THE SOURCES OF THE VARIOUS READINGS.

The student can scarcely realize how the number of various readings can be so great and yet the number of serious differences so small as we have represented in the preceding chapters, until he becomes acquainted in detail with the sources whence the various readings have arisen.

Much the greater part of the variants, as the reader must already have perceived, is the result of accident; but there are some which must be regarded as intentional alterations. They are therefore divided into the two general classes of accidental and intentional alterations; and in seeking to trace them to their more especial sources we will consider these two classes separately.

The sources of the accidental alterations may be classified as follows:

1. Momentary Inattention. Every person who has had experience in copying knows that it is difficult to keep the attention closely fixed on the task for a protracted period, and that if it is diverted even for a moment, mistakes are almost certain to occur. This is a prolific source of such mistakes as the omission of letters and words, the repetition of the same, the substitution of words for others composed chiefly of the same letters, the substitution of letters for others of similar form, and the transposition of words.

2. Diversion of attention from the words to the subject matter. An intelligent copyist must unavoidably follow the train of thought in that which he copies, and the moment that he becomes more absorbed in this than in the exact words employed, he is exposed to such mistakes as the omission of particles not necessary to the sense, the substitution of one synonym for another, and the addition or omission of pronouns, and the insertion of nouns where their pronouns were understood.

3. Writing from dictation. The task of the copyist was a very tedious one, and he naturally resorted to every available means of hastening his progress. One of these was to employ an assistant who would read a few words at a time while he copied. In this case he had only the sound of the words to guide him, and he was exposed to errors through his reader's fault as well as his own. If the reader mispronounced a word, or pronounced it indistinctly, it was likely to be misspelt or mistaken for another. If he omitted or repeated a word, it was omitted or repeated by the copyist.1

4. Homoioteleuton. For want of a suitable English word critics have adopted this Greek word for another source of clerical errors, the similar ending of clauses, sentences and lines. The copyist, when he finishes a certain clause, or sentence, or line, bears in his mind as he turns his eye back to the manuscript before him, the ending of what he has just written, and seeing a similar ending close by he starts from it, omitting some words, a whole clause, the whole of a short sentence, or possibly the whole of a line.

5. Change of pronunciation. Words in a living language undergo many changes of pronunciation; and when a dead language is employed by scholars of different tongues it is subjected to as many different modes of pronunciation as the tongues employed; and in all these cases there is a constant tendency toward the misspelling of words to suit the changed pronunciation.

6. Trusting to memory, The copyist necessarily carries words in his memory from the moment that his eye turns away from the text before him until the last word of the number thus carried is written. The greater the number of words thus carried at once the more rapid his progress and the less wearisome his task. He is therefore tempted to trust too much to memory. The same is true in writing from dictation. From this cause must have sprung a large number of errors of nearly all the kinds mentioned above.

7. Absence of spaces and punctuation. Early manuscripts were written in continuous rows of capital letters, without spaces between the words and sentences. The earliest example of separated words is found in a manuscript of the ninth century, and it was not until about this period that the punctuation marks now employed came into use, the earliest existing Greek manuscripts having no stops at all, and the oldest existing manuscripts of the New Testament having only a single point here and thereat the top of the letters to denote a pause in the sense.2 That such a mode of writing must have been a prolific source of mistakes in copying, and must have aggravated the effects of the other causes mentioned above, is obvious. The English scholar will have a more lively appreciation of it if he will imagine himself copying a book printed as follows:

The sources of intentional alterations are not numerous, and the number of such alterations is comparatively small. All these sources are to be found in the various purposes for which the alterations were made, and all may be included in the following:

1. To correct a supposed mistake. Every copyist, knowing that preceding copyists were liable to mistakes, was tempted to correct such mistakes when he discovered them, or when he thought he discovered them. These supposed mistakes were of two kinds: first, errors in grammatical construct ion; and second, errors of omission, addition, or substitution. When a sentence appeared to the scribe ungrammatical, or even inelegant, he sometimes corrected it without altering the sense. Sometimes, also, MSS. were thus corrected by interlineation, and copies of these MSS. perpetuated and multiplied these corrections.3 Errors of the other kind originated chiefly from confounding marginal notes with marginal corrections. It was quite common for owners of MSS. to write notes and comments on the margin, or between the lines; and it was also common for copyists when they had accidentally omitted a word or a number of words, to insert these in the same way. Now and then, a subsequent copyist would mistake one of these marginal notes for a marginal correction, and purposely put it into the body of his text. It, is supposed, for example, that the portion of I. John v. 7 relating to the Heavenly Witnesses, the whole of Acts viii. 37, the doxology to the Lord's prayer, and John v. 4, as represented in King James' version, were interpolated in this way.

