What Version Authorised Or Revised

61 more than four manuscripts.” Moreover, concerning Tischendorf he had said: “The case of Tischendorf is still more easily disposed of. Which of this most inconstant critic’s Texts are we to select? Surely not the last, in which an exaggerated preference for a single manuscript has betrayed him into an almost childlike infirmity of judgment.” Tregelles also he had condemned in terms equally uncompromising. Yet, when the defence of the R. V. depended upon it, this learned scholar, who was — more than any other individual — responsible for the form finally given to it, can do no other or better than to appeal to the opinion of the very same modern and radical editors whose work he had himself previously declared to be unworthy of confidence.

At the time Bishop Ellicott’s defence of 1882 was prepared, Westcott and Hort had just published their ‘’New Greek Text,” and the sup porting “theory;” and so Bishop Ellicott sought to avail himself thereof, and did so by the plea that those who objected to the R. V. ought to meet that theory.

He did not have to wait long; for Dean Burgon’s smashing attack, strongly supported by the ablest textual critic of the day (Dr. Scrivener) and others, appeared about the same time. To all this Bishop Ellicott made no response (so far as we are aware) until in 1901 he published the book named above.

Turning to that volume we find that again he ignores entirely the main issue. Moreover, we find that now, instead of endorsing Dr. Hort, upon whom he leaned so hard in 1882, and by whom the whole Revision Committee was led astray, he virtually throws him overboard. For he cites a work of Dr. Salmon, of Trinity College, Dublin (1897), in which (to quote the Bishop’s own words) “the difficulties and anomalies and apparent perversities in the text of Westcott and Hort are compared with the decisions of the Revisers ;” and he finds himself unable, as he admits, to “resist the conviction that Dr. Salmon, in his interesting Criticism of the Text of the New Testament, has successfully indicated three or more particulars which must cause some arrest in our final judgment on the Text of Westcott and Hort.”

The three particulars which Bishop Ellicott points out, which are exceedingly important, are these (we quote the Bishop’s own words) : “In the first place it cannot be denied that, in the introductory volume, Dr. Hort has shown too distinct a tendency to elevate probable hypotheses into the realm of established facts,” — “which is just another way of saying that Dr. Hort depended upon guess work, as Dean Burgon had pointed out in 1883. “In the second place, in the really important matter of the nomenclature of the ancient types of Text ... it does not seem possible to accept the titles of the four fold division of these families of manuscripts which has been adopted by Westcott and Hort. . . . The objections to this arrangement and to this nomenclature are, as Dr. Salmon very clearly shows,