53. Again, a careful comparison of these readings with their rivals will help us to understand why it has now come to be admitted on both sides that the differences between the Traditional Text and the ‘Neutral’ or the ‘Western’ cannot be explained as due merely to the normal accidents of trans- mission. The changes bear too clearly stamped upon them the marks of method and deliberation, and have been carried out too consistently, not to be the result of design. Dr. Hort expressed his opinion on this point with remarkable boldness and precision, asserting that a thorough examination of the facts pointed not to one only, but to two careful revisions under editorial supervision—the first after the death of Origen, and the second about the middle of the 4th century. This second revision he saw reason, as has been already pointed out, to connect with the Church of Antioch. None of his conclusions has roused so much scorn and indigna- tion among his opponents, or has been so unspar- ingly denounced as groundless and visionary. But time and further study under the stimulus of con- troversy have brought a more intelligent apprecia- tion of the phenomena. Dean Burgon (Trad. Tezxt, p. 234), though ‘not so simple as to pretend to fix the precise date and assign a definite locality to the fontal source, or sources, of our perplexit and distress,’ yet suspects ‘ that in the little hand- ful of authorities which have acquired such a notoriety in the annals of recent Textual Criticism, at the head of which stand Codices B and &,
* Dr. Salmon seems hardly to do justice to the attitude of WH on this last point. Itis true, in a sense, that, as he says (p. 155), they investigated the subject merely as a ‘literary prob- lem.’ It is difficult to see how, if their work was to have any scientific value, and to provide materials on which a student of the Apostolic age can work with confidence, they could have done otherwise. All considerations of immediate edification had to be rigorously excluded. At the same time they would be the last people in the world to dispute Dr. Salmon’s doctrine of “the well-illuminated penumbra.’ A highly developed literary conscience does not necessarily imply a rigidly mechanical theory of Inspiration.
The text adopted by the Revisers really represents that kind of compromise which Dr. Salmon’s argument would desiderate. In it distinct recognition is given to ‘prescriptive rights.’ Pas- sages like the pericope de adultera and Mk 169-°0 are retained in their familiar places for public use. At the same time, the student receives due warning of the difference in authentication between these passages and their surroundings.
are to be recognized the characteristic features of a lost family of (once well-known) 2nd or 3rd cent. documents, which owed their existence to the misguided zeal of some well-intentioned but utterly incompetent persons who devoted themselves to the task of correcting the Text of Scripture, but were entirely unfit for the undertaking.’ Mr. Miller sees reason to place this editorial activity at an even earlier period (Causes of Corr. p. 22, note); ‘Iam inclined to believe that, in the age immediately succeeding the apostles, some person or persons of great influence and authority executed a Re- vision of the NT, and gave the world the result of such labours in a “‘corrected Text.” The guiding principle seems to have been to seek to abridge the Text, to lop off whatever seemed redundant, or which might in any way be spared, and to elimi- nate from one Gospel whatever expressions occurred elsewhere in another Gospel. Clauseswhich slightly obscured the speaker’s meaning, or which seemed to hang loose at the end of a sentence, or which intro- duced a consideration of difficulty,—words which interfered with the easy flow of a sentence, — everything of this kind, such a person seems to have felt at liberty to discard. But, what is more serious, passages which occasioned some difficulty, as the pericope de adultera; physical perplexity, as the troubling of the water ; spiritual revulsion, as the agony in the garden,—all these the reviser or revisers seem to have judged it safest simply to eliminate. It is difficult to understand how any persons in their senses could have so acted by the sacred deposit ; but it does not seem improbable that at some very remote period there were found some who did act in some such way. Let it be observed, however, that, unlike some critics; I do not base my real argument upon what appears to me to be a not unlikely supposition.’
54, When we add to this that the result of the revi- sion was to produce ‘a Thucydidean compactness, condensed and well pruned according to the fastidi- ous taste of the study,’ ‘exactly that which does not in the long-run take with people who are versed in the habits of ordinary life’ (Trad. Text, p. 291), we have a picture of the characteristic differences between the rival texts, the main outlines of which it would be difficult to improve, blurred though they are in parts by a failure to dis- criminate between features peculiar to the Western and features belonging to both the Western and the Neutral types. Students may safely be left to de- cide for themselves between the rival methods of explaining the character and accounting for the origin of these differences.