THE PROBLEM OF ACCOUNTING FOR WESTERN VARIATIONS.

It may doubtless be said that WH do not pretend to have succeeded in recovering the text of the original autographs, but only that they have got as near that text as it is nowpossible to arrive. Still, if any one were to defend the assertion that the British expedition had arrived at Khartoum by saying, Of course I did not mean that they had actually got to Khartoum, but only that they had got as near it as under present circumstances it is possible to arrive, we should reply, If the expedition has only got as far as Dongola, it would be better to say Dongola and not Khartoum. When WH refuse to give a local name to the readings they prefer, and designate them as neutral, that is to say, as free from corruptions of various kinds, they are disguising from themselves and from their readers that the question what text has the most early attestation cannot be decisively answered.

As I have already said, the honour we give to our four Gospels ultimately rests on the fact that all over the Christian world they were from the first recognized as the specially trustworthy records of the Saviour's life. But this unanimity of testimony respecting the books regarded as substantial wholes does not continue to prevail when we desire to remove variations of readings; for such variations are found to exist as far as we can trace the history back. Some of our most valuable information about early various readings is got from Origen, and when he tells us what were the readings of the MSS. which he accounted the best and oldest, we may safely infer what was then the approved text in the Church of Alexandria. But quite as early testimony convinces us that readings different in several points were at the same date approved in the West. It would seem then that if we desire a text absolutely free from ambiguity we desire what God has never been pleased to give His Church; nor do I see that the ambiguity affects the proof of anything that can be supposed to be necessary to our salvation to know.

But if we desire to solve the literary problem of determining what readings can claim to have belonged to the earliest form of the Gospels, it does not seem that success is likely to be attained if we begin by setting aside half the witnesses. Hort's method of casting aside Western readings as worthless has certainly the advantage of much simplifying the problem; but it reminds me too strongly of the Irish juryman who, after he had heard counsel on one side, decided that it only perplexed his judgment to listen to what the other side had to say. When we have rejected all the "Syrian" witnesses, that is to say, the overwhelming majority of all the less ancient MSS., and all the Western witnesses, that is to say, a majority of all the ancient ones, we find criticism made very easy. We have but to follow B, and are only embarrassed when that MS. fails us, or in the rare cases where its readings are clearly inadmissible. But considering how early the Gospel found its way to Rome, and what a part that city played in early Church history, it is strange that its testimony to the earliest form of the Gospel text should be so very worthless.

No doubt it is credible that bad MSS. as well as good found their way to the West As there were early Alexandrian and later Alexandrian, so there were early Western and later Western; there were Western texts which were Roman, and others which were Western in a wider sense. Thus the task of discrimination may be difficult; but we must not conceive that we have solved a problem because for our convenience we have simplified it. True such simplification may be a first, and a necessary, step to the solution. It is thus that in theoretical mechanics we study the operation of forces, at first putting out of sight such disturbing elements as friction, resistance of the air, etc., which complicate the practical problems with which we have to deal. And doubtless the study of the Alexandrian evidence by itself is an important simplification of the critical problem, and has led to results of permanent value. But the problem has not been completely solved until we have taken account of the evidence which has been temporarily neglected. When modern explorers set themselves to discover the sources of the Nile, they found after they had traced the river a long way up, that they had come to a confluence, where two streams united to form the river as previously known. Who could blame them in such a case if they followed the branch of which the navigation was the more easy? But we should condemn their proceeding as arbitrary if they declared that this branch alone deserved to be called the Nile, and therefore that it was quite needless to trace the course of the other. A stay-at-home critic, himself quite incapable of exploring, might without immodesty declare the work to be imperfect until the neglected branch had been explored, and might urge the task on others better qualified than himself to do it successfully. And so I have thought that I could without immodesty give my opinion that the last word on the subject of New Testament criticism had not been said until the question of the origin of Western readings had received more attention than WH had been disposed to give it.

