Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/273

Rh In the New Testament, as in almost all prose writings which have been much copied, corruptions by interpolation are many times more numerous than corruptions by omission. When therefore a text of late and degenerate type, such as is the Received Text of the New Testament, is consciously or unconsciously taken as a standard, any document belonging to a purer stage of the text must by the nature of the case have the appearance of being guilty of omissions; and the nearer the document stands to the autograph, the more numerous must be the omissions laid to its charge. If Β is preeminently free from interpolations, Western, Alexandrian, or Syrian, it cannot but be preeminently full of what may relatively to the Received Text be called omissions. Strictly speaking, these facts have no bearing on either the merits or the demerits of the scribe of B, except as regards the absolutely singular readings of B, together with those nearly singular readings in which the other attestation may easily be due to accidental coincidence: multitudes of the so called omissions of Β are found in other good documents, few or many, and therefore, if not genuine, must at least have originated at a point in the line of transmission antecedent to B. It has seemed best however to speak of the supposed omissions of Β here once for all, both those which concern the character of Β individually and those which concern the character of the older text or texts from which it was derived.

314. The great mass of omissions, or rather for the most part non-interpolations, which Β shares with other primary documents being set aside as irrelevant, it remains to be considered whether its singular readings, which alone are relevant, include such and so many