Now again I ask,--Is it likely, is it in any way credible, that we can be warranted in rejecting the testimony of (suppose) 1490 ancient witnesses, in favour of the testimony borne by (suppose) ten? Granting freely that two of these ten are older by 50 or 100 years than any single MS. of the 1490 I confidently repeat the question. The respective dates of the witnesses before us may perhaps be thus stated. The ten MSS. so confidently relied upon date as follows, speaking generally:--
2 about A.D. 330-340. 1 about 550. 1 about 750. 6 (say) about 950 to A.D. 1350.
The 1490 MSS. which are constantly observed to bear consentient testimony against the ten, date somewhat thus:--
1: A.D. 400. 1: 450. 2: 500. 16 (say): 650 to A.D. 850. 1470: 850 to A.D. 1350.
And the question to which I invite the reader to render an answer is this:--By what process of reasoning, apart from an appeal to other authorities, (which we are going to make by-and-by), can it be thought credible that the few witnesses shall prove the trustworthy guides,--and the many witnesses the deceivers?
Now those many MSS. were executed demonstrably at different times in different countries. They bear signs in their many hundreds of representing the entire area of the Church, except where versions were used instead of copies in the original Greek. Many of them were written in monasteries where a special room was set aside for such copying. Those who were in trust endeavoured with the utmost pains and jealousy to secure accuracy in the transcription. Copying was a sacred art. And yet, of multitudes of them that survive, hardly any have been copied from any of the rest. On the contrary, they are discovered to differ among themselves in countless unimportant particulars; and every here and there single copies exhibit idiosyncrasies which are altogether startling and extraordinary. There has therefore demonstrably been no collusion--no assimilation to an arbitrary standard,--no wholesale fraud. It is certain that every one of them represents a MS., or a pedigree of MSS., older than itself; and it is but fair to suppose that it exercises such representation with tolerable accuracy. It can often be proved, when any of them exhibit marked extravagancy, that such extravagancy dates back as far as the second or third century. I venture to think--and shall assume until I find that I am mistaken--that, besides the Uncials, all the cursive copies in existence represent lost Codexes of great antiquity with at least the same general fidelity as Ev. 1, 33, 69, which enjoy so much favour in some quarters only because they represent lost MSS. demonstrably of the same general type as Codd. { ~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}BD(30).