The fundamental text of late extant Greek MSS generally is beyond all question identical with the dominant Antiochian or Græco-Syrian text of the second half of the fourth century. The community of text implies on genealogical grounds a community of parentage: the Antiochian Fathers and the bulk of extant MSS written from about three or four to ten or eleven centuries later must have had in the greater number of extant variations a common original either contemporary with or older than our oldest extant MSS, which thus lose at once whatever presumption of exceptional purity they might have derived from their exceptional antiquity alone.
131. The application of analogous tests to other groups of documents leads to similar results. The requisite chronological criteria are to be found in the Greek patristic evidence of the second, third and fourth centuries; in the Latin patristic evidence of the third and fourth centuries; in the Old Latin version, as dated indirectly by the Latin patristic evidence; in the Vulgate Latin, the Gothic, and virtually the Armenian versions, as dated by external evidence; and the two (or possibly three) oldest extant Greek MSS, B, א, and A; the Armenian version and probably A being however a little over the line. To this list may safely be added the Old and Vulgate Syriac, as they have some sufficient if slight patristic attestation in the early part of the fourth century, although the evidence which completely establishes their antiquity, being inferential, would not entitle them to a place here; and also the two principal Egyptian versions, the early age of which, though destitute of the testimony which it would doubtless have received from the preservation of an early Coptic literature, is established by historical considerations independent of the character of the texts.
