The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels | Page 6

any regular
supervision exercised by the Apostles. In fact, as far as the Syrian
believers in Christ at first consisted of Gentiles, they must perforce
have been regarded as being outside of the covenant of promise. Yet
there must have been many who revered the stories told about our Lord,
and felt extreme interest and delight in them. The story of King Abgar
illustrates the history: but amongst those who actually heard our Lord
preach there must have been very many, probably a majority, who were
uneducated. They would easily learn from the Jews, because the
Aramaic dialects spoken by Hebrews and Syrians did not greatly differ
the one from the other. What difference there was, would not so much
hinder the spread of the stories, as tend to introduce alien forms of
speech and synonymous words, and so to hinder absolute accuracy

from being maintained. Much time must necessarily have elapsed,
before such familiarity with the genuine accounts of our Lord's sayings
and doings grew up, as would prevent mistakes being made and
disseminated in telling or in writing.
The Gospels were certainly not written till some thirty years after the
Ascension. More careful examination seems to place them later rather
than earlier. For myself, I should suggest that the three first were not
published long before the year 70 A.D. at the earliest; and that St.
Matthew's Gospel was written at Pella during the siege of Jerusalem
amidst Greek surroundings, and in face of the necessity caused by new
conditions of life that Greek should become the ecclesiastical language.
The Gospels would thus be the authorized versions in their entirety of
the stories constituting the Life of our Lord; and corruption must have
come into existence, before the antidote was found in complete
documents accepted and commissioned by the authorities in the
Church.
I must again remark with much emphasis that the foregoing suggestions
are offered to account for what may now be regarded as a fact, viz., the
connexion between the Western Text, as it is called, and Syriac remains
in regard to corruption in the text of the Gospels and of the Acts of the
Apostles. If that corruption arose at the very first spread of Christianity,
before the record of our Lord's Life had assumed permanent shape in
the Four Gospels, all is easy. Such corruption, inasmuch as it beset the
oral and written stories which were afterwards incorporated in the
Gospels, would creep into the authorized narrations, and would vitiate
them till it was ultimately cast out towards the end of the fourth and in
the succeeding centuries. Starting from the very beginning, and gaining
additions in the several ways described in this volume by Dean Burgon,
it would possess such vigour as to impress itself on Low-Latin
manuscripts and even on parts of the better Latin ones, perhaps on
Tatian's Diatessaron, on the Curetonian and Lewis manuscripts of the
fifth century, on the Codex Bezae of the sixth; also on the Vatican and
the Sinaitic of the fourth, on the Dublin Palimpsest of St. Matthew of
the sixth, on the Codex Regius or L of the eighth, on the St. Gall MS.
of the ninth in St. Mark, on the Codex Zacynthius of the eighth in St.

Luke, and a few others. We on our side admit that the corruption is old
even though the manuscripts enshrining it do not date very far back,
and cannot always prove their ancestry. And it is in this admission that
I venture to think there is an opening for a meeting of opinions which
have been hitherto opposed.
In the following treatise, the causes of corruption are divided into (I)
such as proceeded from Accident, and (II) those which were Intentional.
Under the former class we find (1) those which were involved in pure
Accident, or (2) in what is termed Homoeoteleuton where lines or
sentences ended with the same word or the same syllable, or (3) such as
arose in writing from Uncial letters, or (4) in the confusion of vowels
and diphthongs which is called Itacism, or (5) in Liturgical Influence.
The remaining instances may be conveniently classed as Intentional,
not because in all cases there was a settled determination to alter the
text, for such if any was often of the faintest character, but because
some sort of design was to a greater or less degree embedded in most of
them. Such causes were (1) Harmonistic Influence, (2) Assimilation, (3)
Attraction; such instances too in their main character were (4)
Omissions, (5) Transpositions, (6) Substitutions, (7) Additions, (8)
Glosses, (9) Corruption by Heretics, (10) Corruption by Orthodox.
This dissection of the mass of corruption, or as perhaps it may be better
termed, this classification made by Dean Burgon of the numerous
causes which are found