Testimonies (Volume 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AN EMENDATION TO 1 PETER ii. 8 The previous investigations and arguments will have made it clear that the Testimony Book is an important factor in the criticism and interpretation of the New Testament. It comes in as a judge to decide for us between the contending readings in the first verse of Mark: should we read "in Isaiah the prophet" or "in the prophets"? The Testimony Book will tell how the variant arose, and which is the original reading. In the same way, when we ask what we ought to read in Matt. xxvii. 9, 10, should it be "Jeremy the prophet" or just "the prophet," or some other reading? the judge will sum up the case for us and announce the verdict. In the cases mentioned, the decision is given on evidence, and between disputants. There are, however, cases where the Testimony Book throws light on the text, where there is no evidence available for its reconstruction or correction, and at first sight, no suspicion of inaccuracy. We propose now to draw attention to such a case, and to make a conjectural emendation to which we shall be guided by the book of early Christian teaching that we have unearthed. In studying the text of the first Epistle of Peter the conviction has been deepening for a long time that it contains a large number of residual errors, such as cannot be cured by the aid of manuscripts which are at present at our disposal. Perhaps this may be due, in part, to the antiquity of the document, of which we may say that, as a whole, it is one of the best attested compositions of the New Testament. But this presumed antiquity can hardly be a complete explanation of its errors, supposing, that is, that we agree that the text still needs mending. For, after all, the difference in the length of life between this composition and other similar com...