Fenton John Anthony Hort

“ It is therefore no wonder that only a small fraction of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament preserved to modern times were written in the uncial period, and but few of this number belong to the first five or six centuries, none being earlier than the age of Constantine. Most uncial manuscripts are more or less fragmentary; and till lately not one was known which contained the whole New Testament unmutilated. A considerable proportion, in numbers and still more in value, have been brought to light only by the assiduous research of the last century and a half. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor have we a right to assume that what in any particular case we judge after comparison to be the intrinsically strongest of the two or more possible impulses must as a matter of course be the one impulse which acted on a scribe if he was acted on by one only: accidental circumstances beyond our knowledge would determine which impulse would be the first to reach his mind or hand, and there would seldom be room for any element of deliberate choice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The art of Conjectural Emendation depends for its success so much on personal endowments, fertility of resource in the first instance, and even more an appreciation of language too delicate to acquiesce in merely plausible corrections, that it is easy to forget its true character as a critical operation founded on knowledge and method. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Where we find cross combinations associated with variations so numerous and of such a character that accidental coincidence is manifestly incompetent to explain them, we know that they must be due to mixture, and it then becomes necessary to observe within what limits the effects of mixture are discernible.
61. In so far as mixture operates, it exactly inverts the results of the simpler form of transmission, its effect being to produce convergence instead of divergence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is no adequate justification for assuming that primitive corruption must be confined to passages where it 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. ”