Introduction, by Westcott and Hort

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

357―360....Approximate non-existence of genuine readings unattested by any of the best Greek uncials

357..... The vague but necessary term 'inferior documents' covers two classes of evidence which demand attention on wholly different grounds; first, Greek uncials which in external character, as in conventional designation, have no generic difference from the best Greek uncials, and secondly, the earlier Versions and Fathers. First then it may be asked,―Given the relative supremacy which we have been led to ascribe under normal conditions to B and ‏א in most books and to some extent to A and C in the Apocalypse, is there or is there not good ground to expect that the true reading should sometimes exist not in them but in less good or in secondary Greek uncials? There is no theoretical improbability in the supposition here made. This is obviously true in cases where ‏א and B are at variance, that is, where the positive evidence afforded by the coincidence of two extremely ancient independent lines is absent: for, where they differ from each other, the true reading may differ from that of either, and may have survived in an independent line to a somewhat later time, and so have found its way into other uncials. The theoretical possibility holds good likewise where B and ‏א agree, though reduced within much narrower limits. Near as the divergence of the respective ancestries of B and ‏א must have been to the autographs, there must have been an appreciable interval of transcription (§§ 241, 301 ff.); and it is a priori conceivable that relics of a line of transmission starting from a yet earlier point should find their way into one or another uncial of the fifth or following centuries, and further that such relics should include genuine readings which disappeared in the writing of an intermediate ancestor of B and ‏א.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

358..... When however the readings of secondary or even primary uncials in opposition to B and ‏א are consecutively examined, they present no such phenomena, whether of accessory attestation or of internal character, as might have been expected were the supposition true. The singular readings with rare and unimportant exceptions have all the appearance of being individualisms. The scanty subsingular readings having some attestation by early Versions or Fathers will be noticed under the next head. The readings attested by two or more of these uncials, which make up by far the greater part of the whole of these readings, can be recognized at once as distinctively Syrian or Alexandrian or Western, or as obvious modifications of extant readings having one or other such attestation and character. Among all the endless varieties of mixture there is a striking sameness in the elements mixed. The immediate sources of all our uncials not purely Syrian, except B and ‏א, were evidently for the most part the popular eclectic texts of about the fourth century, Syrian or other, and not the various earlier and simpler Ante-Nicene texts from which the eclectic texts are compounded, and which the eclectic texts soon drove out of currency. Lastly, the verdict of internal evidence is almost always unfavorable where it is not neutral.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

359..... Passing backwards to Ante-Nicene times, we have to deal with the second question,―May we or may we not reasonably expect to find true readings in very limited but very ancient groups of documents in opposition to B and ‏א? There are many Pre-Syrian readings the antiquity of which is vouched for by Versions or Fathers, but which nevertheless are supported by no Greek manuscript but a stray uncial or two, or only by a few cursives, (such cursives naturally as are otherwise known to contain ancient elements of text,) or even in many cases by no Greek manuscript at all. The attestation of these readings, or at least of the second and third classes of them, resembles the accessory attestation of the subsingular readings of B, which we have already learned to judge on the whole favorably: it resembles also the accessory attestation of the subsingular readings of ‏א, which we have rarely found to have the stamp of genuineness. All such readings show how plentiful a crop of variation existed in the early centuries and was swept out of sight by the eclectic texts.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

