Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/260

222 ments, and in which each of the two MSS is supported by a small number of documents having a largely Pre-Syrian text. In these cases, allowance being made for the possibility of an occasional accidental coincidence, the reading of neither nor Β can have originated in the process of transcription from a proximate common source, and the two MSS confront each other with exclusively early texts of different ancestry.

300. It follows from the binary and the ternary variations alike that the hypothesis of a proximate common original for the identical readings of B involves the necessity of postulating at least three independent sources of exceptionally ancient character of text for the two MSS, independently of sources akin to documents still largely extant. It is at once obvious that the same phenomena are accounted for with much greater probability by the simple explanation that the identical readings do not represent a third and proximate common original, containing a single pure text preserved with extraordinary fidelity, but are merely those portions of text in which two primitive and entirely separate lines of transmission had not come to differ from each other through independent corruption in the one or the other.

301. The importance of this conclusion is so great that we venture to repeat in other and fewer words the principal steps which lead to it. Whatever be the mutual relation of and B, each of them separately,  in the Apocalypse excepted, is found on comparison of its characteristic readings with those of other documentary authorities of approximately determinate date to have a text more ancient by a long interval than that of any other extant Non-Western MS containing more than a few verses; to be in fact essentially a text of the second