proceed to enquire into the character of special groups in detail, it will be right to examine a little more closely the probable relation of the primary ancient lines of transmission to many important variations now to be considered.
282. The principal difficulty with which we have to deal arises from an apparent combination of Western and Alexandrian attestations in opposition to a group of documents which bears no clear and obvious marks of compositeness of attestation, but which is commended by Internal Evidence of Groups; so that the preference accorded to this group seems to involve the paradox of a preference of a single line of descent to two concordant lines of descent. Given the independence of the Western and Alexandrian texts, the supposed preference is genealogically untenable as regards readings which could not owe their place in both texts to accidental coincidence in error. Now, though no contradiction is involved in the hypothesis of the adoption of early Alexandrian readings into a late Western text or of early Western readings into a late Alexandrian text, the actual evidence contains comparatively few traces of any such relation of dependence; while the definite original parallelism of the two texts is evinced by the many places in which they smooth away difficulties of language by entirely different devices. Either therefore (1) the readings of which we are now speaking as found only in the better of the primary Greek MSS must be of Alexandrian origin; or (2) they must have originated in some indeterminate equally aberrant text, assignation of them to a Western origin being in most cases clearly impossible; or (3) the opposed attestation cannot rightly be said to combine the two primary aberrant texts.
