garded with great suspicion, and, unless upheld by strong internal evidence, can hardly be adopted.

(3) That in the far more numerous cases where the most ancient documents are at variance with each other, the later or cursive copies are of much importance, as the surviving representatives of other codices, very probably as early, perhaps even earlier, than any now extant.

It is suggested that on such terms the respective claims of the uncial and cursive, the earlier and more recent codices (and those claims are not in reality conflicting) may be fitly and with good reason adjusted.

19. Since we have not been sparing in our animadversions on that species of Comparative Criticism, which, setting out from a foregone determination to find an ancient, if not a genuine, text only in a certain limited number of documents of every class, shuts out from view the greater portion of the facts that oppose the theory it maintains; it is all the more incumbent on us to say that from another kind of Comparative Criticism, patiently cultivated, without prejudice or exclusive notions, we look for whatever light is yet to be shed on the history and condition of the sacred records. No employment will prove more profitable to the student than his private and independent research into the relation our documents stand in with regard to each other, their affinities, their mutual agreement or diversity. The publication of Cod. & in full (see p. 28) will soon open a wide field to our investigations, which many aspirants will doubtless hasten to occupy and cultivate to the general profit: a single illustration of the nature and results of the process shall now suffice. Those who would seek the primitive text of Scripture rather in the readings of Cod. B, the most widely removed from that commonly received, than in Cod. A1, which (at least in the Gospels) most nearly

1 Since the description of Cod. A (pp. 79–84) was printed off, an 8o edition of the Codex Alexandrinus in common type has appeared in a form to match the Leipsic reprint of Cod. B (see p. 92), but in this instance under the care of a responsible editor, "B. H. Cowper." Like its predecessor, the reprint of Cod. A is burdened with modern breathings and accents: the paragraphs of his codex are departed from, when Mr Cowper judges them inconvenient, and its hiatus are absurdly supplied from Kuster's Mill (1710). These defects, however, may easily

approaches it, are perpetually urging the approximation to the character of the former of those considerable fragments which yet survive, and date from the fifth or sixth century. Tregelles, for instance, describing Cod. R (see p. 114), on which he bestowed such honest, and (for his own fame) such unavailing toil, speaks thus on a matter he might be presumed to have thoroughly examined. "The text of these fragments is ancient; agreeing generally with some of the other copies of the oldest class. The discovery of all such fragments is of importance as affording a confirmation of those results which criticism of the text would previously have indicated" (Tregelles' Horne, p. 184): a confirmation of his system certainly not to be disparaged or explained away, but entitled, so far as it goes, to much attention. Yet after all how stand the facts of the case, when Cod. R is submitted to the test of Comparative Criticism? I have analysed the readings of all the 25 fragments (505 verses), as they stand in the notes to Tregelles' own Greek Testament, and I respectfully commend to that editor's consideration the summary of a result for which his language had in no wise prepared me. Out of the 1008 various readings cited from R, expressly or by implication, that venerable palimpsest stands alone among the manuscripts on Tregelles' list 46 times; with ABCD (but C is sadly mutilated) 23 times; with ABC 51 times; with ABD 57 times; with AB 97 times; with others against AB 131 times (52 of them with the Received text); with B against A 204 times (55 of them with the Received text); but with Cod. A against Cod. B no less than 399 times, in 366 of which it agrees with the textus receptus'. Thus the true character of this "ancient text"

be endured if, as he assures us, the editor has revised Woide's great work, by a careful re-examination of the original, and this statement I found no cause to doubt on the slight comparison between them I have yet been able to make. The Prolegomena too are useful and painstaking, but since Mr Cowper is evidently a novice in these studies, they are calculated to afford the learned on the continent a low opinion of English scholarship. I cordially assent to the editor's approval of the reverential care with which this precious book is treated by the officers of the British Museum: so frail have some of its leaves become, and so liable is the ink to peel or fly off in a kind of impalpable dust, that "however gently the manuscript is handled, it must be deteriorated; and should therefore only be consulted for some really practical purpose" (p. xix). For his opinion respecting its reading in 1 Tim. iii. 16, see Chap. IX.

