Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/305

Rh 351. Taking all kinds of indications together, we are inclined to surmise that Β and were both written in the West, probably at Rome; that the ancestors of Β were wholly Western (in the geographical, not the textual sense) up to a very early time indeed; and that the ancestors of  were in great part Alexandrian, again in the geographical, not the textual sense. We do not forget such facts as the protracted unwillingness of the Roman church to accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, commended though it was by the large use made of it in the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians: but the complex life of Christian Rome in the fourth century cannot safely be measured by its official usage; and it would be strange if the widely current History of Eusebius led no Roman readers to welcome the full Eusebian Canon, with the natural addition of the Apocalypse, a book always accepted in the West. The supposition here made would account for all ascertained facts and contradict none. Yet we are well aware that other suppositions may be possibly true; and we must repeat that the view which we have here ventured to put forward as best explaining the sum total of the phenomena is only a surmise, on which we build nothing.

352. The fundamental similarity of text throughout the whole of B, and again throughout the whole of with the exception of the Apocalypse, deserves special notice, because it is more probable that the exemplars from which they were taken contained each only a single book or group of books than that they were large enough to contain the whole series of books (see  §§ 14,  301). Even among cursives it is not uncommon to find one or more groups of books written in a different age from the rest, with which they are bound up; so that a transcript