A reader of WH would have no other explanation suggested to him of the licentiousness of Western scribes than, to use a now current expression, that these scribes had been born with a double dose of original sin. It is the more hard to believe in so curious a geographical phenomenon because there does not seem to be historic ground for the opinion that Christians in the West were less solicitous than those in the East for preserving the purity of the sacred text. At the beginning of the third century the Roman presbyter Caius used language concerning the impiety of those who tampered with the Gospel text quite as strong as Burgon himself could have employed; and towards the end of the preceding century Irenaeus is found using arguments which could have no force to one who did not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Evangelists. So we are tempted to examine more closely an explanation that had been suggested of the fact that some things are attested by the vast majority of the MSS. of Luke's writings which we would gladly believe to be genuine, yet cannot understand how, if so, they could be omitted from certain very early MSS. which do not contain them. It has been suggested that Luke may have published two editions of his Gospel, adding in the second edition some supplementary statements which had been absent from the first. If this were so, we should be wrong in assuming the shorter text to be the only genuine one and in ascribing all additions to it to the licentiousness of transcribers. Both editions would be genuine, and the fuller one, as having the author's last care, would be the more valuable of the two. But the earliest witnesses who speak of our Gospels as being in circulation in their time are very many years too late to be able to give us authentic information as to the circumstances of their first publication. We can therefore have no external evidence enabling us either to confirm or reject the hypothesis of a double edition.

Hort (p. 177) dismisses this hypothesis with scant consideration, finding that the readings affected by it have little note of originality, and in some cases the reverse. Bishop Lightfoot, however, had taken a more favourable view of this hypothesis. Speaking of the omission in some texts of the words addressed to James and John (Luke ix. 56), of the agony in the garden (xxii. 43, 44), and the solemn words on the cross (xxiii. 34), he says¹: "It seems impossible to believe that these incidents are other than authentic, and the solution will suggest itself that the Evangelist himself may have issued two separate editions. This conjecture will be confirmed by observing that in the second treatise of St. Luke similar traces of two editions are seen, where the passages omitted in many texts, though not important in themselves (e.g. Acts xxviii. 16, 29),² bear equal evidence of authenticity, and are entirely free from suspicion on the ground that they were inserted to serve any purpose devotional or doctrinal." And a little time ago Blass, proceeding on the lines that Lightfoot had indicated, showed by a careful study of the Acts that the hypothesis of a double edition of that work deserves serious consideration; and therefore that the hypothesis of a double edition of the Gospel cannot be summarily dismissed.

There is no document that has been thought more worthless for critical purposes than the text of the Acts as given by Codex D. In a great number of places where the sense agrees with the Received Text, the wording appears to have been licentiously and causelessly altered; and, besides, there are several alterations affecting the sense, as well as additions to the Received Text, which it had seemed impossible to accept on so suspicious authority. But on a careful examination of these variations, Blass has come to the conclusion, which in my opinion he has fully proved, that some of them show such independent knowledge of the facts and the circumstances, that no satisfactory account can be given of the statements except that they rest on the authority of Luke.³ And in some of the variations which have not this internal note of genuineness D does not stand alone, for some of its peculiarities are found in quotations from the Acts by early Latin Fathers.⁴

Blass's account of the matter is that Luke, having made a rough draft of his history, desired to make a handsome copy of it for presentation to Theophilus. Not being rich enough to employ a professional scribe to make the copy, he had to make it himself, and naturally, instead of slavishly following his first draft, exercised the freedom which an author can lawfully take with a work of his own, in altering phraseology and lopping superfluities. From both forms of the work Blass imagines that copies were made; the current text representing to us the copy made for Theophilus, while copies made from the original draft had some circulation in the West.

If we had to deal only with the Acts, I should look for no other explanation of the facts. But if the fact of a double edition of the Acts is established, it becomes probable that the like may be true of the Gospel; and it does not seem a priori improbable that when Luke published the Acts he might also have published a revised edition of the Gospel. Blass has accepted the challenge to extend his theory to Luke's Gospel, of which also he holds that there were two editions, save that in this case he believes that the Received Text represents the earlier form published while Luke was still in the East, and the Western text the revised form published after the Evangelist had visited Rome. But clearly speculations concerning the Gospels and the Acts stand on a different footing; both for other reasons, and because it is not possible in the former case, as it is in the latter, to establish the conjecture by pointing out statements not contained in the Received Text which could scarcely have come from any hand but Luke's.