1 On applying this mode of calculation to the first hundred verses of St Luke contained in Codd. PQ (p. 113), of the sixth and fifth centuries respectively, we

is no longer doubtful; the process by which it is arrived at, if somewhat tedious, is rather more trustworthy than the shrewdest conjecture; and we have one warning the more, furnished too by no mean critic, that αταλαίπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς (and not τοῖς πολλοῖς only) ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται.

find that out of 216 readings recorded for P, 182 for Q, P stands alone 14 times, Q not once: P agrees with others against AB 21 times, Q 19: P agrees with AB united 50 times, Q also 50: P is with B against A 29 times, Q 38: but (in this respect resembling Cod. R) P accords with A against B in 102 places, Q in 75. Codd. AZ have but 23 verses in common; but judged from them Z resembles B much more than A.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONSIDERATIONS DERIVED FROM THE PECULIAR CHARACTER AND GRAMMATICAL FORM OF THE DIALECT OF THE GREEK TESTAMENT.

1.

IT

T will not be expected of us to enter in this place upon the wide subject of the origin, genius, and peculiarities, whether in respect to grammar or orthography, of that dialect of the Greek in which the N. T. was written, except so far as it bears directly upon the criticism of the sacred volume. Questions, however, are perpetually arising, when we come to examine the oldest manuscripts of Scripture, which cannot be resolved unless we bear in mind the leading particulars wherein the diction of the Evangelists and Apostles differs not only from that of pure classical models, but also of their own contemporaries who composed in the Greek language, or used it as their ordinary tongue.

2. The Greek style of the N. T., then, is the result of blending two independent elements, the debased vernacular speech of the age, and that strange modification of the Alexandrian dialect which first appeared in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, and which, from their habitual use of that version, had become familiar to the Jews in all nations under heaven; and was the more readily adopted by those whose native language was Aramaean, from its profuse employment of Hebrew idioms and forms of expression. It is to this latter, the Greek of the Septuagint, of the Apocalypse, and of the foreign Jews, that the name of Hellenistic (Acts vi. 1) strictly applies. St Paul, who was born in a pure Greek city (Juvenal, III. 114–118); perhaps even St Luke, whose original writings1

1 viz. Luke i. I-4, some portion of the Gospel and most of the Acts: excluding such cases as St Stephen's speech, Act. vii, and the parts of his Gospel

savour strongly of Demosthenes and Polybius, cannot be said to have affected the Hellenic, which they must have heard and spoken from their cradles. Without denying that the Septuagint translation and (by reason of their long sojourning in Palestine) even Syriac phraseology would powerfully influence the style of these inspired penmen, it is not chiefly from these sources that their writings must be illustrated, but rather from the kind of Greek current during their lifetime in Hellenic cities and colonies.

3. Hence may be seen the exceeding practical difficulty of fixing the orthography, or even the grammatical forms prevailing in the Greek Testament, a difficulty arising not only from the fluctuation of manuscript authorities, but even more from the varying circumstances of the respective authors. To St John, for example, Greek must have been an alien tongue; the very construction of his sentences and the subtle current of his thoughts amidst all his simplicity of mere diction, render it evident (even could we forget the style of his Apocalypse) that he thought in Aramaean: divergencies from the common Greek type might be looked for in him and those Apostles whose situation resembled his, which it is very unlikely would be adopted by Paul of Tarsus. Bearing these facts always in mind (for the style of the New Testament is too apt to be treated as an uniform whole), we will proceed to discuss briefly, yet as distinctly as may be, a few out of the many perplexities of this description to which the study of the original codices at once introduces us.

4. One of the most striking of them regards what is called v éþeλкvσтikóv, the "v attached", which has been held to be an ν ἐφελκυστικόν, arbitrary and secondary adjunct. This letter, however, which is "of most frequent occurrence at the end of words, is itself of such a weak and fleeting consistency, that it often becomes inaudible, and is omitted in writing" (Donaldson, Greek Grammar, p. 53, 2nd edit.). Hence, though, through the difficulty of pronunciation, it became usual to neglect it before a consonant, it always comprised a real portion of the word to which it was annexed, and the great Attic poets are full of verses which

which resemble in style, and were derived from the same sources as, those of SS. Matthew and Mark.