Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/59

Rh 26. These considerations evidently afford reasonable presumptions; presumptions which in some cases may attain such force on the negative side as to demand the rejection or qualify the acceptance of readings most highly commended by other kinds of evidence. But the uncertainty of the decision in ordinary cases is shown by the great diversity of judgement which is actually found to exist. The value of the Intrinsic Evidence of Readings should of course be estimated by its best and most cultivated form, for the extemporaneous surmises of an ordinary untrained reader will differ widely from the range of probabilities present to the mind of a scholar prepared both by general training in the analysis of texts and by special study of the facts bearing on the particular case. But in dealing with this kind of evidence equally competent critics often arrive at contradictory conclusions as to the same variations.

27. Nor indeed are the assumptions involved in Intrinsic Evidence of Readings to be implicitly trusted. There is much literature, ancient no less than modern, in which it is needful to remember that authors are not always grammatical, or clear, or consistent, or felicitous; so that not seldom an ordinary reader finds it easy to replace a feeble or half-appropriate word or phrase by an effective substitute; and thus the best words to express an author's meaning need not in all cases be those which he actually employed. But, without attempting to determine the limits within which such causes have given occasion to any variants in the New Testament, it concerns our own purpose more to urge that in the highest literature, and notably in the Bible, all readers are peculiarly liable to the fallacy of supposing that they understand the author's meaning and purpose because they under-