adopting a conventional spelling, such as stands in the Received Text; and the many points of orthography in which there is little hope of arriving at approximate certainty in the present state of knowledge throw some serious discouragement on the attempt to reproduce the autographs in this as well as in more important respects. Yet it is not seemly, when the text of the New Testament is being scrupulously elaborated word by word, that it should be disfigured many times in every page by a slovenly neglect of philological truth. The abandonment of all restoration of the original forms of words is also liable to obliterate interesting and perhaps important facts, affinities of authorship and the like being sometimes indicated by marks trivial in themselves. No strictly middle course is satisfactory: for, though not a few ancient spellings are placed above doubt by the consent of all or nearly all the better uncials, there is every gradation of attestation between these and spellings of highly questionable authority. We have therefore thought it best to aim at approximating as nearly as we could to the spelling of the autographs by means of documentary evidence; with this qualification, that we have acquiesced in the common orthography in two or three points, not perhaps quite free from doubt, in which the better attested forms would by their prominence cause excessive strangeness in a popular text. Under the head of spelling it is convenient to include most variations of inflexion.
394. Much of the spelling in the current editions of Greek classical authors is really arbitrary, depending at least as much on modern critical tradition as on ancient evidence, whether of MSS of the book edited or of MSS of other books or of statements of Greek grammarians. Indeed to a great extent this artificiality of spelling is inevitable for want of MSS of any considerable antiquity. In the Greek Bible however, and especially in most books of the New Testament, there is a tolerable supply of available resources, so that criticism can occupy a position not unlike that which it holds with respect to Latin writings preserved in fairly ancient MSS.
395. The spellings found in good MSS of the New Testament at variance with the MSS of the middle ages and of the Received Text are probably in a few cases the true literary spellings of the time, though not found in printed editions of other books: but for the most part they