Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/339

Rh Both its elements, the clause and the scholium or explanatory note respecting the angel, are unquestionably very ancient: but no good Greek document contains both, while each of them separately is condemned by decisive evidence. In internal character it bears little resemblance to any of the readings which have been allowed to stand in the margin between the symbols &#x22A3; &#x22A2;; and it has no claim to any kind of association with the true text.

391. In some of the best documents a modified form of St John's statement (xix 34) about the piercing of our Lord's side is inserted in St Matthew's text after xxvii 49, although our Lord's death follows in the next verse. If the words are an interpolation, as seems on the whole most probable, their attestation involves no special anomaly, not being essentially different from that of the interpolations in Luke xxii and xxiv which are found in the best documents but omitted by the Western (§§ 240 f., 383). The superficial difference of attestation would seem to be chiefly if not wholly due to the accident that here the Syrian revisers preferred the shorter Western text. On this supposition the fortunate circumstance that their habitual love of completeness met with some counteraction, probably from a sense of the confusion arising out of the misplacement of the incident, has saved the texts of later times from a corruption which they might easily have inherited, and would doubtless have held fast. Apart however from the possibility that the words did belong to the genuine text of the first Gospel in its present form (see § 368), we should not have been justified in excluding them entirely from our text so long as we retained similar interpolations; and we have therefore inserted them, like the rest, in double brackets.