Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/62

24 and these clear instances supply ample materials for discovering and classifying the causes of corruption which must have been operative in all variations. The most obvious causes of corruption are clerical or mechanical, arising from mere carelessness of the transcriber, chiefly through deceptions of eye or ear. But, as we have seen (§ 10), the presence of a mental factor can often be traced in corruptions partly mechanical; and under the influence of a lax conception of the proper office of a transcriber distinctly mental causes of change may assume, and often have assumed, very large proportions. Even where the definite responsibilities of transcription were strongly felt, changes not purely clerical would arise from a more or less conscious feeling on a scribe's part that he was correcting what he deemed an obvious error due to some one of his predecessors; while, at times or places in which the offices of transcribing and editing came to be confused, other copyists would not shrink from altering the form of what lay before them for the sake of substituting what they supposed to be a clearer or better representation of the matter.

31. The value of the evidence obtained from Transcriptional Probability is incontestable. Without its aid textual criticism could rarely attain any high degree of security. Moreover, to be rightly estimated, it must be brought under consideration in the higher form to which it can be raised by care and study, when elementary guesses as to which reading scribes are likely in any particular case to have introduced have been replaced by judgements founded on previous investigation of the various general characteristics of those readings which can with moral certainty be assumed to have been introduced by scribes. But even at its