360..... Readings thus attested by Versions and Fathers almost without support from existing Greek manuscripts have as yet received from critics no attention proportionate to their historical interest. The accident of their neglect by the Greek editors of the fourth century and their consequent approximate or complete extinction in Greek copies of the New Testament, can have bearing on the character of their pedigree in the earlier ages. It is therefore but right to enquire whether the accidental preservation of B and ‏א does or does not give their texts an undeserved preeminence, which they would have lost had continuous uncials existed containing such texts as these stray readings represent. A scrutiny of the readings themselves dispels the suspicion. We have for our own part been quite prepared to find among these relics of ancient variation many readings highly commended by Internal Evidence: but experience has not justified any such anticipation. A very few readings absent from all existing Greek manuscripts we have thought it safest to retain as alternate readings; for instance in Matt. iv 17 ἤγγικεν (for μετανοεῖτε· ἤγγικεν γάρ), attested by syr.vt Orig (as represented by schol Procop.Es.144 Hier.Es.128) Vict.ant.Mc.273 (expressly); and in 1 John iv 3 λύει (for μὴ ὁμολογεῖ), attested by 'ancient copies' mentioned by Socrates, and also by lat.vg. Iren.lat (with context) Orig.Mt.lat; (?schol) Tert Lucif Aug Fulg. There are a few others supported by yet higher authority, which have an appearnce of intrinsic probability in places where the better attested readings seem to be specifically difficult; and these we have not attempted to separate from purely conjectural readings. Readings belonging to either of these classes are however in the highest degree exceptional, and do not disturb the general impression produced by examination of the whole number. Most indeed of the readings of great antiquity which stand in no extant Greek uncial are seen at a glance to be ordinary Western readings; so that doubtless the reason why those of them which occur in the Gospels and Acts are deprived of the support of D is simply the comparative purity of its early Western text. While then it cannot be confidently affirmed that no relics of lines of transmission independent of the ancestries of B and ‏א now exist in one or more secondary documents of one kind or another (compare § 357), the utmost number of such relics is too petty, even with the inclusion of doubtful instances, to affect appreciably the conclusions already obtained. It is of course with such evidence as actually exists that the primary uncials can be brought into comparison: but the fullest comparison does but increase the conviction that their preeminent relative purity is likewise approximately absolute, a true approximate reproduction of the text of the autographs, not an accidental and deceptive result of the loss of better Greek manuscripts.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

361―370.....Approximate sufficiency of existing documents for the recovery of the genuine text, notwithstanding the existence of some primitive corruptions

361..... The way has now been cleared the final question,―Is it or is it not reasonable to expect that in any considerable number of cases the true reading has now perished? Have we a right to assume that the true reading always exists somewhere among existing documents? The question is often foreclosed on one or both of two grounds which in our judgment are quite irrelevant. First, some think it incredible that any true words of Scripture should have perished. In reply it is a sufficient argumentum ad hominem to point to the existence of various readings, forming part of various texts accepted for long ages, and the frequent difficulty of deciding between them, even though we say nothing of difficulties of interpretation: on any view many important churches for long ages have had only an approximately pure New Testament, so that we have no right to treat it as antecedently incredible that only an approximately pure New Testament should be attainable now, or even in all future time. For ourselves we dare not introduce considerations which could not reasonably be applied to other ancient texts, supposing them to have documentary attestation of equal amount, variety, and antiquity. Secondly, the folly and frivolity of once popular conjectures have led to a wholesale reaction against looking beyond documentary tradition. Some of them are attempts to deal textually with what are really difficulties of interpretation only; the authors of others, though they propose remedies which cannot possibly avail, are not thereby shown to have been wrong in the supposition that remedies are needed; and a few have been perhaps too quickly forgotten. Though it cannot be said that recent attempts in Holland to revive conjectural criticism of the New Testament have shown much felicity of suggestion, they cannot be justly condemned on the ground of principle. The caution imposed by the numerous failures of the earlier critics has on the whole worked well; but it has no bearing on the question at issue.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

362..... On the other hand a strong presumption in favor of the immunity of the text of the New Testament from errors antecedent to existing documents is afforded by the facts mentioned under the last head (§§ 357―360). If among the very ancient evidence now extant, collected from various quarters, so little can be found that approves itself as true in opposition both to B and to ‏א, there is good reason at the outset to doubt whether any better readings have perished with the multitudes of documents that have been lost.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

363..... The question however needs more careful consideration on account of the apparent ease and simplicity with which many ancient texts are edited, which might be thought, on a hasty view, to imply that the New Testament cannot be restored with equal certainty. But this ease and simplicity is in fact the mark of evidence too scanty to be tested; whereas in the variety and fullness of the evidence on which it rests the text of the New Testament stands absolutely and unapproachably alone among prose writings. For all other works of antiquity, the Old Testament (in translations) and some of Latin poets excepted, manuscripts earlier than the ninth or even tenth century are of extreme rarity. Many are preserved to us in a single manuscript or hardly more; and so there is little chance of detecting corruption wherever the sense is good. Those only which are extant in many copies of different ages present so much as a distant analogy with the New Testament: and, if through the multitude of various readings, and the consequent diversities of printed editions, they lose the fallacious uniformity of text which is the usual result of extreme paucity of documents, there is always a nearer approximation to perfect restoration. Doubtful points are out or sight even in critical editions of classical authors merely because in ordinary literature it is seldom worth while to trouble the clearness of a page. The one disadvantage on the side of the New Testament, the early mixture of independent lines of transmission, is more than neutralized, as soon as it is distinctly perceived, by the antiquity and variety of the evidence; and the expression of doubt wherever doubt is really felt is owing to the paramount necessity for fidelity as to the exact words of Scripture.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

