The Text of the Septuagint: Its Corruptions and Their Emendation

less, that it was precisely BS which yielded the subconscious model - if
there was anything subconscious in a legislator like Hort-for the
formal presentation of his text. That is what was to be expected. Hort's
sense of style, his idea of what was correct and preferable in every alternative,
was acquired from a close acquaintance with his ' neutral ' text.
It did not occur to him that most of its formal aspects tallied with his
standards just because these were taken from his model. So far his
decisions are in the nature of a vicious circle. We today who live outside
this magic circle, which kept a generation spellbound, are able to see
through Hort's illusion. In fact we know that the traits which were
congenial to Hort's mind, the abstention from extremes, or at least welltempered
moderation in admitting them, are the unmistakable mark of
recension. This observation is far from finally depriving a class of MSS of
its value. Indeed, all the good scholarly texts that have come down to
us go back to a recension which involved a curtailing of current wild
texts, such as we now know in abundance, e.g. from papyrus texts of
Homer or Plato. Yet here the crucial problem is to what extent we are
allowed to assume that the sound critical standards, which are behind
our trustworthy recensions, included even matters of spelling. As long
as we are unable to arrive at some satisfactory decision, we ought to
refrain from taking advice from the results of textual criticism for
deciding in an analogous way matters of spelling, which were obviously
a matter of minor concern to the ancient authors and scribes themselves.
Hort's way is in practice an uneasy compromise between his knowledge
of Attic spelling and the evidence of the MSS that, for other
reasons, have a just claim on his favour; and this uneasiness, which
certainly does him credit, is seen from the fact that he has recourse to a
kind of assertion which, at least to twentieth-century ears, must
inevitably ring false, as it betrays a metabasis eis alio genos. ' Tabulation
renders it morally certain that Ιστήκειν is nowhere a mere itacism'
(App. p. i62 b
). Here, if anywhere, we have 'the mistake of assuming the
identity of the morally acceptable with the historically true' (C.J.
Cadoux, The Historic Mission of Jesus p. 3), a striking attempt to support
an untenable position in an illegitimate way, which discloses a nineteenth-century
mentality and an almost Ritschlian outlook. The
answer appropriate to our century was given by J. H. Moulton
(Moulton-Howard, Gr. π p. 77): 'It is perfectly futile to follow our
best uncials in printing abnormal forms like ϊδον for είδον and Ιστήκειν
for είστήκειν.. .The MS evidence is not adequate proof that such forms