may in such cases remain. Thus it may be clear that a reading was first Western and then Syrian, while yet there may be a doubt whether certain of the attesting documents derived it from a Syrian or from an earlier source. If from the former, the reading must be held to be in effect distinctively Western: if from the latter, the possibility or probability of its having existed not only in the Western but in a Non-Western Pre-Syrian text has to be taken into account. These occasional ambiguities of evidence do not however affect the force or the ordinary applicability of the principle itself: and in practice the doubt is in most cases removed by Internal Evidence of Groups.
SECTION II. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHIEF ANCIENT TEXTS
169—187
169. Leaving for the present the Syrian text and its own history, we must now go back to the earlier periods within which the primary ramifications of the genealogical tree have been shown to lie. It follows from what has been said above that all readings in which the Pre-Syrian texts concur must be accepted at once as the apostolic readings, or to speak more exactly, as the most original of recorded readings. Indeed this is only repeating in other words that all distinctively Syrian readings must be at once rejected. The variations between Pre-Syrian texts raise much more difficult questions, which can be answered only by careful examination of the special characteristics of the several texts.
