hope to pursue some profitable bypaths in Bible knowledge; and so we take up

the question of the way in which the text of the original has been preserved,

and of the means we have of arriving at a conclusion upon the matter.

When the student of Scripture takes up his Bible, he will not read far

before he comes across a marginal note to the effect that, 'Some ancient

authorities read ...'.  It is natural to ask who these ancient authorities

are, and how it comes about that there are alternative readings.  These

questions we will endeavour to answer.

Before the invention of printing, every book of necessity was written

by hand.  This manuscript work, however faithfully undertaken, becomes in

time partly automatic, and slight errors are bound to occur.  When we

remember that, in some cases, the scribe was a poor, badly educated believer,

making his copy in secret, under the shadow of possible apprehension and

martyrdom, we can understand how the possibilities of error in transcription

were multiplied.  Yet, if the reader will but think for a moment, none of

these errors need prevent him from understanding what was the original text.

Suppose this present article were given to twenty different persons of all

grades of education and appreciation of the subject matter to copy, it is

possible that not one copy would be absolutely free from some typographical

fault; yet, though every copy should contain errors, a careful examination of

them all would enable any judicious reader to discover the original text, for

it is certain that where, say, five would make the same mistake, the other

fifteen would be correct.

We shall find that the mistakes of transcriptions fall into several

clearly defined groups.  Sometimes it is but a matter of spelling that leaves

the sense unimpaired.  Often it is the result of two lines of the manuscript

ending with the same word.  The eye of the copyist falls upon the second line

instead of the first, so that the whole line is omitted; or the process may

be reversed, and the whole line repeated.  Again, this is not a serious

matter, and is easily corrected by comparison with other manuscripts.

Errors that are more difficult to deal with are those which are not

mechanical, as are the above instances, but mental.  Something goes on in the

copyist's mind which we cannot know, and in a momentary lapse a wrong word is

inserted.  A very common form of this error is the alteration of a passage to

one that is remembered in another part of the book.  For example, the words

of Luke 6:48 in the A.V. are identical with those of the parallel passage in

Matthew 7:25: 'For it was founded upon a rock'.  The reader of any critical

Greek testament, however, will observe that Tischendorf and Tregelles found

sufficient evidence to warrant the reading, 'Because it had been well

builded', which is the reading adopted by the R.V.  There is every likelihood

that those mss of Luke 6:48 that agree with Matthew 7:25 were written by a

scribe whose mind retained the earlier readings although his eye read what

the R.V. has in the text.

The most serious of all modifications, of course, is intentional

alteration, but the fact that copies of the Scriptures were multiplied all

over the earth and were connected with differing schools of thought, provides

an effective check in nearly all cases.  These remarks may at first appear

rather disconcerting, but we hasten to assure the reader that they are not

so.  Dr. Hort, whose learning and labours give him a high place in matters of

textual criticism, says of the various readings of the New Testament, that by

far the greatest part of these are concerned merely with differences in order

and other unimportant variations, and that 'the amount of what can in any