THE OMISSIONS OF THE WESTERN TEXT.

The multitude of authorities for the New Testament text is so enormous, and the difficulty of adjudging between rival claims so great, that we ought to be grateful to WH for simplifying so complicated a problem by at once striking away all post-Syrian authorities; that is to say, they turn out of court all but a few of the witnesses in attendance. We are thus left to choose between the Alexandrian and the Western witnesses. But the latter are next set aside as unworthy of credit, on account of their too great licentiousness and their indifference to verbal accuracy. With one exception, to be presently mentioned, Hort never follows merely Western authority, so that his may be pronounced to be a thoroughly

Protestant New Testament, the fact that a reading is Roman being regarded as enough to condemn it. Yet the Gospel came earlier to Rome than to Alexandria; and Christians necessarily flocking to Rome, as Irenaeus remarks, from all parts of the world, must have brought with them MSS. from all quarters. Some of these no doubt would be good and some bad; so that the choice between them might be expected to be difficult: but it does not seem rational to cast all aside en masse as absolutely unworthy of examination. I had thought of comparing this successive elimination of untrustworthy witnesses to the process by which Gideon weeded his army of the soldiers on whom he could not rely; but even Gideon's reduced army is too large to represent the force on which WH depend. I ought rather to have thought of the victory won by Jonathan and his armour-bearer; for the majority of the Alexandrian witnesses are not thought worthy of more than a local name; and what Hort really trusts is B with the sometimes doubtful assistance of א.

Hort's limitation of admissible witnesses to a single line of testimony has led to two consequences, with neither of which I am satisfied. The first is that he regards conjectural emendations with less disfavour than cautious critics of late have done. Of course the field open for conjecture is the wider the more scanty the MS. evidence. In the case of a classical author, whose text may ultimately depend on the testimony of a single witness, a licence of conjecture is quite legitimate, which is not justifiable in the case of the New Testament, of which we have so many MSS. that it is scarcely likely that the true reading should not have been preserved in some one of them. As new MSS. are discovered our confidence in the most plausible conjecture is abated. When the text of Clement's Epistle rested on but one MS., I thought Wordsworth's emendation (c. 6) νεάνιδες παιδίσκαι instead of δαναίδες καὶ δίρκαι almost certainly right. I have not the same confidence now that the since discovered MS. evidence gives the conjecture no support. Evidently the depreciation of all authorities except the early Alexandrian leads to willingness to accept conjecture as some relief for the voluntary poverty to which we have reduced ourselves.

The second consequence of Hort's confidence in his system is his belief that it is liable to little modification from subsequent discovery of MSS. or from increased knowledge by careful collation of existing MSS. His " siege has been made," and he thinks it a work of little necessity to add to his materials. In fact, though Hort bestowed enormous labour on the formation of his system, he has enabled his disciples to set up as critical editors with as small an apparatus as Burgon himself might have found necessary. Burgon might have given the instruction: " Follow the Textus Receptus, unless you come across something very clearly wrong." Hort does not give the instruction, "In the Gospels always follow B," any more than Cato the elder explicitly laid down that agriculture, and especially pasturage, was the only way in which a gentleman could honourably make an income. But Hort's rules very much remind me of Cato's " A quo cum quaereretur quid maxime in re familiari expediret respondit, Bene pascere. Quid secundum? Satis bene pascere. Quid tertium? Male pascere. Quid quartum? Arare. Et cum ille qui qusereret dixisset, Quid fcenerari? turn Cato, Quid hominem, inquit, occidere."¹

So Hort, if consulted what authority should be followed, might answer, Follow B א; accept their readings as true, unless there is strong internal evidence to the contrary, and never think it safe to reject them absolutely. But suppose B has not the support of א? Still follow B, if it has the support of any other MS. But suppose B stands alone? Unless it is clearly a clerical error, it is not safe to reject B. But suppose B is defective? Then follow א. What about adopting the Western reading? What about killing a man?

