PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

NEW edition of the notes on St. Matthew's Gospel having been called for, it will be needful to preface it with a few remarks.

A

No alterations of any consequence have been made in the practical notes, which comprise by far the greater part of the book. Not so, however, with the comparatively short critical notes. It has been found necessary to re-write them, and for the following reason. When I undertook the Commentary I determined to append critical notes as short as were consistent with the purpose of making the English reader acquainted with "all readings of the original Greek, or renderings of that Greek into English which, having any authority worth notice, appreciably affect the sense." I had it in mind to follow the leading of such a book as Scrivener's Greek Testament" in the Cambridge series of "Greek and Latin Texts," giving principally the readings adopted by editors, such as Tregelles, Tischendorf, and Westcott and Hort, and sometimes, though sparingly, referring to the leading uncials, B, N, and C, and sometimes D,-A being unavailable for the greater part of St. Matthew's Gospel.

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As I proceeded, however, I found I had more and more reason to doubt the fairness of thus treating the sacred text. I found that, in a very large number of instances, these editors pinned their faith so exclusively on two or three manuscripts, that they made their evidence for a particular reading to outweigh that of all other MSS., versions, and DEC 101914 321407

fathers put together-in fact, the evidence of all the rest of Christendom.

"

I began seriously to doubt whether B and N, even when supported by D and L and the Coptic, were entitled to such exceeding deference. In coming to this conclusion, I was much influenced by the articles in the "Quarterly Review," by Dean Burgon, as well as by the contents of a pamphlet by my friend, Canon Cook, entitled, The Revised Version of the First Three Gospels considered;" but that which, far more than either of these, broke the spell which the extraordinary deference paid to the readings of B and by so many persons of such high critical pretensions had, I confess, cast upon me, were certain articles in the "Expositor" for January, March, and May, 1883, in which the writer, Mr. Alfred Watts, himself once a compositor, and afterwards a well-known corrector of the press, shows to demonstration how exactly analogous the blunders of the scribes of ancient manuscripts (particularly those of N and B) were to the blunders of modern compositors. Whilst fully allowing (in opposition to the views of Dean Burgon) the value of these MSS. in helping us to approximate, as far as possible, to the primitive text, he clearly shows what a large portion of those readings in which they stand apart from almost all other MSS., fathers, and versions, are due to sheer carelessness, and he proves how exceedingly imperfectly both must have been corrected, and how they were in all probability the copies of MSS. in their turn carelessly written and very imperfectly examined as regards errors. In particular he shows that the characteristic of Codex B, as compared with other MSS., i.e., its extraordinary omissions, is the fault to which copiers of MSS. are most of all liable, compositors being copyists under almost exactly the same conditions as to their work as the transcribers of ancient MSS.

From the reading of these instructive articles we cannot but gather two inferences :

and B, as indicating

1. That the age of such MSS., as their comparative nearness to the Apostolic autographs, may have little, if anything, to do with their freedom from error, if the links betwixt them and the primitive autographs were not themselves carefully copied and as carefully corrected.

2. That the canon so widely accepted amongst critics, that the more difficult or awkward reading is the most likely to be the right one, must be abandoned altogether as absolutely fallacious; for it postulates that the scribe must have been both an educated, and also a conscientious man, who paused and asked himself, when he came to any sentence which contained a difficulty, "Why this awkwardness? It must have been in the copy from which my MS. has been transcribed, it would have been altered so as to make sense, so I am bound to leave it as it is;" and he must also have been an exceedingly accurate transcriber whose carefulness would have infallibly preserved him from introducing any additional, awkward, or unlikely readings himself.

or

The writer of the articles shows by numbers of instances, that any such conscientiousness or carefulness is the last thing to be predicated of the scribes of B and N.

All this is, I must confess, to me a great relief, for it is painful to suppose that their autographs came from the hands of the evangelists disfigured by the blunders and omissions with which the earliest MSS. are crowded. It is a relief to one to think that St. Matthew did not confound Asa with Asaph (i. 7), or Amon with Amos (i. 10); or that the evangelist did not, in direct contradiction to his brother Apostle, tell us that our Lord's Life was taken from him by the piercing of the spear (Matth. xxvii. 49). It is a relief to think that St. Mark does not go contrary to history, which he would do if he had written "his (Herod's) daughter Herodias" (Mark vi. 22), and does not conclude a gospel of trust and love with the words, "they were afraid; " or that St. Luke did not

write impossible names, Admein for Aminadab, or Arnei for Aram (iii. 33); and does not make nonsense of such a word of Christ as "one thing is needful," by turning it into "few things are needful or one;" or make the Lord say, "Who shall give you that which is our own?" (xvi. 12); or utterly spoil the words, "it was founded on a rock," by the commonplace, "it was well built" (vi. 48); or omit the Agony and Bloody Sweat, and the divinest of all words, "Father, forgive them; or make St. Paul to be wrecked upon an island called Militene, by which name no island upon the face of the earth was ever known.

Now all those manifest blunders and gross omissions (and they are only a few specimens culled out of a vast number of similar ones) are adopted in their texts, or inserted in their margins by leading modern critics on the assumption that Codex B reproduces, as nearly as possible, the text of the evangelists. I speak not irreverently, but seriously, when I say that these holy men ought not to be credited with such manifest blunders or such gross omissions, except on overwhelming evidence; and so in this edition I have omitted the names of editors, and inserted instead the names of ancient authorities, MSS., &c. So that the reader may see how, in most of these cases, one or two manuscripts only are on the side of clear error, and all the rest of Christendom (I believe under the direction of the Spirit of God) on the side of what, on the face of it, is most right and fitting.