The Dean. Certainly, and therefore I do not assume my claim till I substantiate it. But before I go on to do so, may I ask whether you can dispute the fact of the four first Notes of Truth being on my side?
B. S. No: you are entitled to so much allowance.
The Dean. That is a very candid admission, and just what I expected from you. Now as to Weight. The passage just quoted is only one instance out of many. More will abound later on in this book: and even then many more must of necessity remain behind. In point of hard and unmistakable fact, there is a continual conflict going on all through the Gospels between B and א and a few adherents of theirs on the one side, and the bulk of the Authorities on the other, and the nature and weight of these two Codexes may be inferred from it. They will be found to have been proved over and over again to be bad witnesses, who were left to survive in their handsome dresses whilst attention was hardly ever accorded to any services of theirs. Fifteen centuries, in which the art of copying the Bible was brought to perfection, and printing invented, have by unceasing rejection of their claims scaled for ever the condemnation of their character, and so detracted from their weight.
B. S. Still, whilst I acknowledge the justice of much that you have said, I cannot quite understand how the [pg 078] text of later copies can be really older than the text of earlier ones.
The Dean. You should know that such a thing is quite possible. Copies much more numerous and much older than B and א live in their surviving descendants. The pedigree of the Queen is in no wise discredited because William the Conqueror is not alive. But then further than this. The difference between the text of B and א on the one side and that which is generally represented by A and Φ and Σ on the other is not of a kind depending upon date, but upon recension or dissemination of readings. No amplification of B and א could by any process of natural development have issued in the last twelve verses of St. Mark. But it was easy enough for the scribe of B not to write, and the scribe of א consciously[86] and deliberately to omit, verses found in the copy before him, if it were determined that they should severally do so. So with respect to the 2,556 omissions of B. The original text could without any difficulty have been spoilt by leaving out the words, clauses, and sentences thus omitted: but something much more than the shortened text of B was absolutely essential for the production of the longer manuscripts. This is an important point, and I must say something more upon it.
First then[87], Cod. B is discovered not to contain in the Gospels alone 237 words, 452 clauses, 748 whole sentences, which the later copies are observed to exhibit in the same places and in the same words. By what possible hypothesis will such a correspondence of the Copies be accounted for, if these words, clauses, and sentences are indeed, as is pretended, nothing else but spurious accretions to the text?
Secondly, the same Codex throughout the Gospels [pg 079] exhibits 394 times words in a certain order, which however is not the order advocated by the great bulk of the Copies. In consequence of what subtle influence will it be pretended, that all over the world for a thousand years the scribes were universally induced to deflect from the authentic collocation of the same inspired words, and always to deflect in precisely the same way?
But Cod. B also contains 937 Gospel words, of which by common consent the great bulk of the Cursive Copies know nothing. Will it be pretended that in any part of the Church for seven hundred years copyists of Evangelia entered into a grand conspiracy to thrust out of every fresh copy of the Gospel self-same words in the self-same places[88]?
You will see therefore that B, and so א, since the same arguments concern one as the other, must have been derived from the Traditional Text, and not the Traditional Text from those two Codexes.
B. S. You forget that Recensions were made at Edessa or Nisibis and Antioch which issued in the Syrian Texts, and that that was the manner in which the change which you find so difficult to understand was brought about.