the Epistle to the Hebrews, who are in other respects the most cultivated writers.
397. A question might here be raised whether there is sufficient ground for assuming that the spellings found in the oldest MSS of the New Testament were also, generally speaking, the spellings of the autographs; whether in short the oldest extant orthography may not have been introduced in the fourth or some earlier century. Versions afford no help towards answering the question; and Fathers not much more, owing to the lateness of the MSS in which nearly all their writings have been preserved; though it is instructive to observe that the better MSS of some patristic writings shew occasional unclassical forms or spellings as used by the authors in their own persons as well as in quotations, while they disappear in inferior MSS. Although however there is a lack of direct evidence, the probabilities of the case are unfavourable to the hypothesis of the introduction of such forms by transcribers of the New Testament. In the fourth and following centuries, and even during a great part of the third, a natural result of the social position of Christians would be a tendency of scribes to root out supposed vulgarisms, as is known to have been the case in the revisions of the Old Latin as regards grammatical forms as well as vocabulary. In this matter the orthography of late MSS has no textual authority. Like their substantive text, it is a degenerate descendant from the orthography of the early Christian empire, and cannot have survived independently from primitive times; so that its testimony to classical spellings is without value, being derived from the literary habits of scribes, not from their fidelity in transmission. Hence, be the spellings of our best MSS right or wrong, they are the most trustworthy within our reach. Even if it be taken as a possible alternative that they originated with the scribes of the second century, we must still either follow our best MSS or rewrite the orthography by blind conjecture. The simpler supposition that in the main they were transmitted from the autographs need not however be questioned. The unclassical forms or spellings of our MSS were certainly current in the apostolic age, as is proved by inscriptions; and they are not out of keeping with the prevalent characteristics of the diction of the New Testament: so that no tangible reason can be given why the apostles and other writers should not have employed them.
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