1 therefore do not scruple to offer an alternative way of accounting for the phenomena which seems to me to deserve consideration viz. that Luke may have continued to reside at Rome after the expiration of Paul's two years, and may there have given readings of his work; and that explanatory statements which he then made were preserved in the West. It need hardly be mentioned that public recitation was a form of publication which prevailed in the days when Juvenal counted it as one of the plagues of Rome that even the month of August put no stop to the recitation of their works by poets. We may give no credence to the account that Herodotus read his history at the Olympian games; but at the time when Lucian told the story that must have seemed a natural mode of publication. In fact, long after the art of writing came into use it must have remained a rare accomplishment, used rather for the preservation than the propagation of knowledge. Grown men, like young children nowadays, liked to have stories read to them, before they were able to read them for themselves; and there must have been a considerable use of the art of writing before there was any very general use of the art of reading. In the apostolic age Rome may be regarded as a literary city; books were numerous, and not dear; yet we may well believe that there was a large number of people who found it pleasanter to hear them read than to read them for themselves. In any case, we need not doubt that the great bulk of the early Christian community knew the Gospel history, not from the reading of the book, but from hearing it read Sunday after Sunday. We know, from the earliest authorities who tell us anything of the Christian weekly service, that the reading of the Gospel history formed part of it, and we need not doubt that before the Gospel was put into writing, the story was told by those best able to relate it.

I may mention without laying stress on it a speculation of my own, that the office of evangelists of whom the New Testament makes mention without defining their special function may have been this telling of the Gospel story. Philip, who was called the Evangelist, was plainly a person who had had good opportunities for qualifying himself for such work. When Paul and Barnabas took Mark with them as their travelling companion, it may have been on account of his special fitness for this duty. Later Luke may have discharged the same office. The young Timothy might have shown quickness of apprehension and strength of memory such as to induce Paul to take him with him, and train him for this work of an evangelist which he is afterwards exhorted to fulfil.

However this may be, what I consider we ought to bear in mind is that the first publication of the Gospel story was oral and official. When I say official, I mean that if we take our Gospels to be embodiments of an oral tradition, it was not one formed by individual Christians writing down things which they had happened to hear from Apostles or other actual disciples of our Lord, but by their preserving the form in which authorized teachers had weekly proclaimed it in the Church. Thus I reject the account of the genesis of our Gospels given by Renan, whose idea is that an originally meagre outline was filled in with stories which individual Christians had written, each in the margin of his own copy, according as they touched his heart. Such a conception is not appropriate to times when it is not to be assumed that Christians in general possessed pocket Bibles, in which they could make notes from time to time; and it is not to be thought probable that changes made by private authority could get any wide circulation. On the contrary, I believe that no changes took place in the Gospel text read in the public services except by the direction of the bishop or other presiding authority by whom the services were regulated. On the other hand, I believe, as I have already said, that with such direction moderate changes could easily be made.⁵ Thus, though I have had difficulty in accepting Hort's hypothesis of a Syrian revision, when the changes seemed to be represented as effected by the influence of some unknown scholar, the hypothesis becomes credible to me if the reviser were supposed to have succeeded in inspiring with confidence some leading bishop.

The fact, however, remains to be accounted for that very early in the history of the Church there came to be differences between the Gospels as read at Rome and at Alexandria. But it is obvious that the conditions of learning the Gospel story must have been different in the two places. Alexandria was a city that did not much He in the way of the earliest Christian preachers; and its knowledge of our Lord's history is likely to have been mainly derived from written records brought there by an early convert. Blass finds an indication of this in the Acts, and I am not prepared to dismiss his speculation as altogether baseless. In Acts xvii. 25 Apollos is described as speaking and teaching ἀκριβῶς the things concerning Jesus, but knowing only the baptism of John until Priscilla and Aquila expounded to him the way of God ἀκριβέστερον. Some time ago a learned lay friend proposed to me a conjectural emendation for the word ἀκριβῶς, and certainly there seemed need for emendation; for how could one who did not know about Christian baptism be said to know our religion accurately? The New Testament Revisers seem to have felt the difficulty; for they depart from their rule of translating as far as possible the same Greek words by the same English, and translate "carefully" the word ἀκριβῶς, which they translate " exactly " in the other places where it occurs in the Acts (xxiii. 15, 20, xxiv. 22). But the word " carefully " is here not appropriate, for clearly the fault found with the teaching of Apollos is not want of diligence, but want of exact knowledge. And yet his knowledge was defective in a point which one would think must have been one of the first things the Christian who converted him must have taught him (see Acts ii. 38, viii. 16, 36). How then was it possible for Apollos to know accurately the story of our Lord, and yet not have heard of the necessity of being baptized in His name?

