Fenton John Anthony Hort

“ Thus though faith regained its rights, it remained an energy of the understanding, confined to those who had the requisite inborn capacity; while the dealings of God with man were shut up within the lines of mechanical justice. The majestic and, so to speak, pathetic view bounded by the large Basilidian horizon was well fitted to inspire dreams of a high and comprehensive theology, but the very fidelity with which Basilides strove to cling to reality must have soon brought to light the incompetence of his teaching to solve any of the great problems. ”

“ Doubtless Basilides pushed election so far as to sever a portion of mankind from the rest, as alone entitled by Divine decree to receive the higher enlightenment. In this sense it must have been that he called "the election a stranger to the world, as being by nature supermundane"; while Clement maintained that no man can by nature be a stranger to the world (iv. p. 639) . It is hardly necessary to point out how closely the limitation of spheres agrees with the doctrine on which the Great Ignorance is founded, and the supermundane election with that of the Third Sonship. ”

“ His still more elaborate examination of Professor Jowett's book turns almost wholly on matters of principle. The two chief positions which he maintains against Jowett are, first, that the late Greek in which the New Testament is written is as precise a language as the classical Attic, however widely differing from it; and, next, that neither St. Paul's antecedents nor the internal evidence of his epistles supply any reasons for thinking that he had imperfect knowledge of the language in which he wrote, or imperfect skill in using it. ”

“ The office of textual criticism, it cannot be too clearly understood at the outset, is always secondary and always negative. It is always secondary, since it comes into play only where the text transmitted by the existing documents appears to be in error, either because they differ from each other in what they read, or for some other sufficient reason. With regard to the great bulk of the words of the New Testament, as of most other ancient writings, there is no variation or other ground of doubt, and therefore no room for textual criticism ”

“ Thus all the souls of this stage, whose nature it is to continue immortal in this stage alone, will remain without knowledge of anything higher and better than this, lest they suffer torment by craving for things impossible, like a fish desiring to feed with the sheep on the mountains, for such a desire would have been to them destruction. All things are indestructible while they abide in their place, but destructible if they aim at overleaping the bounds of Nature. ”

“ There is no royal road to the ascertainment of the true texts of ancient writings. Investigation of the history and character of documentary ancestries would indeed be out of place for the text of the New Testament if the documentary evidence were so hopelessly chaotic that no difference of authority could carry much weight as between readings all having some clearly ancient attestation. The consequent necessity of always judging chiefly by Internal Evidence of Readings would undeniably save much labour. ”

“ Nothing of course can exclude the possibility that one line of transmission may have ramified more rapidly and widely than another in the same time: yet still the shorter the interval between the time of the autograph and the end of the period of transmission in question, the stronger will be the presumption that earlier date implies greater purity of text. But the surest ground of trusting composite attestation is attained when it combines the best documentary representatives of those lines of transmission which, as far as our knowledge goes, were the earliest to diverge. ”

“ In this manner evolution from below might once more give place to emanation from above, Docetism might again sever heaven and earth, and a loose practical dualism (of the profounder speculative dualism of the East there is no trace) might supersede all that Basilides had taught as to the painful processes by which sonship attains its perfection. The composite character of the secondary Basilidianism may be seen at a glance in the combination of the five Greek abstractions preparatory to creation with the Semitic hosts of creative angels bearing barbaric names. ”

“ All conflicts between Intrinsic and Transcriptional Probability arise from the imperfection of our knowledge: in both fields criticism consists of inferences from more or less incomplete data. Every change not purely mechanical made by a transcriber is, in some sense, of the nature of a correction. Corrections in such external matters as orthography and the like may be passed over, since they arise merely out of the comparative familiarity of different forms, and here Intrinsic Probability has nothing to do with what can properly be called excellence or easiness. ”

“ It is therefore no wonder that the ancient types of text now lose themselves in a general medley, not indeed vanishing entirely from view, but discernible only in fragments intermingled with other texts. Whatever may be the causes, mixture prevails everywhere in the fourth century: almost all its texts, so far as they can be seen through the quotations of the Fathers, are more or less chaotic. ”

“ He who had learned their lore and known all angels and their powers was said to become invisible and incomprehensible to all angels and powers, even as also Caulacau was (the sentence in which Irenaeus, our sole authority here, first introduces Caulacau, a name not peculiar to the Basilidians, is unfortunately corrupt) . And as the Son was unknown to all, so also, the tradition ran, must members of their community be known to none; but while they know all and pass through the midst of all, remain invisible and unknown to all, observing the maxim, "Do thou know all, but let no one know thee." ”

“ Lastly; the practical value of the simple application of Internal Evidence of Documents diminishes as they increase in number. It is of course in some sort available wherever a text is preserved in more than a single document, provided only that it is known in each variation which readings are supported by the several documents. Wherever it can be used at all, its use is indispensable at every turn; and where the documents are very few and not perceptibly connected, it is the best resource that criticism possesses. ”

“ Transcriptional Probability is not directly or properly concerned with the relative excellence of rival readings, but merely with the relative fitness of each for explaining the existence of the others. Every rival reading contributes an element to the problem which has to be solved; for every rival reading is a fact which has to be accounted for, and no acceptance of any one reading as original can be satisfactory which leaves any other variant incapable of being traced to some known cause or causes of variation. ”

“ But in the Apocalypse Primasius, an African writer of the sixth century, has preserved to us an almost uninterrupted text, which is proved by its close similarity to the quotations of Cyprian to be African Latin of high purity. Thus, singularly enough, the Apocalypse possesses the unique advantage of having been preserved in a Latin text at once continuous and purely African. The quotations of other late African Fathers from various books exhibit an African text much altered by degeneracy and mixture, but preserving many ancient readings. ”

