acing somewhere in the last half of the second century. The testimony
of these witnesses to the uncorrupt preservation of the sacred text,
from the time when they first appeared to the present, is decisive; for
they also agree essentially with the Greek text of the gospel as we now
possess it. Nor is this all. Davidson affirms of the Old Latin version,
that "the more ancient the Greek manuscripts, the closer is their
agreement with it." And Tischendorf says of the oldest known manuscript
of the Bible--the Greek Sinai Codex, brought by him from the convent of
St. Catharine, Mount Sinai, in 1859--that its agreement, in the New
Testament portion, with the Old Latin version, is remarkable. Through
the joint testimony, then, on the one hand, of the most ancient Greek
manuscripts, especially the Sinai Codex, which is the oldest of them
all; and on the other, of the Old Latin version which belongs to the
last half of the second century, we are carried back to a very ancient
and pure form of the Greek text prevalent before the execution of this
version, that is, about the middle of the second century. Tischendorf
adds arguments to show that the Syriac Peshito version, the text of
which has not come down to us in so pure a state, had for its basis
substantially the same form of text as the Old Latin and the Sinai
Codex.

The substantial identity of the sacred text, as we now have it,
with that which has existed since about the middle of the second
century, is thus shown to be a matter not of probable
conjecture, but of certain knowledge. Here, then, we have a sure
criterion by which to measure and interpret the complaints which
textual critics, ancient or modern, have made, sometimes in very
strong language, concerning the corruptions that have found
their way into the text of the New Testament. These writers have
reference to what are called "various readings," not to
mutilations and alterations, such as those charged by the
ancients upon Marcion, by which he sought to change the facts
and doctrines of the gospel. That this must be their meaning we
know; for there are the manuscripts by hundreds as witnesses,
all of which, the most corrupt as textual critics would call
them, as well as the purest, give in the gospel narratives the
same facts and doctrines without essential variation.

Let not the inexperienced inquirer be misled into any wrong
conclusion