ana translation

INTRODUCTION
lix
Krpiov (Jud. 4).
On the whole, however, it leans decidedly to the
B-side. If it is rightly assigned, as Mrs. Gibson with other authorities
of the highest competence assign it on palaeographic grounds, to the
ninth century, it is, as a witness in great measure to the B-text, coeval
with our oldest witness to the A-text (Cod. 1).
And thus it proves
that many of the most serious corruptions of the B-text are not, as the
MS evidence would otherwise lead us to conclude, recent in date and
Maronite in origin.
SECTION XV.
The Text of the Earlier as against the Later MSS
adopted in this Edition.
From the materials described in the foregoing Section the text of
the present Edition has been formed, irrespective of all previous printed
texts. All those texts are based ultimately, as we have seen, oil two
manuscripts one, our Cod. 8, the other not now forthcoming, which
are reproduced, the former in the Editio Princeps, the latter in the
Paris Polyglot ;
the former being (see p.
liv supr.) of the seventeenth
century, the latter nearly identical with it in text, and probably little
if at all earlier in date. One or other of these has been assumed as the
two only of whom (both of the
Textus Beceptus by subsequent editors ;
nineteenth century) have corrected it here and there Dr. Lee in L
after Cod. 9, and the American editor in N, after Cod. 11.* The text
of all these, even of L and N, presents a considerable number of readings
which diverge widely from the text of the original as attested by Greek
authorities, most of these divergences being unconfirmed by any other
evidence. Many, but not all, of these divergent readings
have been
made known to Biblical students in the Apparatus subjoined to Tischendorf's
Greek Testament (eighth edition). f
The text as now presented,
based on the combined testimony of some twenty manuscripts, varying
in date from the ninth century to the seventeenth or later (including
every one which I have been able directly or indirectly to reach), and
thus completely reconstructed, will be found to differ frequently in
not a few places materially from the text as hitherto edited. The
* See p. Ivii supr.
t Tischendorf cites the Syriac New Testament from Schaaf's edition (or rather
from the Latin version attached to its text) as "Syr' ch " except in the Four
Epistles, where he writes " Syr bodl " ; assuming Schaaf to have uniformly repeated
Pococke's text, which is not always the fact. See my article in Hcrmathena-,
vol. vii, pp. 281 et sgg.