If more new MS. evidence should come to light, there is no reason why it should be treated with more respect than that which has been already rejected. The first question would be, Is it post-Syrian? In that case it might be treated with the same disregard as the great bulk of our existing MSS. which are of that class. Much the same might be said if its text were Western; and that even if the MS. were undoubtedly as old as the second century. If by a rare chance its text was of the same type as א B, then indeed it would be valuable, and would give additional strength to the conclusions already arrived at; but no possible find could affect these main conclusions, though it might be interesting to note some sporadic varieties of reading, and though its testimony might be accepted as throwing light on a few cases where the present evidence seems nearly balanced.

There is just one case where it would really deserve to be listened to with deference, and that is if it omitted anything found in all our present authorities. Hort himself, in criticising Tischendorf's Greek Testament, had censured him, because "he makes the worst, or at best very bad, evidence if supported by a canon of probability outweigh the best evidence standing alone."² He himself had insisted that it is exceedingly precarious to ignore the relative antecedent credibility of witnesses, and trust exclusively to our own inward power of singling out the true readings from their counterfeits. Consequently he lays down as a canon that knowledge of documents should precede final judgments upon readings. Accordingly he examines the documents with the result that among readings whose attestation is ancient, he attributes the very highest value to the combination א B, and the very lowest to the Western readings. But when it is a question about omission, if a small handful of Western MSS. omit words which are found not only in א B, but in all other authorities, he decides in favour of omission.

The inconsistency is very marked in the last verses of St. Luke's Gospel. The very same authorities which omit καὶ ἀνεφέρετο εἰς τὸν οὐρανόν in ver. 51, read αὐνοῦντες instead of εὐλογοῦντες in ver. 53. Tischendorf thought that he could not consistently follow them in the one case and forsake them in the other. Consequently, as he decided on omitting the clause in ver. 51, he thought himself bound to edit αἰνοῦντες in ver. 53. WH, acting on their ordinary principles, reject the Western αἰνοῦντες; but in a question of omission they follow the authorities they reject in ver. 53, and pronounce the suppression of the clause in ver. 51, as well as of another in ver. 52, to be a case, not of omission, but of non-interpolation.

Hort's reason for always in similar cases preferring the shorter reading is founded on a canon of probability. Transcribers, he holds, were much more likely to add to the text than to omit, their universal tendency being to make their text as full as possible; for no transcriber would willingly omit any genuine word of the Gospel, though, through fear of thus mutilating the divine record, he might include in his copy some clauses on too slender authority. It must be accepted as a fact that in the early centuries the Gospels as read in one place contained some clauses not found in the Gospels as read in another. Whether any explanation can be given of this may be discussed later on. At present I will only say that I believe it to be far too extreme a rule to lay down that in the admission of a verse into the New Testament text a single black bean shall exclude. As to the dictum that scribes were more likely to add than to omit, it is true when the work of the scribe was editorial, but not so when it was merely mechanical. A compositor at a printing office might easily drop out a word or line of his copy, but would never dream of inserting one of his own. It may be presumed that the production of the very earliest copies of the Gospels was merely mechanical, and that critical comparison of different copies and additions to them belong to a somewhat later stage.

However this may be, I feel no doubt with regard to the example I have quoted that WH are wrong in treating the clause ἀνεφέρετο εἰς τὸν οὐρανόν as an interpolation, and that the word "omission" is properly applied to the leaving out of words clearly necessary to the context. For if we leave them out, we find that St. Luke closes his Gospel by relating an interview, at the end of which our Lord, who had led His disciples out as far as Bethany, parted from them, whereupon they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. We ask what was the cause of their joy; were the disciples glad that their Lord had left them? And it would seem that they took His departure as final, for thereafter they were continually in the Temple blessing God. Again, we are told that He parted from them ἐν τῷ εὐλογεῖν, in the act of blessing them. This is pictorially quite intelligible if the parting was by way of an ascension, but otherwise it is difficult to conceive in what way a departure in the act of blessing could be accomplished.

