C. 123—126. Fathers
123. The third class of documentary evidence is supplied by the writings of the Fathers, which enable us with more or less certainty to discover the readings of the MS or MSS of the New Testament which they employed. The quotations naturally vary in form from verbal transcripts of passages, short or long, through loose citations down to slight allusions. Nay there are cases in which the absence of even an allusion allows the text read by an author to be inferred with tolerable certainty: but this negative evidence is admissible only with the utmost caution.
124. Besides the evidence as to the texts used by ancient writers which is supplied by their quotations, allusions, or silences, a few of them sometimes make direct assertions as to variations of reading within their knowledge. The form of assertion varies much, now appearing as a statement that, for instance, "some" or "many" or "the most accurate" "copies" contain this or that variant, now as an allegation that the true reading has been perversely depraved by rash or by heretical persons for some special end. This whole department of patristic evidence has a peculiar interest, as it brings vividly before the reader the actual presence of existing variations at a remote antiquity. Its true value is twofold: for the history of the whole text it certifies two or more alternative readings as simultaneously known at a definite time or locality; and for the settlement of the text in a given passage it usually enables the reading adopted by the writer to be known with a higher degree of certainty than is attainable in a majority of cases by means of ordinary quotations. But this superior certitude must not be confounded with higher authority: the relative excellence or the historical position of the text employed by a Father has nothing to do with the relative adequacy of our means of ascertaining what his text actually was. Moreover in the statements themselves the contemporary existence of the several variants mentioned is often all that can be safely accepted: reliance on what they tell us beyond this bare fact must depend on the estimate which we are able to form of the opportunities, critical care, and impartiality of the respective writers.
125. An enumeration of the Greek Fathers would be out of place here. The names most important in textual criticism will come before us presently, when we have to