cerning itacistic error, namely how far its early prevalence invalidates the authority of the better MSS as between substantive readings which differ only by vowels apt to be interchanged. The question cannot be answered with any confidence except by careful comparison of the various places in the New Testament which are affected by it. The results thus obtained are twofold. It becomes clear that in early times scribes were much more prone to make changes which affected vowels only than to make any other changes; and that every extant early document falls in this respect below its habitual standard of trustworthiness. Readings intrinsically improbable have often a surprising amount of attestation; and thus internal evidence attains unusual relative importance. It is no less clear that the several documents retain on the whole their relative character as compared with each other, and that readings unsupported by any high documentary authority have little probability. Where the testimony of early Versions and Fathers is free from uncertainty, it has a special value in variations of this kind by virtue of mere priority of date, as the chances of corruption through such interchange of vowels as is not obviously destructive of sense are considerably more increased by repetition of transcription than the chances of corruption of any other type: but MSS of Versions are in many cases liable to corresponding errors of precisely the same kind, and the interpretations of Fathers are open to other special ambiguities.
404. Probably the commonest permutation is that of ο and ω, chiefly exemplified in the endings -ομεν and -ωμεν, -όμεθα and -ώμεθα. Instances will be found in 1 Cor. xv 49, where we have not ventured to reject either φορέσωμεν or φορέσομεν; and in Rom. ν 1, where the imperative εἰρήνην ἔχωμεν, Standing as it does after a pause in the epistle, yields a probable sense, virtually inclusive of the sense of εἰρήνην ἔχομεν, which has no certain attestation of good quality but that of the 'corrector' of א. Another frequent permutation is that of ε and αι; likewise exemplified in forms of the verb, especially in the infinitive and the second person plural of the imperative. Thus in Luke xiv 17 it is difficult to decide between Ἔρχεσθε and ἔρχεσθαι, or in xix 13 between πραγματεύσασθαι and Πραγματεύσασθε, the infinitive in the latter place being justified by St Luke's manner of passing from oratio obliqua to oratio recta. Gal. iv 18 furnishes one of the few instances in which Β and א have happened to fall into