2. To secure fullness of expression. In many instances the scribes have copied into a passage in one of the Gospels words which belong to the parallel place in another, but which appeared to him necessary to fill out the sense. Thus, in the sentence, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance," the words "to repentance" are copied into Matt, ix.13 and Mark ii.17, from Luke v. 32 where they are genuine. Again, the prophetic citation in Matthew xxvii.35 is interpolated from John xix. 24.4 In other instances, separate narratives of the same event, written in the same book, are made to supplement one another. In the account of Paul's conversion given in Acts ix. 3-6, the words, "it is hard for thee to kick against the goad," were taken from xxvi. 14; and the words, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do," from xxii. 10. In other instances, the transcribers, in copying quotations made from the Old Testament by New Testament writers, have extended the quotations. The words, "draweth nigh to me with their mouth" (Matt. xv. 8); "to heal the broken hearted" (Luke iv. 18); "him shall ye hear" (Acts vii. 37), are examples. In these instances the added words are found in the Old Testament, and the New Testament writers had seen fit to omit them, but the transcribers took the liberty to insert them.

3. To support a doctrine. There is only a very small number of variations which can be suspected of a doctrinal origin; and fortunately none of these affects materially the doctrine of the Scripture as a whole on the subject involved. Yet the difference between manuscripts in regard to the following readings can scarcely be accounted for on any other hypothesis. In Mat. xix.17, some MS. read: "Why callst thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God." Others, " Why askest thou me concerning that which is good? One there is who is good." In John i. 18, some read "the only begotten son;" others, "the only begotten God." In Acts xx. 28 some read "the church of God which he bath purchased with his own blood;" others, "the Church of the Lord," etc. It is highly probable that, no matter which of the readings in each of these instances is the original, intemperate zeal on the question of the Trinity led to the insertion of the other in the copies which have it. It is possible that in some of them the scribe regarded the objectionable reading as a mistake of his predecessor, yet doctrinal prejudice is the most probable cause of his so thinking.  

When we consider all of the foregoing sources of corruption to which the sacred text was exposed for fourteen hundred years, the multitude of accidental mistakes to which a long line of copyists were exposed, the constant temptation of ambitious scholars to make what they might think improvements in the style, and the almost irresistible inclination on the part of sectaries engaged in fierce controversy to make the Scriptures conform to their dogmas, we have reason to be surprised, not that there are so many various readings, but that they are so few and of so little importance. Nothing short of a miracle could have prevented their existence, and nothing short of reverence for divine things can have so limited their number and character.

1 Dr. Scrivener remarks in regard to this source of error: "One is not very willing to believe that manuscripts of the better class were executed on so slovenly and careless a plan;" and he thinks that "the confusion of certain vowels and diphthongs having nearly the same sound" can be accounted for on other suppositious. Doubtless he is correct; and it may be added, that no scribe would trust himself to this method who did not regard himself as very proficient in Greek orthography; yet, while all this is true of manuscripts of the "better class," it may not be true of those of inferior classes, and a supposition so natural in itself, and adopted by all other critics, can not be set aside entirely by the counter-supposition of a single critic. .See Scriv. Int., 10

2 Scrivener's Int., 46, 47.

3 The student who understands Greek syntax may find a number of examples of this class of corrections in Scrivener's Introduction. 13 (12).

4 Scrivener makes the very apposite remark, that the tendency to thus fill up one narrative from another must have been aggravated by the laudable effort of Biblical scholars (beginning with Tatian's Diatesseron in the second century) to construct a satisfactory harmony of them all. Int., 12 (9).