§ 1.
'Glosses,' properly so called, though they enjoy a conspicuous place in every enumeration like the present, are probably by no means so numerous as is commonly supposed. For certainly every unauthorized accretion to the text of Scripture is not a 'gloss': but only those explanatory words or clauses which have surreptitiously insinuated themselves into the text, and of which no more reasonable account can be rendered than that they were probably in the first instance proposed by some ancient Critic in the way of useful comment, or necessary explanation, or lawful expansion, or reasonable limitation of the actual utterance of the Spirit. Thus I do not call the clause νεκρους εγειρετε in St. Matt. x. 8 'a gloss.' It is a gratuitous and unwarrantable interpolation,—nothing else but a clumsy encumbrance of the text[353].
[Glosses, or scholia, or comments, or interpretations, are of various kinds, but are generally confined to Additions or Substitutions, since of course we do not omit in order to explain, and transposition of words already placed in lucid order, such as the sacred Text may be reasonably supposed to have observed, would confuse rather than illustrate the meaning. A clause, added in Hebrew fashion[354], which may perhaps appear to modern taste to be hardly wanted, must not therefore be taken to be a gloss.]
Sometimes a 'various reading' is nothing else but a gratuitous gloss;—the unauthorized substitution of a common for an uncommon word. This phenomenon is of frequent occurrence, but only in Codexes of a remarkable type like B[Symbol: Aleph]CD. A few instances follow:—
1. The disciples on a certain occasion (St. Matt. xiii. 36), requested our Lord to 'explain' to them (ΦΡΑΣΟΝ 'ημιν, 'they said') the parable of the tares. So every known copy, except two: so, all the Fathers who quote the place,—viz. Origen, five times[355],—Basil[356],—J. Damascene[357]. And so all the Versions[358]. But because B-[Symbol: Aleph], instead of φρασον, exhibit ΔΙΑΣΑΦΗΣΟΝ ('make clear to us'),—which is also once the reading of Origen[359], who was but too well acquainted with Codexes of the same depraved character as the archetype of B and [Symbol: Aleph],—Lachmann, Tregelles (not Tischendorf), Westcott and Hort, and the Revisers of 1881, assume that διασαφησον (a palpable gloss) stood in the inspired autograph of the Evangelist. They therefore thrust out φρασον and thrust in διασαφησον. I am wholly unable to discern any connexion between the premisses of these critics and their conclusions[360].
2. Take another instance. Πυγμη,—the obscure expression (Δ leaves it out) which St. Mark employs in vii. 3 to denote the strenuous frequency of the Pharisees' ceremonial washings,—is exchanged by Cod. [Symbol: Aleph], but by no other known copy of the Gospels, for πυκνα, which last word is of course nothing else but a sorry gloss. Yet Tischendorf degrades πυγμη and promotes πυκνα to honour,—happily standing alone in his infatuation. Strange, that the most industrious of modern accumulators of evidence should not have been aware that by such extravagances he marred his pretension to critical discernment! Origen and Epiphanius—the only Fathers who quote the place—both read πυγμη. It ought to be universally admitted that it is a mere waste of time that we should argue out a point like this[361].