The violence of Burgon's attack on the rejecters of the conclusion of St. Mark's Gospel seems somewhat to have disturbed Hort's calmness of judgment, and to have made him keen-sighted to watch and close every possible door against the admission of the disputed verses. In this case he takes occasion to profess his belief not only that the story of the Ascension was no part of St. Mark's Gospel, but that it ought not to find a place in any Gospel. He says that this interpolation in St. Luke was inserted from an assumption that a separation from the disciples at the close of the Gospel must be the Ascension; but that this apparently did not lie within the proper scope of the Gospels as seen in their genuine texts. But this does not appear to have been the opinion of St. Luke himself, who, in the beginning of the Acts, states that the subject of his former treatise had been the things which Jesus began to do and teach up to the day of His Ascension, ἄχρι ἧς ἡμέρας ἀνελήμφθη.

Now it is remarkable that the same Western authorities which omit the clause in the Gospel vary much from the Received Text in the opening of the Acts. In fact, Blass in his attempt to restore the Western text of the Acts leaves out this reference to the Ascension, and we have instead a reference to a parting charge of our Lord to His Apostles, such as we find at the conclusion of St. Matthew's Gospel, and of St. Mark's according to the fuller text. Speculation as to the origin of this difference belongs to another branch of the subject, about which a few words must be said later on. Here it will suffice to say that there was an obvious reason why a reviser might be tempted to get rid of the mention of the Ascension at the conclusion of St. Luke; for the impression which the Gospel gives a reader is that the Ascension took place on the same day as the Resurrection, whereas the Acts, written probably after the Evangelist had acquired fuller knowledge by intercourse with those who had companied with our Lord, places an interval of forty days between them.³ In any case it ought to be seen that the discussion of the true reading of the last verses of St. Luke cannot be separated from the discussion of the true reading of the opening verses of the Acts. I am persuaded that critics will be forced to acknowledge that the Gospel as read in the second century in the Church of Rome differed in a few particulars from that read at the same date in Alexandria. Critics may discuss which of these texts is authoritative, or whether both may be so; but I am sure that an arbitrarily created hybrid between the two is wrong; and this is the kind of text more than once exhibited by WH in the closing verses of St. Luke.

There being then a good way of accounting for the dropping out of the clause, what Hort calls intrinsic probability and transcriptional probability agree in approving the reading which has the strongest possible documentary attestation; yet all this avails nothing when coming into collision with Hort's canon that an addition to the text is always more likely than an omission, or rather, that the former is likely enough, the latter almost inconceivable.⁴

If I cannot adopt Hort's decision in this case, the knowledge of the overpowering weight which this principle has with him abates something of my confidence in following his rulings in some other cases. I have already said that we do not get rid of the subjective element if, instead of trusting on our judgment to decide in particular cases which reading is most probably correct, we follow the documents which we have found to be most deserving of confidence. For still everything depends on the correctness of the judgment we form as to which documents are most worthy of confidence; and after this specimen of Hort's adoption of an omission, in the teeth both of documentary evidence and of considerations of probability, a suspicion arises whether it is correct to say that WH exclude certain passages from their text because the best documents omit them, or rather that WH account those documents the best because of their omissions.

The other cases of what Hort designates as Western non-interpolations in the closing chapters of St. Luke's Gospel deserve a fuller discussion than can be given here without lengthening this essay too much. I merely mention a speculation which accounts for signs of compression, at the end both of the third Gospel and of the Acts, by a theory that the papyrus books of the day were made in definite sizes, to which copyists and writers had to conform. Copyists would be most tempted to compression and omission when space was failing them towards the end of their book. If writers had more to say than their book could hold, they made a new book. Thus it has been suggested that the manner in which the Gospel closes indicates that the author contemplated a continuation. So likewise that we may gather from the manner in which the story of the Acts breaks off, leaving untold much that we should wish to know, that if the author had lived he would have given us a continuation of the history.

1) Cic, De Off., ii. 88.

2) Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, iv. 207.

3) This interval was further extended to a year and a half by some of the Gnostic sects. Their object evidently was to find space for the communication by our Lord to His Apostles of the secret doctrines of which these sects claimed to be in possession. Although some of these sects arose very early in the second century, the Gospels which we still have must by that time have gained such recognition as the only authentic account of the public life of our Lord, that it was felt that it would be difficult to gain acceptance for an addition to the history of the period with which their narrative dealt.

4) I do not know whether Hort's rule of always preferring omissions would have led him to prefer to the Greek text of the Gospels Mrs. Lewis's Syriac, which is shorter than any other known text.