Blass's solution is, Apollos (or perhaps we should rather say his teacher) had not been in oral communication with any of the apostolic company, but had learned the religion from a book. If, for instance, the Gospel of St. Mark in the shorter form had already reached Alexandria, he might have learned from it accurately everything about our Lord's teaching, His mighty works, and His death, yet have learned nothing about the necessity of any baptism but John's. It would be very interesting if we could find reason to think that a written Gospel could have reached Alexandria at so early a date as that of the conversion of Apollos. However that may be, it seems unlikely that any teacher could have reached Alexandria with authority such as to make him be thought capable of improving on the written records that had come to them; and in that literary city the form in which the Gospel had originally reached it would be likely to be preserved with little substantial alteration.

But it was quite otherwise with Rome, which from the very first was visited by men who had at least heard of our Lord from those who had actually conversed with Him, and soon after by men of the very highest authority in the Christian Church. Men who had firsthand knowledge of the facts were not likely to be left unquestioned; and in particular those two visitors to Rome, Luke and Mark, who had written Gospels, were likely to be asked for explanations, if anything in their writings seemed to need it; and these explanations would be likely to be preserved after they had gone, and to be read in the Church as authorized commentary on their writings. It must be remembered that official shorthand reporting was common at the time. Here again we come in contact with the Synoptic question; for one of the explanations which have been offered of the verbal differences between the Evangelists where they tell substantially the same story, is that they arise from the natural variations between the reports given by two different hearers of a story orally delivered in the presence of both. I am tempted to regard favourably this way of accounting for Western variations in St. Luke's Gospel, because I think that if there had been a definite Western written text we should have been able to reproduce it in a way that we cannot now.

It may not always be easy to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized commentary. Thus the verse (Acts xv. 34), " It pleased Silas to abide there still," gives an obvious explanation which might have occurred to any intelligent reader; but it may also be the answer given by Luke himself to the question, " Did you not say that Silas had been sent away?" So again Acts viii. 37 may have been, as good critics think, a later interpolation; but it may also be that it gives Luke's answer to the question, And was the eunuch baptized without being asked for any profession of belief?⁶ But when we find in the Western text of the Acts other less obvious explanations which imply knowledge not likely to be in possession of any one but the author himself, we are disposed to take a more favourable view of the cases which are open to doubt.

The same remark applies to the Gospel. Thus the words of our Lord's rebuke to James and John, when they asked leave to call down fire from heaven on a village of the Samaritans, have only Western authority, and therefore find no place in the text either of Tischendorf or of WH. Yet though the words, " I am not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them," are such as we can well imagine a disciple of our Lord's attributing to his Master,⁷ yet the preceding words, " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of," are far less obvious, and are more like tradition than invention. If Luke in reading his Gospel had merely told that our Lord had rebuked His disciples, curious hearers might naturally ask, What did He say?

Whatever we may think of this particular case, it seems to me a mistake to regard Western variations as licentious additions made by audacious scribes who did not scruple to insert in the Gospel text anything they happened to hear. On the contrary, many of them express, as I believe, the form in which the Gospel was read in the Church of Rome in apostolic or sub-apostolic times. To reject this form without examination, because it contained some things which did not find their way to Alexandria, is to shut our eyes to the fact that Rome was visited by teachers of the highest authority, able to speak of the facts from first-hand knowledge. We might as well praise a publisher who, having got hold of a first edition of Tennyson's poems, should now give to the world a pure text cleared of the alterations and additions by which subsequent editions had been corrupted.

