What Version Authorised Or Revised

28 “It must be confessed indeed that the Codex Sinaiticus abounds with similar errors of the eye and pen, to an extent not unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in documents of first rate importance; so that Tregelles has freely pronounced that ‘the state of the text, as proceeding from the first scribe, may be regarded as very rough.’ “ Speaking of the character of the two oldest Mss. Dean Burgon says: “The impurity of the text exhibited by these codices is not a question of opinion but of fact. . . . In the Gospels alone Codex B (Vatican) leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. Codex Sinaiticus ‘abounds with errors of the eye and pen to an extent not indeed unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in documents of first-rate importance.’ On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through very carelessness. Letters and words, even whole sentences, are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.”

In enumerating and describing the five ancient Codices now in existence, Dean Burgon remarks that four of these, and especially the Vatican and Sinaitic Mss. “Have, within the last twenty years, established a tyrannical ascendancy over the imagination of the critics which can only be fitly spoken of as a blind superstition. ‘ ‘ Those ancient Codices have indeed been blindly followed, notwithstanding that they differ “not only from ninetynine out of a hundred of the whole body of extant Mss. Be sides, but even from one another. This last circumstance, obviously fatal to their corporate pretensions, is unaccountably overlooked. As said of the two false witnesses that came to testify against Christ, so it may be said of these witnesses who are brought forward at this late day to testify against the Received Text, “But neither so did their witness agree together.”

The Number and Kinds of Differences As a sufficient illustration of the many differences between these two Codices and the great body of other Mss. We note that, in the Gospels alone.

Codex Vaticanus differs from the Received Text in the following particulars: It omits at least 2,877 words; it adds 536 words; it substitutes 935 words; it transposes 2,098 words ; and it modifies 1,132 ; making a total of 7,578 verbal divergences. But the Sinaitic Ms. is even worse, for its total divergences in the particulars stated above amount to nearly nine thousand.

Summing up the case against these two fourth century Codices (with which he includes the Beza, supposedly of the sixth) Dean Burgon solemnly