earliest transcribers. Except from extraneous sources, which here have no existence, it is never possible to know how many transcriptions intervened between the autograph and the latest common ancestor of all the elements in all extant documents; and a corruption affecting them all may evidently have originated at any link of that initial chain. Moreover the line of demarcation between primitive and other corruptions is less easy to draw than might be supposed. As was intimated above (§ 360), account has to be taken of a few places in which what appears to be the true reading is found exclusively in one or two secondary or hardly even secondary documents; perhaps transmitted from the autograph, and preserved by some rare accident of mixture notwithstanding the otherwise complete extinction of the line of transmission by which it had been conveyed, perhaps due only to a casual and unconscious emendation of an erroneous current reading. But these gradations of primitiveness in corruption have no practical moment. The only fact that really concerns us is that certain places have to be recognised and marked as insecure.
368. The number of such places which we have been able to recognise with sufficient confidence to justify the definite expression of doubt is not great. If we exclude books in which the documentary attestation of text is manifestly incomplete, as the Apocalypse, some of the Catholic Epistles, and the latter part of Hebrews, it is relatively extremely small. There may be and probably are other places containing corruption which we have failed to discover: but judging by analogy we should expect the differences to be of no real interest. We cannot too strongly express our disbelief in the existence of undetected interpolations of any moment. This
