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254 it is always speculatively possible that it may have had a place in the virtually Pre-Syrian as well as in the Syrian ancestor: but in the face of the certainty that it must have existed in the Syrian ancestor this speculative possibility has no appreciable force for the purposes of criticism.

335. It so happens that the relation between two extant uncial MSS of St Paul's Epistles illustrates vividly the composite origin of many texts, including the texts of some at least of such cursives as have been noticed above. The St Germain MS E3, apparently written in Cent. or late in Cent. , has long been recognised as a copy of the Clermont MS D2, executed after D2 had suffered much revision by correcting hands: all possible doubt as to the direct derivation of the one from the other is taken away by the senseless readings which the scribe of E3 has constructed out of a combination of what was written by the original scribe of D2 and what was written by its correctors;—an interesting illustration, it may be observed in passing, of the manner in which the strange of * in 2 Pet. ii 15 must have resulted from a fusion of the two readings and. D2, it will be remembered (§§ 100 f., 203), was written in Cent. , and has a Western text. The readings introduced by the two chief correctors, referred to Cent. (D2a) and Cent. (D2b) respectively, and especially the readings due to the later of the two, are for the most part Syrian: on the other hand, while the later corrector alters many Pre-Syrian readings which his predecessor had passed over, he fails to make his own assimilative revision complete.

336. A short passage from D2 (Rom. xv 31—33) will sufficiently exhibit the chief phenomena of the corrections and transcription, the readings of the correctors being set between the lines: &emsp;&emsp;  &ensp; &emsp; &ensp; This passage contains five distinctively Western readings, of which the first four, (before ),, and the interpolation of , are brought by the correctors into conformity with