Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/337

Rh verses of St Luke's Gospel. The current supplement (xvi 9—20) was evidently an independently written succinct narrative beginning with the Resurrection and ending with the Ascension, probably forming part of some lost evangelic record, and appropriated entire, as supplying at once a needed close to St Mark's words and a striking addition to the history, although the first line started from the same point as the beginning of the sixteenth chapter. The two supplements are thus of very unequal interest; but as independent attempts to fill up a gap they stand on equal terms, and may easily be of equal antiquity as regards introduction into copies of St Mark's Gospel; so that we have felt bound to print them both within &#x27E6;&thinsp;&#x27E7; in the same type. Moreover, as we cannot believe that, whatever may be the cause of the present abrupt termination of the Gospel at v. 8, it was intended by the Evangelist to end at this point, we have judged it right to mark the presumed defect by asterisks, and to suggest the probability that not the book and paragraph only but also the last sentence is incomplete.

388. The Section on the Woman taken in Adultery (John vii 53—viii 11) likewise required an exceptional treatment. No interpolation is more clearly Western, though it is not Western of the earliest type. Not only is it passed over in silence in every Greek commentary of which we have any knowledge, down to that of Theophylact inclusive (Cent. ); but with the exception of a reference in the Apostolic Constitutions (? Cent. ), and a statement by an obscure Nicon (Cent. or later) that it was expunged by the Armenians, not the slightest allusion to it has yet been discovered in the whole of Greek theology before the twelfth century. The