ana translation

Ixii
INTRODUCTION
witnesses ;
whereas it is readily accounted for as a facile and obvious
corruption of the Syriac as exhibited by the A-group and adopted
thence into our emended text.
(i.)
I place first a few examples chosen because they serve the
purpose of this Section in the most convincing manner, the Greek
evidence being, in each and all of them, unanimous, with the A-text
and against the B-text.*
(a) 2 Pet. i. 4 (TO. /xey terra icat Ti'/uua 7rayy'AjU,aTa).
With A, we read \**OQM ) c |l>Ooi of B
= (all Greek) eVayyeA/xaTa ) \
= eViyi/oxmsf (unattested).
Here it
seems impossible to doubt that B represents a Syriac scribe's
blunder, between two words which to eye and ear present but small
and easily overlooked difference, though in sense widely remote. The
other alternative is barely admissible,
that the Greek exemplar, which
the Philoxenian represents, really read eTriyvwo-as
or cTrio-T^ara (or any
word equivalent), alien to the purport of the passage and unconfirmed
by other evidence that B has preserved this genuine Philoxenian
reading, and that A has been tampered by a corrector so as to bring it
into conformity with the current Greek text and the Harklensian.
This latter explanation perverts the facts it accounts for the B-
;
readings by a complicated hypothesis assuming
unsuitable and otherwise unknown Greek variant,
the existence of an
and supposing an
imaginary editor to have borrowed from the Harklensian the reading
as now found in the A-text. The former explanation is,
on the contrary,
simple and natural ;
it merely alleges a common and very minute
error of transcription. I have therefore unhesitatingly adopted the
A-readin
into the reconstructed text of this Edition.
(&) 2 Pet. ii. 1 (i^evSoTrpo^T/rar.
v ra> Aaw).
With A, we read ]Vr>v^ ) . C ]vr\k~> of B
= (all Greek) lv TO> Xao) 5 (.
= / TU> KOO-JJUO (unattested).
Here the facts are similar to those of :
example (a)
and the like
alternative is set before us. The B-reading
is
unworthy of considera-
*
The lists of passages set forth under this head and the following are not
meant to be exhaustive, but merely to give a sufficient view of the facts. It is
limited to examples in which the Greek authorities are unanimous or nearly so.
t Or possibly (to suit the context), the neuter eTno-TTJ/iara (in the sense of