364..... But it will be seen from the preceding pages that we possess evidence much more precisely certified than by the simple and general titles of antiquity, excellence, and variety. Two or three of our best documents might have been lost, and yet those titles might still be justly claimed; while without those documents both the history of the text and its application would be so imperfectly understood that the results in that case would be both different and more uncertain. It is the minute study of the whole evidence in relation to the best documents which brings out their absolute and not merely their relative excellence. The external evidence is therefore such that on the one hand prefect purity is not a priori improbable, and a singularly high degree of purity is highly probable; and yet the conditions are not such ― it is difficult to see how they could ever be ― as to exclude the possibility of textual error.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

365..... These general probabilities however are but preparatory to the definite question,―Are there as a matter of fact places in which we are constrained by overwhelming evidence to recognize the existence of textual error in all extant documents? To this question we have no hesitation in replying in the affirmative. For instance in 2 Pet. iii 10 ‏אBK₂P₂ with three of the best cursives and two Versions read στοιχεῖα δὲ καυσούμενα λυθήσεται καὶ γῆ καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτῇ ἔργα εὑρεθήσεται. Before εὑρεθήσεται two other Versions insert a negative. C replaces εὑρεθήσεται by ἀφανισθήσονται, for which we find κατακαήσετοι in AL₂ and most cursives and several Versions and Fathers; while one representative of the Old Latin omits it altogether. External evidence is here strongly favorable to εὑρεθήσεται, as must be felt even by those who do not see any special significance in the concordance of ‏א and B. Internal evidence of transcription is absolutely certain on the same side, for εὑρεθήσεται fully accounts for all four other readings, two of them being conjectural substitutes, two less audacious manipulations; while no other reading will account for the rest. Yet it is hardly less certain by intrinsic probability that εὑρεθήσεται cannot be right: in other words, it is the most original of recorded readings, the parent of the rest, and yet itself corrupt. Conditions of reading essentially the same, in less striking form, occur here and there in other places.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

366..... But there is no adequate justification for assuming that primitive corruption must be confirmed to passages where is was obvious enough to catch the eye of ancient scribes, and would naturally thus lead to variation. Especially where the grammar runs with deceptive smoothness, and a wrong construction yields a sense plausible enough to cause no misgivings to an ordinary reader, there is nothing surprising if the kind of scrutiny required for deliberate criticism detects impossible readings accepted without suspicion by all transcribers. On the various kinds of primitive errors, and the nature of the evidence on which in each case their evidence can be affirmed, we have said enough in the Second Part (§§ 85―92).

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

367..... Little is gained by speculating as to the precise point at which such corruption came in. They may be due to the original writer, or to his amanuensis if he wrote from diction, or they may be due to one of the earliest transcribers. Except from extraneous sources, which here have no existence, it is never possible to know how many transcriptions intervened between the autograph and the latest common ancestor of all the elements in all extant documents; and a corruption affecting them all may evidently have originated at any link of that initial chain. Moreover the line of demarcation between primitive and other corruptions is less easy to draw than might be supposed. As was intimated above (§ 360), account has to be taken of a few places in which what appears to be the true reading is found exclusively in one or two secondary or hardly even secondary documents; perhaps transmitted from the autograph, and preserved by some rare accident of mixture notwithstanding the otherwise complete extinction of the line of transmission by which it had been conveyed, perhaps due only to a casual and unconscious emendation of an erroneous current reading. But these gradations of primitiveness in corruption have no practical moment. The only fact that really concerns us is that certain places have to be recognized and marked as insecure.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

