Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/82

44 natural confusion being aided perhaps by the application of the convenient and in itself harmless term ‘authorities’ to documents. No one doubts that some documents are better than others, and that therefore a numerical preponderance may have rightly to yield to a qualitative preponderance. But it is often assumed that numerical superiority, as such, among existing documents ought always to carry a certain considerable though perhaps subordinate weight, and that this weight ought always to be to a certain extent proportionate to the excess of numbers. This assumption is completely negatived by the facts adduced in the preceding pages, which shew that, since the same numerical relations among existing documents are compatible with the utmost dissimilarity in the numerical relations among their ancestors, no available presumptions whatever as to text can be obtained from number alone, that is, from number not as yet interpreted by descent.

56. The single exception to the truth of this statement leaves the principle itself untouched. Where a minority consists of one document or hardly more, there is a valid presumption against the reading thus attested, because any one scribe is liable to err, whereas the fortuitous concurrence of a plurality of scribes in the same error is in most cases improbable; and thus in these cases the reading attested by the majority is exempt from the suspicion of one mode of error which has to be taken into account with respect to the other reading. But this limited  presumption, itself liable to be eventually set aside on evidence of various classes, is distinct in kind, not in degree only, from the imaginary presumption against a mere minority; and the essential difference is not