For the sake of illustration, we fdve here the main reading's in the instance selected for special discussion by Hort. In Jlk 6-'3 (following and the people saw them going, and mami knew them, and they ran there together on foot from all the cities) we find the following readings :
xxi rtpvf,\6o^ airoui (and ovtwent them), KB lect 49 Lat. vg Boh Arm and (with rpo^vjkOtvtor rrpor.xBov) LA 13 lect 3!) ; Syr. vg has xa,) rTfiorjXOov ocvtov Ixst.
xa'i rvvrtXOov avTou (and came together there), Dk"" 28, 604 h (2p« d ff i r have xx) tixdov ai/rou, a siinjily et venerunt, Syr. sin and when the// came : these documents might be taken to sup- port either of the shorter readings).
xcci Tpor,xl)i>}, avroh; xx.) ruti^xOov rpis ocvtov (and outwent them,
and came together unto him), all known uncials, except the five named above, all cursives except eight, / 7 Syr. hcl /Eth.
In this case it will be noticed that there is no evidence to show that xxi truv'-fiKdoy Tpi; a.u7ov alone was ever read ; more- over, the evidence for xai iruvy,xdi>\ airo'C is very slender, and quite possibly later than the supposed conflation. Mill sug- gested with much probaljility that D omitted the words and outwent them because they contradicted Mt 1413 and Lk 911 ' the crowds followed him.' Swete, ad loc., quotes 38 as reading trvvihpa.fM>v rrpoi otvToh; xcci fTvvviXiiov rrpo; uutov : this ai)pears to have been another wa^' of getting rid of the words objected to. The reading of the mass of MSS gives such good sense that Hort himself says (§ 136), 'There is nothing in the sense that would tempt to alteration : all runs easily and smoothly, and there is neither contradiction nor manifest tautology ' ; and again (§ 138), ' Had it been the only extant reading, it would have roused no suspicion.' He does, indeed, argue that the fresh point made by and came together unto him ' sinij^ly spoils the point of \ltx6aiv in v.^4 ; the multitude "followed" (Mt., Luke) the Lord to the desert region (^xu), but the actual arrival at His presence was due to His act, not theirs, for He "came out" of His retirement in some sequestered nook to meet them.' But Swete, ad loc, far more naturally takes the iiiXHciiv to mean ' having landed,' and thus the only objection that Hort could find to the language of the fuller reading falls to the ground : the crowd were the first to reach the spot whither Jesus and His disciples were going, they ran together on the beach to meet Him ; and as He landed He saw them, and realized that He could not secure the quiet He sought. It is therefore quite possible that the reading of NBLA is due to the accidental omission of a clause.
In none of the eight cases can it be proved that the two parts of the longer reading both existed separately at a time when the combined reading did not exist, and it is a matter of opinion whether the readings in Avliich the two separate ones are combined are likely to be right or not.
Dr. Salmon (Some Thoughts on the Textual Criticism of the NT, p. 68) says that ' Canon Cook elaborately discussed Hort's eight cases, contending that in every one of them the con- flation hypothesis gives the less probable account of the facts.' He adds : ' In each of these cases I did not myself follow Hort altogether without misgivings.' Miller also discusses the sup- posed conflations in Appendix ii. of his ' Causes of Corruption,' and makes out a fairly good case for the originality of the sup- posed conflate readings.
(ii.) Hort's next argument to prove the posteri- ority of Antiochian readings is founded on Ante- Nicene Patristic evidence.
It will be convenient to follow Hort's example in giving at this point some general considerations in regard to the character and the use of Patristic evidence. We will speak first of the dis- advantages and difficulties experienced in using it. To begin with, the material is necessarily very fragmentary in more senses than one. Each writer quotes Isut a limited immber of passages, so that it is only in the case of a few specially v>rominent passages that we can get together a really representative collection of Patristic quotations. It follows that any kind of Patristic apparatus is more or less deceptive. It may be, for instance, that Origen has a reading which agrees with MSS most approved by critical writers, but that the passage in which it occurs is not quoted by Clement of Alexandria. Here we are placed in a difficulty, because Clement and Origen did not by any means always agree, and, if a quotation had been preserved in which Clement used a different reading, it would be probable that Origan's reading did not belong to the text traditionally current at Alexandria, but that he had obtained it from some other source ; his evidence, therefore, would be simply of a personal character. It is necessary, therefore, in weighing Patristic evidence to deal with the author's quotations as a whole, in order to form a judgment of the character of the text he used. When Clement's and Origen's quotations are thus dealt with, it is found that Origen in part agrees with the text most favoured by critical editors, but that his predecessor Clement used a substantially different text of a ' Western ' type ; Origen too, in part, followed ' Western ' texts : the conclusions to which these phenomena lead will be discussed later on. The important point to note at this stage is that the whole mass of a writer's quotations must be treated as one whole, and that, while we can discover the type of text he used, our knowledge of it is only fragmentary, and necessarily confined as far as details are con- cerned to the passages explicitly quoted.