In Mk 62'^ nearly all documents read x<x,'i tla-ixioija-ni rvj; BuyxTpo; auryi; t-^? 'Hpahiiiho; : WH follow NBDLA 2pe (238) in substitut- ing a-jToC for xuTY,; Ty,;, making the dancer a daughter of Herod bearing the same name as her mother Herodias. This is quite impossible, and we have to understand rij; Buyxrpo; xvtoV to mean step-daughter ; but even so an unknown character is introduced, for the daughter of Herodias, according to Josephus, was named Salome. Clearlj' B and its allies, in spite of the support of D, nmst be wrong here.
In Mt 27'19 NBCL, with some late support, add (after iruurav xvrov) the words liXXo? il Xajiuii XoyX'1^ 'huiev aurou Ty,v ^kiupccn, xxi ilviXBiv Oiup xa.) xlfMc. WH suspend judgment by i^lacing the words in the text within double brackets ; but tliey are fairly obviously an interpolation, put in at the wrong place, from Jn 193-1.
In Mk 620 WH read, with XBL Boh., -h-ripu for iroiu. Both readings make excellent sense, but many people will think the simpler one the more likely.
In Lk i** WH read 'lou^ocia.; instead of Tu.XiXx.'i<x.;. It is difficult to understand how any one can accept 'I«t;5a/aj as even a possible reading in view of the context (but see Hastings' DB i. 406 f.). In the RVm we read that ' very many ancient authorities read Judoea.' It is interesting to observe the autho- rities which agree in this obvious error : they are NBCLQR 1-131-209, 22, 157, and 11 other minuscules, 6 lectionaries, the Bohairic, and the text of the Hark. Syriac — an unusually wide and very representative Alexandrian group. Soon after (Lk 6'), a similar though smaller group (NBL 1-118-209, 22, 69, 33, 157, with the Bohairic and some Latin and Syriac documents) omits the difficult word hiuTipoTpui-tfi. WH and the RV accept the evidence of this group.
The excellence of the Alexandrian group is well seen in Lk 112-4 | there can be little doubt that the short form of the Lord's Prayer is right in Lk., as Godet unhesitatingly declared. The constant element in the attestation for the tliree omissions consists of BL 1, 22, 130, Latin Vulgate ; N and 57 join in two of the three places.
The number of Patristic references to the omission in MSS of Lk 2243. 44 (the ministering angel, the bloody sweat) renders it almost certain that they do not form part of the true text ; they are omitted by N^ ABRT 13*-69-124 /, Hark. Syriac margin, and some MSS of the Eg.^'ptian Versions ; they are marked as probably spurious in many later documents.
The variants in Jn 739 are of peculiar interest, because there can be little doubt about the right reading, o'jtoi ykp -^v TyiuuM without addition. The difficulty of this statement is so obvious, that it is a wonder more attemiits were not made to soften it down. We do not think any passage bears more conclusive testimony to the excellence of the text of the NT as transmitted to us. The words are found without addition in NTKH 42, 91, some MSS of the Latin Vulgate, the Curetonian Syriac, the Bohairic, and the Armenian. The great majority of documents add iyjov— a natural insertion which does not affect the main point. Most Latin documents support the insertion of iehou,ivov after -rviuu.a.. It is very remarkable that B (254) (with e </, Jerusalem and Hark. Syriac) has the fullest reading, rrviv/uM. iiyion
ZBiof^itov. D (with / go) gets over the difficulty in a different way by reading to Tvevpca iiyiov l^r' aiTois.
It is not an easy thing to convey a fair impres- sion by a selection of readings, but we hope the above passages are sulficient to show two things, the undoubted excellence of the Alexandrian tradi- tion, and the inadvisability of following it against interna] evidence of readings. If Hort's views of the genealogical relations..of the main texts are, as we believe, unproved, then the Alexandrian group must stand on its merits alone, and we must bear in mind that its readings^iay be due to a definite revision ; * in any case, however, whether there was an Alexandrian revision or not, the text preserved bj' this group of documents is the purest and the most important now known to us. We believe that the following passage from Dr. Salmon (Introd. to the NT^, p. 164, note) well expresses what will be the ultimate verdict in regard to the work of the two great Cambridge critics :
' It seems to me that textual critics are not entitled to feel absolute confidence in their results, if they venture within range of the obscurity that hangs over the history of the first publica- tion of the Gospels. Such a task as Bentley and Lachmann proposed to themselves, viz., to recover a good fourth-century text, was perfectly feasible, and has, in fact, been accomplished by Westcott and Hort with triumphant success. I suppose that if a MS containing their text could have been put into the hands of Eusebius, lie would have found only one thing in it which would have been quite strange to him, namely, the short con- clusion on the last page of St. Mark, and that he would have pronounced the MS to be an extremel}' good and accurate one. But these editors aim at nothing less than going back to the original documents ; and, in order to do this, it is in some cases necessary to choose between two forms of text, each of which is attested by authorities older than any extant MS. Now, a choice which must be made on subjective grounds only cannot be made with the same confidence as when there is on either side a clear preponderance of historical testimony. And, further, there is the possibility that the Evangelist might have himself published a second edition of his Gospel, so that two forms of text might both be entitled to claim his authoritj'.'