HKB
52 Once for all, we request it may be clearly understood that we do not, by any means, claim perfection for the Received Text. We entertain no extravagant notions on this subject. Again and again we shall have occasion to point out (e.g. at page 107) that the Textus Receptus needs correction. We do but insist, (1) That it is an incomparably better text than that which either Lachmann, or Tischendorf, or Tregelles has produced: infinitely preferable to the “New Greek Text” of the Revisionists. And, (2) That to be improved, the Textus Receptus will have to be revised on entirely different “principles” from those which are just now in fashion. Men must begin by unlearning the German prejudices of the last fifty years; and address themselves, instead, to the stern logic of facts.
53 Scrivener’s Introduction, pp. 342-4.
55 “Ex scriptoribus Græcis tantisper Origene solo usi sumus.”—Præfatio, p. xxi.
56 Scrivener’s Plain Introd. p. 397.
57 Ut suprà*, p. 48.
58 Ut suprà*, p. 47.
59 Prebendary Scrivener, ibid. (ed. 1874), p. 429.
60 Ibid.* p. 470.
61 Ibid.*
62 Concilia*, i. 852.
63 Ut suprà*, p. 47.
64 The New Testament in the Original Greek.* The Text revised by Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D., and Fenton John Anthony Hort, D.D. Cambridge and London, 1881.
65 From the Preface prefixed to the “limited and private issue” of 1870, p. vi.
66 Ut suprà*, p. xv.
67 Ibid.* p. xviii.
68 Ibid.* p. xvi.
69 Ibid.* pp. xviii., xix.
70 [Note,—that I have thought it best, for many reasons, to retain the ensuing note as it originally appeared; merely restoring [within brackets] those printed portions of it for which there really was no room. The third Article in the present volume will be found to supply an ample exposure of the shallowness of Drs. Westcott and Hort’s Textual Theory.]
While these sheets are passing through the press, a copy of the long-expected volume reaches us. The theory of the respected authors proves to be the shallowest imaginable. It is briefly this:—Fastening on the two oldest codices extant (B and א, both of the IVth century), they invent the following hypothesis:—“That the ancestries of those two manuscripts diverged from a point near the autographs, and never came into contact subsequently.” [No reason is produced for this opinion.]
Having thus secured two independent witnesses of what was in the sacred autographs, the Editors claim that the coincidence of א and B must “mark those portions of text in which two primitive and entirely separate lines of transmission had not come to differ from each other through independent corruption:” and therefore that, “in the absence of specially strong internal evidence to the contrary,” “the readings of א and B combined may safely be accepted as genuine.”
But what is to be done when the same two codices diverge one from the other?—In all such cases (we are assured) the readings of any “binary combination” of B are to be preferred; because “on the closest scrutiny,” they generally “have the ring of genuineness;” hardly ever “look suspicious after full consideration.” “Even when B stands quite alone, its readings must never be lightly rejected.” [We are not told why.]
But, (rejoins the student who, after careful collation of codex B, has arrived at a vastly different estimate of its character,)—What is to be done when internal and external evidence alike condemn a reading of B? How is “mumpsimus” for example to be treated?—“Mumpsimus” (the Editors solemnly reply) as “the better attested reading”—(by which they mean the reading attested by B,)—we place in our margin. “Sumpsimus,” apparently the right reading, we place in the text within ††; in token that it is probably “a successful ancient conjecture.”