“This general immunity from substantive error ... in the common original of א b, in conjunction with its very high antiquity, provides in a multitude of cases a safe criterion of genuineness, not to be distrusted except on very clear internal evidence. Accordingly ... it is our belief, (1) That Readings of א b should be accepted as the true Readings until strong internal evidence is found to the contrary; and (2), That no Readings of א b can be safely rejected absolutely.”—(p. 225.)
XLVI. And thus, by an unscrupulous use of the process of Reiteration, accompanied by a boundless exercise of the Imaginative faculty, we have reached the goal to which all that went before has been steadily tending: viz. the absolute supremacy of codices b and א above all other codices,—and, when they differ, then of codex b.
And yet, the “immunity from substantive error” of a lost Codex of imaginary date and unknown history, cannot but be a pure imagination,—(a mistaken one, as we shall presently show,)—of these respected Critics: while their proposed practical inference from it,—(viz. to regard two remote and confessedly depraved Copies of that original, as “a safe criterion of genuineness,”)—this, at all events, is the reverse of logical. In the meantime, the presumed proximity of the Text of א and b to the Apostolic age is henceforth discoursed of as if it were no longer matter of conjecture:—
“The ancestries of both MSS. having started from a common source not much later than the Autographs,” &c.—(p. 247.)
And again:—
“Near as the divergence of the respective ancestries of b and א must have been to the Autographs,” &c.—(p. 273.)
Until at last, we find it announced as a “moral certainty:”—
“It is morally certain that the ancestries of b and א diverged from a point near the Autographs, and never came into contact subsequently.”—(Text, p. 556.)
After which, of course, we have no right to complain if we are assured that:—
“The fullest comparison does but increase the conviction that their pre-eminent relative purity is approximately absolute,—a true approximate reproduction of the Text of the Autographs”—(p. 296.)