CHAPTER X: CAUSES OF CORRUPTION CHIEFLY INTENTIONAL.

CAUSES OF CORRUPTION CHIEFLY INTENTIONAL.
IV. OMISSION.

[WE have now to consider the largest of all classes of corrupt variations from the genuine Text [257] ,--the omission of words and clauses and sentences,--a truly fertile province of inquiry. Omissions are much in favour with a particular school of critics; though a habit of admitting them whether in ancient or modern times cannot but be symptomatic of a tendency to scepticism.]

§ 1.

Omissions are often treated as Various Readings.' Yet only by an Hibernian licence can words omitted be so reckoned: for in truth the very essence of the matter is that on such occasions nothing is read. It is to the case of words omitted however that this chapter is to be exclusively devoted. And it will be borne in mind that I speak now of those words alone where the words are observed to exist in ninety-nine MSS. out of a hundred, so to speak;--being away only from that hundredth copy.

Now it becomes evident, as soon as attention has been called to the circumstance, that such a phenomenon requires separate treatment. Words so omitted labour prima facie under a disadvantage which is all their own. My meaning will be best illustrated if I may be allowed to adduce and briefly discuss a few examples. And I will begin with a crucial case;--the most conspicuous doubtless within the whole compass of the New Testament. I mean the last twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel; which verses are either bracketed off, or else entirely severed from the rest of the Gospel, by Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford and others.

The warrant of those critics for dealing thus unceremoniously with a portion of the sacred deposit is the fact that whereas Eusebius, for the statement rests solely with him, declares that anciently many copies were without the verses in question, our two oldest extant MSS. conspire in omitting them. But, I reply, the latter circumstance does not conduct to the inference that those verses are spurious. It only proves that the statement of Eusebius was correct. The Father cited did not, as is evident from his words [258] , himself doubt the genuineness of the verses in question; but admitted them to be genuine. [He quotes two opinions; --the opinion of an advocate who questions their genuineness, and an opposing opinion which he evidently considers the better of the two, since he rests upon the latter and casts a slur upon the former as being an off-hand expedient; besides that he quotes several words out of the twelve verses, and argues at great length upon the second hypothesis.

On the other hand, one and that the least faulty of the two MSS. witnessing for the omission confesses mutely its error by leaving a vacant space where the omitted verses should have come in; whilst the other was apparently copied from an exemplar containing the verses
[259] . And all the other copies insert them, except L and a few cursives which propose a manifestly spurious substitute for the verses,--together with all the versions, except one Old Latin (k), the Lewis Codex, two Armenian MSS. and an Arabic Lectionary,--besides more than ninety testimonies in their favour from more than forty-four' ancient witnesses [260] ; --such is the evidence which weighs down the conflicting testimony over and over and over again. Beyond all this, the cause of the error is patent. Some scribe mistook the Telos occurring at the end of an Ecclesiastical Lection at the close of