“ Yet it is not seemly, when the text of the New Testament is being scrupulously elaborated word by word, that it should be disfigured many times in every page by a slovenly neglect of philological truth. The abandonment of all restoration of the original forms of words is also liable to obliterate interesting and perhaps important facts, affinities of authorship and the like being sometimes indicated by marks trivial in themselves. ”

“ It is at once obvious that the same phenomena are accounted for with much greater probability by the simple explanation that the identical readings do not represent a third and proximate common original, containing a single pure text preserved with extraordinary fidelity, but are merely those portions of text in which two primitive and entirely separate lines of transmission had not come to differ from each other through independent corruption in the one or the other. ”

“ Doubtful points are out of 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 neutralised, as soon as it is distinctly perceived, by the antiquity and variety of the evidence ”

“ As soon as the numbers of a minority exceed what can be explained by accidental coincidence, so that their agreement in error, if it be error, can only be explained on genealogical grounds, we have thereby passed beyond purely numerical relations, and the necessity of examining the genealogy of both minority and majority has become apparent. A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant documents is more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents at each stage of transmission than vice versa. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To accept however every ancient spelling differing from the late spellings would be as rash as to accept every Western reading because it is very ancient. Curiously enough, but quite naturally, the Western documents are rich in forms and spellings not found in other documents, and some few are also confined to documents in which the Alexandrian text is very prominent. ”

“ There is always an abundance of variations in which no practised scholar can possibly doubt which is the original reading, and which must therefore be derivative; 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Alternative readings are given wherever we do not believe the text to be certain, if the doubt affects only the choice between variations found in existing documents. It is impossible to decide that any probable variation, verbal or real, is too trivial for notice; while it would be improper to admit any variation to a place among alternative readings except on the ground of its probability. Nothing therefore is retained among alternatives which in our judgement, or on final consideration in the judgement of one of us, has no reasonable chance of being right. ”

“ When it is clearly understood that coincidence of reading infallibly implies identity of ancestry wherever accidental coincidence is out of the question, all documents assume their proper character as sources of historical evidence, first respecting the antecedent lines of textual transmission, and then respecting the relation of each reading to these antecedent texts. ”

“ It is impossible to entertain an equal degree of confidence in the numerous decisions which we have felt ourselves justified in making in comparatively obscure or difficult variations; because in these cases a greater liability to error was involved in the proportionally larger part inevitably played by individual personal judgements. Even where a text is certain enough to make the exhibition of alternative readings superfluous, gradation of certainty is a necessary consequence of the manifold gradations of evidence. ”

“ Criticism arises out of the question what is to be received where a text is extant in two or more varying documents. The most rudimentary form of criticism consists in dealing with each variation independently, and adopting at once in each case out of two or more variants that which looks most probable. The evidence here taken into account is commonly called 'Internal Evidence': as other kinds of Internal Evidence will have to be mentioned, we prefer to call it more precisely 'Internal Evidence of Readings'. ”

“ When once the separation of words had become habitual, the old continuous mode of writing would be found troublesome to the eye, and even the old 'uncial' or rounded capital letters would at length prove an obstacle to use. Had biblical manuscripts of the uncial ages been habitually treated with ordinary respect, much more invested with high authority, they could not have been so often turned into 'palimpsests', that is, had their ancient writing obliterated that the vellum might be employed for fresh writing, not always biblical. ”

“ The complexity introduced into the transmission of ancient texts by mixture needs no comment. Where the mixture has been accompanied or preceded by such licence in transcription as we find in the New Testament, the complexity can evidently only increase the precariousness of printed texts formed without taking account of the variations of text which preceded mixture. ”

“ Evidence is valuable only so far as it can be securely interpreted; and not the least advantage conferred by new documents is the new help which they give towards the better interpretation of old documents, and of documentary relations generally. By way of supplement to the preceding brief sketch of the history of criticism, we insert the following table, which shews the dates at which the extant Greek uncials of the sixth and earlier centuries, with five others of later age but comparatively ancient text, have become available as evidence by various forms of publication. ”

“ But, apart from this involuntary licence, most translators are liable to deviate from their original by slight verbal paraphrase in just the same way as transcribers of the fundamental text: in other words, many associations of versions with Greek evidence in support of changes of diction are due to accidental coincidence. Every paraphrastic impulse which affects a transcriber is not less likely to affect a translator, who has a strong additional temptation to indulge the impulse in the fact that he is creating a new set of words, not copying words set one after another before him. ”

“ The evidence for corruption is often irresistible, imposing on an editor the duty of indicating the presumed unsoundness of the text, although he may be wholly unable to propose any endurable way of correcting it, or have to offer only suggestions in which he cannot place full confidence. ”

“ The true range of individuality of text cannot moreover be exactly measured by the range of contents of an existing document. We have no right to assume without verification the use of the same exemplar or exemplars from the first page to the last. A document containing more books than one may have been transcribed either from an exemplar having identical contents, or from two or more exemplars each of which contained a smaller number of books; and these successive exemplars may have been of very various or unequal excellence. ”

“ Here then at last genealogical evidence becomes extensively applicable to use in the discrimination of false readings from true. As each variation comes before us with its two or more variants, each attested by a group of documents, we are now enabled in a large proportion of cases to assign at once each variant to one of the ancient texts on the strength of the grouping of documents which makes up its attestation, and thereby to obtain (to say the least) a presumption of the highest value as to its genuineness or spuriousness. ”