alternatives would leave open the possibility that single readings of B, otherwise unsupported, may have originated with the common proximate source here implied: but there is no difference between the three alternatives as regards the general character and