Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/92

54 mon descent is always essentially the same, consisting in numerous readings in which they agree among themselves and differ from all other documents, together with the easy deducibility, direct or indirect, of all their readings from a single text. In the absence of the second condition the result would differ only in being less simple: we should have to infer the mixture of two or more lost originals, independent of each other as well as of the remaining extant documents.

68. The manner of recovering the text of a single lost original, assuming the fact of exclusive descent from it to have been sufficiently established, will be best explained by a free use of symbols. Let us suppose that the extant descendants are fourteen, denoted as o; that, when their mutual relationships are examined, they are found to fall into two sets, i and o, each having a single lost ancestor (X and Υ respectively) descended from the common original; and again that each of these sets falls similarly into smaller sets, the first into three, b, f, and i, the second into two, l and o, each of the five lesser sets having a single lost ancestor (' respectively) descended from the common subordinate original, ' from X,  from Y. Let us suppose also that no cross distributions implying mutual or internal mixture can be detected. We have then this pedigree:

69. Readings in which all fourteen documents agree belonged indubitably to the common original O. On the other hand the genealogical evidence now before us furnishes no indication as to the readings of Ο in variations in which all the descendants of X are opposed to all the descendants of Y: for reasons already given (§ 57) the proportion nine to five tells us nothing; and the greater compositeness of i, as made up of three sets against two,