368..... The number of such places which we have been able to recognize with sufficient confidence to justify the definite expression of doubt is not great. If we exclude books in which the documentary attestation of text is manifestly incomplete, as the Apocalypse, some of the Catholic Epistles, and the latter part of Hebrews, it is relatively extremely small. There may be and probably are other places containing corruption which we have failed to discover: but judging by analogy we should expect the differences to be of no real interest. We cannot too strongly express our disbelief in the existence of undetected interpolations of any moment. This is of course, strictly speaking, a speculative opinion, not a result of criticism. But we venture to think that the processes of criticism which it has been our duty to consider and work out have given us some qualifications for forming an opinion as to the probabilities of the matter. There are, it ought to be said, a few passages of St Matthew's Gospel (xii 40 ; [xiii 35 ;] xxiii 35 ; xxvii 9) in which it is difficult to believe that all the words as they stand have apostolic authority: the second part of xxvii 40 would have to be added to the list, if sufficient reasons should be found for accepting the possible but doubtful view that it is not a Non-Western interpolation, but an original reading omitted without authority by the Western text. But the question which these passages raise is rather literary than textual, for we see no reason to doubt that, as regards the extant form or edition of the first Gospel, their text as it stood in the autograph has been exactly preserved.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

369..... It will not be out of place to add here a distinct expression of our belief that even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament there are signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes. The license of paraphrase occasionally assumes the appearance of willful corruption, where scribes allowed themselves to change language which they thought capable of dangerous misconstruction; or attempted to correct apparent errors which they doubtless assumed to be due to previous transcription; or embodied in specific words a meaning which they supposed to be implied. But readings answering to this description cannot be judged rightly without taking into account the general characteristics of other readings exhibited by the same or allied documents. The comparison leaves little room for doubt that they merely belong to an extreme type of paraphrastic alteration, and are not essentially different from readings which betray an equally lax conception of transcription, and yet are transparently guiltless of any fraudulent intention. In a word, they bear witness to rashness, not to bad faith.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

370..... It is true that dogmatic preferences to a great extent determined theologians, and probably scribes, in their choice between rival readings already in existence: scientific criticism was virtually unknown, and in its absence the temptation was strong to believe and assert that a reading used by theological opponents had also been invented by them. Accusations of willful tampering with the text are accordingly not infrequent in Christian antiquity: but, with a single exception, wherever they can be verified they prove to be groundless, being in fact hasty and unjust inferences from mere diversities of inherited text. The one known exception is in the case of Marcion's dogmatic mutilation of the books accepted by him: and this was, strictly speaking, an adaptation for the use of his followers; nor had it apparently any influence outside the sect. Other readings of his, which he was equally accused of introducing, belonged manifestly to to the texts of the copies which came into his hands, and had no exceptional character or origin. The evidence which has recently come to light as to his disciple Tatian's Diatessaron has shown that Tatian habitually abridged the language of the passages which he combined; so that the very few known omissions which might be referred to dogmatic purpose can as easily receive another explanation. The absence of perceptible fraud in the origination of any of the various readings now extant may, we believe, be maintained with equal confidence for the text antecedent to the earliest extant variations, in other words, for the purest transmitted text, though here internal evidence is the only available criterion; and, as we have intimated above, any undetected discrepancies from the autographs which it may contain, due to other or ordinary causes, may safely on the same evidence be treated as insignificant. The books of the New Testament as preserved in extant documents assuredly speak to us in every important respect in language identical with that in which they spoke to those for whom they were originally written.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the OP.

C.....371―374.... Conditions of further improvement of the text

371..... The text of this edition of course makes no pretension to be more than an approximation to the purest text that might be formed from existing materials. Much, we doubt not, remains to be done for the perfecting of the results obtained thus far. Even in respect of the discovery of new documents, and fuller acquaintance with the contents of some that have in a manner been long known, useful contributions to the better understanding of obscure variations may fairly be expected. It is difficult to relinquish the hope that even yet Lagarde may be able to accomplish at least a part of his long projected edition of the testimonies of the oriental versions, so that the New Testament may be allowed to enjoy some considerable fruits of his rare gifts and acquirements: a complete and critically sifted exhibition of the evidence of the Egyptian versions would be a specially acceptable boon. But it would be an illusion to anticipate important changes of text from any acquisition of new evidence. Greater possibilities of improvement lie in a more exact study of the relations between the documents that we already possess. The effect of future criticism, as of future discovery, we suspect, will not be to import fresh readings; but there is reason to hope that the doubts between alternative readings will be greatly reduced.