Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/332

294 readings, but which have in various degrees sufficient interest to deserve some sort of notice.

382. For ordinary readings of this kind the Appendix is the fitting repository. In the Gospels and Acts however there are a considerable number of readings that have no strict claim to a place except in the Appendix, and yet plead strongly for a more immediate association with the true text. To have allowed them to be confounded with true alternative readings would have practically been a deliberate adulteration of the New Testament: but we have thought that on the whole historical truth would be best served by allowing them some kind of accessory recognition, and thus we have been forced to adopt additional modes of notation with peculiar symbols. None can feel more strongly than ourselves that it might at first sight appear the duty of faithful critics to remove completely from the text any words or passages which they believe not to have originally formed part of the work in which they occur. But there are circumstances connected with the text of the New Testament which have withheld us from adopting this obvious mode of proceeding.

383. The first difficulty arises from the absence of any sure criterion for distinguishing Western omissions due to incorrupt transmission, that is, Western non-interpolations, from Western omissions proper, that is, due only to capricious simplification (§ 240): whoever honestly makes the attempt will find his own judgement vacillate from time to time. On the whole it has seemed best that nothing should at present be omitted from the text itself on Western authority exclusively. Those Western omissions therefore which we can confidently accept as, properly speaking, non-interpolations are