Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/271

Rh variations. Singular readings which make good sense and therefore need imply no clerical error, but which might also be easily explained as due to a kind of clerical error already fixed upon the scribe by undoubted examples, are rendered by the presence of possible clerical error as a vera causa more doubtful than they would otherwise be. Singular readings which make good sense, and which cannot be explained by clerical error except such as lies outside the known proclivities of the scribe, acquire a better title to consideration. Again, those singular readings which are evidently errors, but are not clerical errors, can likewise be classified, and the results of classification used in the same manner: for instance, in the New Testament an appreciable number of the singular readings of A consist in the permutation of synonyms, and it can hardly be doubted that these readings are true individualisms. Whether however such singular readings are individualisms or of older date, is often not easy to tell: but it is always useful to remember that the text of a document as it stands is partly ancestral, partly due to transcriptional error in the last stage or stages of transmission, though definite indications of the one or the other origin may be wanting for each individual variation.

312. When the singular readings of Β are examined for the purpose here explained, it is found that on the one hand the scribe reached by no means a high standard of accuracy, and on the other his slips are not proportionally numerous or bad. Like most transcribers, he occasionally omits necessary portions of text because his eye returned to the exemplar at the wrong place. As the longer portions of text so omitted consist usually either