in different places. Sometimes they transcribed unchanged the reading of one of the earlier texts, now of this, now of that. Sometimes they in like manner adopted exclusively one of the readings, but modified its form. Sometimes they combined the readings of more than one text in various ways, pruning or modifying them if necessary. Lastly, they introduced many changes of their own where, so far as appears, there was no previous variation. When the circumstances are fully considered, all these processes must be recognised as natural.
166. Thus not only do the relations disclosed by the conflate Syrian readings reappear conspicuously in the much larger field of distinctively Syrian readings generally, but no fresh phenomenon claims to be taken into account, unless it be the existence of the Alexandrian text, which has its own extant attestation apart from the Syrian text. Taking these facts in conjunction with the absence of distinctively Syrian readings from the patristic evidence of the Origenian and Ante-Origenian periods, while nevertheless distinctive readings of all the texts known to have been used in the production of distinctively Syrian readings abound in the Origenian period, as also, with the possible exception of distinctively Alexandrian readings, in the Ante-Origenian period, we are led to conclude that the hypothesis provisionally allowed must now be definitively rejected, and to regard the Syrian text as not only partly but wholly derived from the other known ancient texts. It follows that all distinctively Syrian readings may be set aside at once as certainly originating after the middle of the third century, and therefore, as far as transmission is concerned, corruptions of the apostolic text.
