Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament

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Macmillan, 1901 - Bible - 321 pages
 

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Page 302 - And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken : but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.
Page 4 - In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament...
Page 6 - Recognising to the full the duty of abstinence from peremptory decision in cases where the evidence leaves the judgment in suspense between two or more readings, we find that, setting aside differences of orthography, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt only make up about one-sixtieth of the whole New Testament.
Page 6 - ... the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text.
Page 5 - The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven-eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth, therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism.
Page 236 - The author believes that he has retrieved (except in very few places) the true exemplar of Origen, which was the standard to the most learned of the Fathers, at the time of the Council of Nice and two centuries after. And he is sure that the Greek and Latin MSS., by their mutual assistance, do so settle the original text to the smallest nicety, as cannot be performed now in any classic author whatever : and that out of a labyrinth of thirty thousand various readings, that crowd the pages of our present...
Page 258 - New omissions accordingly are rare, and where they occur are usually found to contribute to apparent simplicity. New interpolations on the other hand are abundant, most of them being due to harmonistic or other assimilation, fortunately capricious and incomplete. Both in matter and in diction the Syrian text is conspicuously a full text. It delights in pronouns, conjunctions, and expletives and supplied links of all kinds, as well as in more considerable additions. As distinguished from the bold...
Page 259 - Western' scribes, and the refined scholarship of the Alexandrians, the spirit of its own corrections is at once sensible and feeble. Entirely blameless on either literary or religious grounds as regards vulgarised or unworthy diction, yet...

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