Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/290

252 a certain extent disturbed. Two classes of evidence rise into unusual importance here, Secondary documentary evidence and Internal evidence. The effects of both under these circumstances are the same; first to rescue a slenderly attested reading from being entirely set aside, and next, if the two classes of evidence sustain each other, or either is of exceptional strength, to render superfluous the retention of the other reading as an alternative. The bearing of Internal evidence, which here can be only Internal Evidence of Readings, requires no special comment. The change in the relative importance of Secondary documentary evidence will need a little explanation.

332. All Secondary documentary evidence has its value for these variations, in so far as it shews a given reading attested by a primary MS not to be an individualism; provided of course that the coincidence is such as cannot well be accidental. By supplying diversity of attestation, it has at the least the effect of proving that the reading had some sort of pedigree; and, considering the absence of very close and immediate relations of affinity between most extant documents, the pedigree must usually have been of some length. Little would be gained by this were the uncial itself secondary: but if its readings are habitually good in an exceptional proportion, the relative probability of the given reading is at once much increased.

333. There is however a much greater increase of authority when the secondary evidence is that of a peculiarly good element in a mixed document, being then equivalent to fragments of a document which if continuously preserved would have been of primary or not much lower rank. Such elements are found, for instance,