sight suggest itself, of their having originated at Alexandria, and thence spread by mixture to Non-Western texts elsewhere, is set aside by internal evidence as well as by the want of other corroborative instances. The purely documentary phenomena are compatible with the supposition that the Western and the Non-Western texts started respectively from a first and a second edition of the Gospels, both conceivably apostolic: but internally none of the Non-Western interpolations certainly justify this claim to a true though a secondary kind of originality, and some of them, it is not too much to say, shew a misunderstanding which renders it impossible to assign to them any worthier origin than to ordinary Western interpolations.
242. Nothing analogous to the Western non-interpolations presents itself among distinctively Alexandrian readings of any form, omissions, additions, or substitutions. Now and then, though fortunately but rarely, the attestation of what seems to be an Alexandrian reading, unusually well attested, approaches too near the attestation of some neutral readings to exclude doubt as to the true origin, while internal evidence is likewise indecisive. But this occasional ambiguity of external evidence is not to be confounded with incongruities of internal character in readings of clearly defined external type. No variations are known to us in which a distinctively Alexandrian reading, indubitably such, approves itself as genuine against Western and neutral texts combined, or even against the neutral text alone. Of the numerous variations which at first sight appear to involve conflicts between the neutral text and the Western and Alexandrian texts combined it will be more opportune to speak further on.
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