Chapter III. The Seven Notes Of Truth.
§ 1. Antiquity.
[041]
The more ancient testimony is probably the better testimony. That it is not by any means always so is a familiar fact. To quote the known dictum of a competent judge: “It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed; that Irenaeus and the African Fathers and the whole Western, with a portion of the Syriac Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephen, thirteen centuries after, when moulding the Textus Receptus27 .” Therefore Antiquity alone affords no security that the manuscript in our hands is not infected with the corruption which sprang up largely in the first and second centuries. But it remains true, notwithstanding, that until evidence has been produced to the contrary in any particular instance, the more ancient of two witnesses may reasonably be presumed to be the better informed witness. Shew me for example that, whereas a copy of the Gospels (suppose Cod. B) introduces the clause “Raise the dead” into our SAVIOUR'S ministerial commission to His Apostles (St. Matt. x. 8),—another Codex, but only of the fourteenth century (suppose Evan. 604 (Hoskier)), omits it;—am I not bound to assume that our LORD did give this charge 27
Scrivener's Introduction, Ed. iv (1894), Vol. II. pp. 264-265.
