links indeed; certainly the various transcribers who had a hand in making it must either have been in a position which kept them ignorant of the great popular textual corruptions of the second and third centuries or must have for the most part preferred to follow their own inherited exemplars. It was not so in all cases, as is shown by such examples as those which have been cited above (§ 326); and an exceptional adulteration of the fundamental text of Β must be recognised as having occasionally left א alone where אB ought, so to speak, to have stood together. On the other hand the certainty that the ancestry of א posterior to the common archetype must, at one or more points in its history, have been exposed to contact with at least two early aberrant texts, since it accepted a considerable number of their readings (§ 205), enables us to account at once for the good internal character of most subsingular readings of B, and for the questionable internal character of most subsingular readings of א. Where the corrupt readings adopted by the ancestors of א happened to be widely adopted in current texts likewise, Β would be left with little or no support from Greek MSS ; that is, the true text of the common archetype would be preserved in subsingular readings of B. Where the corrupt readings adopted by the ancestors of א happened to find little or no reception in eclectic texts, Β and mixed Greek texts generally would be found alike attesting the true text of the common archetype, and subsingular readings of א would be nothing more than examples of early aberration early extinguished. The erroneous subsingular readings of B, proportionally as well as absolutely much less numerous than those of א, may be described in the same general terms with respect to their genealogical cha-
