belong to the 'vulgar' or popular form of the Greek language. There has been as yet so little intelligent or accurate study of the later varieties of Greek that we must speak with some reserve: but we believe it is not too much to say that no undoubted peculiarities of a local or strictly dialectic nature are at present known in the New Testament. The often used term 'Alexandrine' is, thus applied, a misnomer. The erroneous usage apparently originated partly in the mere name Codex Alexandrinus, the MS so called having been for a long time the chief accessible document exhibiting these forms, partly in the Alexandrian origin of the Septuagint version, assumed to have supplied the writers of the New Testament with their orthography: the imagined corroboration from the existence of the same forms in Egypt is set aside by their equally certain existence elsewhere. The term 'Hellenistic' is less misleading, but still of doubtful propriety. It was coined to denote the language of Greek-speaking Jews: but, though the only extant books exhibiting in large number these modes of language were written either by Greek-speaking Jews or by Christians who might have derived them from this source, the same modes of language were certainly used freely by heathens in various parts of the Greek world. Another objection to the term 'Hellenistic' is the danger of confusion with the 'Hellenic' or 'Common Dialect', that is, the mixed and variable literary language which prevailed from the time of Alexander except where Attic purity was artificially cultivated; a confusion exemplified in the practice of calling Philo a 'Hellenistic' writer, though he has hardly a better title to the name than Polybius.
396. A large proportion of the peculiar spellings of the New Testament are simply spellings of common life. In most cases either identical or analogous spellings occur frequently in inscriptions written in different countries, by no means always of the more illiterate sort. The Jewish and Christian writings which contain them are of popular character: naturally they shew themselves least where literary ambition or cultivation are most prominent. Many found in inscriptions, in the LXX, and in some Christian apocryphal books are absent from the New Testament. Within the New Testament there is a considerable general uniformity: but differences as to books and writers are likewise discernible, and worthy of being noted; thus these spellings are least frequent with St Paul and the author of