In St. John iii. 6, Cn. has: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, because of flesh it is born; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, because God is a spirit, and of God it is born.”And in ver. 8: “So is every one that is born of water and of the Spirit.” This is a Targum-like expansion: possibly anti-Arian. See Tischendorf's Gr. Test. in loco. All the above changes look like deliberate emendations of the text.
[It is curious that the Lewis Codex and the Curetonian both break off from the Traditional account of the Virgin-birth, but in opposite directions. The Lewis Codex makes Joseph our Lord's actual Father: the Curetonian treats the question as described above. That there were two streams of teaching on this subject, which specially characterized the fifth century, is well known: the one exaggerating the Nestorian division of the two Natures, the other tending in a Eutychian direction. That two fifth-century MSS. should illustrate these deviations is but natural; and their survival not a little remarkable.]
Appendix VII. The Last Twelve Verses Of St. Mark's Gospel.
It would be a manifest defect, if a book upon Textual Criticism passing under the name of Dean Burgon were to go forth without some reference to the present state of the controversy on the subject, which first made him famous as a Textual critic.
His argument has been strengthened since he wrote in the following ways:—
1. It will be remembered that the omission of the verses has been rested mainly upon their being left out by B and א, of which circumstance the error is mutely confessed in B by the occurrence of a blank space, amply sufficient to contain the verses, the column in question being the only vacant one in the whole manuscript. It has been generally taken for granted, that there is nothing in א to denote any consciousness on the part of the scribe that something was omitted. But a closer examination of the facts will shew that the contrary is the truth. For—
i. The page of א on which St. Mark ends is the recto of leaf 29, being the second of a pair of leaves (28 and 29), forming a single sheet (containing St. Mark xiv. 54-xvi. 8, St. Luke i. 1-56), which Tischendorf has shewn to have been written not by the scribe of the body of the New Testament in this MS., but by one of his colleagues who wrote part of the Old Testament and acted as diorthota or corrector of the New Testament—and who is further [pg 299] identified by the same great authority as the scribe of B. This person appears to have cancelled the sheet originally written by the scribe of א, and to have substituted for it the sheet as we now have it, written by himself. A correction so extensive and laborious can only have been made for the purpose of introducing some important textual change, too large to be effected by deletion, interlineation, or marginal note. Thus we are led not only to infer that the testimony of א is here not independent of that of B, but to suspect that this sheet may have been thus cancelled and rewritten in order to conform its contents to those of the corresponding part of B.
ii. This suspicion becomes definite, and almost rises to a certainty, when we look further into the contents of this sheet. Its second page (28 vo) exhibits four columns of St. Mark (xv. 16-xvi. 1); its third page (29 ro), the two last columns of St. Mark (xvi. 2-8) and the first two of St. Luke (i. 1-18). But the writing of these six columns of St. Mark is so spread out that they contain less matter than they ought; whereas the columns of St. Luke that follow contain the normal amount. It follows, therefore, that the change introduced by the diorthota must have been an extensive excision from St. Mark:—in other words, that these pages as originally written must have contained a portion of St. Mark of considerable length which has been omitted from the pages as they now stand. If these six columns of St. Mark were written as closely as the columns of St. Luke which follow, there would be room in them for the omitted twelve verses.—More particularly, the fifth column (the first of page 29 ro) is so arranged as to contain only about five-sixths of the normal quantity of matter, and the diorthota is thus enabled to carry over four lines to begin a new column, the sixth, by which artifice he manages to conclude St. Mark not with a blank column such as in B tells its own story, but with a column [pg 300] such as in this MS. is usual at the end of a book, exhibiting the closing words followed by an “arabesque” pattern executed with the pen, and the subscription (the rest being left empty). But, by the very pains he has thus taken to conform this final column to the ordinary usage of the MS., his purpose of omission is betrayed even more conclusively, though less obviously, than by the blank column of B[628].