Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/300

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262
PECULIAR CHARACTER OF

of the rough Palestinian Greek, which indeed for the most part may be classified under a very small number of grammatical heads, several places remain where no document seems to have preserved the true text, and it is quite possible that the discovery of new and better documents might bring to light other unsuspected corruptions. Nothing however in the extant evidence suggests the probability that they would be of any importance.

345. We are by no means sure that we have done all for the text of the Apocalypse that might be done with existing materials. But we are convinced that the only way to remove such relative insecurity as belongs to it would be by a more minute and complete examination of the genealogical relations of the documents than we have been able to accomplish, nor have we reason to suspect that the result would make any considerable change.

346. The relation of the 'Received Text' to the ancient texts in the Apocalypse requires separate notice. In all other books it follows with rare exceptions the text of the great bulk of cursives. In all the books in which there was an undoubted Syrian text the text of the great bulk of cursives is essentially Syrian, with a certain number of later ('Constantinoplitan') modifications; in other books the text is, if not Syrian, at least such as must have been associated with the original Syrian books at Constantinople. The exceptional readings of the 'Received Text', in which it abandons the majority of the cursives, are hardly ever distinctively Alexandrian; in almost all cases they are Western readings, sometimes very slenderly attested, which evidently owe their place to coincidence with the Latin Vulgate,