Even the most licentious changes of all, such as we find in Codex D, where the words of one Gospel are boldly inserted in another, do not indicate disrespect for the authority of the Gospel thus arbitrarily dealt with, but were rather suggested by a sense of the co-ordinate and equal authority of all. It is men who have the strongest belief even in the verbal inspiration of the books of Scripture, who, paying little attention to the human element in their authorship, and regarding God as alike the author of all, in their interpretations combine texts from different books, which a critic of a different school might regard as having no relation to each other. Such a work as Tatian's Diatessaron was probably called forth by the exigencies of missionary labour. When the Gospel story had to be told to a congregation with little previous knowledge of it, the question would arise, In what form shall it be told? which of our four Gospels shall we read for them? And it was a not unnatural decision to refuse to perplex the minds of an unlearned congregation with a variety of forms, but rather combine the four into one continuous Gospel. The same question that arose in Assyria would arise also in Southern Gaul; and the idea which Tatian afterwards completely carried out may have been either learned by him, or have been suggested by him to others, while he was still resident in the West.

1) Fresh Revision of English New Testament, p. 29.

2) These two verses have been ruthlessly cut out of the text of the Revised New Testament; yet in the verse which tells that the centurion " delivered the prisoners to the captain of the guard," the latter word must have been read by the author of the translation preserved in the Gigas, which renders τῷ στρατοπεδάρχῃ, pirincipi peregrinorum, on the meaning of which phrase see Harnack and Mommsen (Berichte der Berl. Akad., 1895, 491). It is well worth while to read Mommsen's explanation who that officer was and why he was the very person to whom the charge of Paul was likely to be transferred by the centurion. This version must have been made while there was still a precise recollection at Rome of the officer in whose custody Paul had been placed. Naturally this was a point which might well be omitted from an edition intended for Easterns.

3) Blass has published a restoration of this Western version, using other authorities besides Codex D, in which he considers that the purity of the Western text has suffered by mixture with the other type. The witnesses, however, to this Western text are so scanty, and in places so defective, that while I am convinced that some things in that text certainly rest on apostolic authority, there are many more in Blass's restored text which do not so clearly commend themselves to me. If there were from the first two authoritative texts, there was not only likely to arise a mixture of the two, but also a tendency of scribes to be less punctilious in adhering to the text of their archetype when once they had recognized that it had no exclusive authority.

4) More recently Conybeare (American Journal of Philology) has found traces of the Western recension of the Acts in an Armenian translation of a commentary on the book by Ephraem Syrus. He finds also the curious result that the commentary on the Acts ascribed to Chrysostom appears to have been based on an older commentary, several of its explanations being based on the Western recension, which, however, was not used by the commentator himself.

5) On this account it seems to me on reflection that Burgon's explanation, which I once thought quite ridiculous, why the MSS. א and B have survived to our time, may be accepted with some modification. These MSS. were evidently written for use in the public Church service. If they had continued to be so used, they would in due time have been hacked to pieces, and would now not reach us, except possibly in fragments as palimpsests. It is probable, therefore, that at some period of their existence they were withdrawn from Church use, and were chiefly preserved on account of their cost and beauty. Why they were withdrawn we cannot tell. It may have been because the bishop preferred the text current in his time; but it may have been merely because a smaller and less costly book was judged to be more convenient to be placed in the readers' hands.

6) If, as has been suggested, the story of a baptism without a profession of faith was likely to have given offence at Rome, a baptism with a profession so meagre, as compared with subsequent Church use, was equally likely to have given offence at Alexandria.

7) It might be said that these words were suggested by John xii. 47, " I came not to judge the world, but to save the world" (see also John iii. 17). On the other hand, if the Western tradition is correct that our Lord addressed these words to John, it was natural that they should dwell in his memory, and make it natural for him to recall similar utterances. Even if it be denied that John wrote the fourth Gospel, in that case its author must have been much indebted to Luke's Gospel, and the existence of passages in the fourth Gospel might strengthen the case for their existence in the third.