The last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.

It is indeed a striking proof of the essential soundness of the tradition that with which all these thousands of copies, tracing their ancestry back to so many different parts of the earth and to conditions of such diverse kinds, the variations of text are so entirely questions of detail, not of essential substance.

All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.

The last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.

It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings have been restored to us in great numbers.

The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.

Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.