adopted some eclectic text too short-lived to have left recognisable traces of itself in extant evidence, though it may be a hidden factor in the process of mixture to which some of our texts are partly due. Thus much it is but just to Hug to say, though the point is of no practical consequence. But neither the deserved discredit into which Hug's theory of recensions as a whole has fallen, nor the uncertainty as to the precise nature of the facts referred to in Jerome's second passage, create any doubt as to the soundness of Griesbach's fundamental classification of texts, which rests entirely on the independent base furnished by the observed phenomena of existing documents.
C. 250—253. Defects of Griesbach's criticism
250. There are indeed some defects in Griesbach's view which he could hardly have failed to correct if all the evidence now accessible had been in his hands. Perhaps the most important of these is a confusion between the classification of ancient texts and the classification of documents derived from them. He was aware indeed that no existing MS preserves any 'recension' or leading ancient text in absolute purity, and that one source of corruption was the intrusion of readings out of another 'recension' (Preface to Gospels of 1796, p. lxxviii; cf. Meletemata, pp. xxxviii f.). But still in effect he treated our documents as capable of being each on the whole identified with some one ancient text. In other words, he failed to apprehend in its true magnitude the part played by mixture in the history of the text during the fourth and following centuries, or to appreciate the value of the observation of groupings as a critical instrument by which a composite text can be to a great extent analysed into its constituent elements.
251. Hardly if at all less important was his confusion of Alexandrian readings with readings preserved wholly or chiefly at Alexandria. His discrimination of the internal character of Western and Alexandrian corrections (ib. p. lxxvii) is excellent as far as it goes, and may supply useful guidance in some cases of obscure attestation. But
his mode of using the two great texts can be justified only on the impossible assumption that the Alexandrian text, with its bulk of pure readings and its distinctive corruptions alike, was, so to speak, full-blown from the beginning.