The scribe of the Vercelli Codex (a) was about to do the same thing; but
he checked himself when he had got as far as 'the pinnacle of the
temple,'--which he seems to have thought as good a scene for the third
temptation as 'a high mountain,' and so left it.

Sec. 3.

A favourite, and certainly a plausible, method of accounting for the
presence of unauthorized matter in MSS. is to suggest that, in the first
instance, it probably existed only in the shape of a marginal gloss,
which through the inadvertence of the scribes, in process of time, found
its way into the sacred text. That in this way some depravations of
Scripture may possibly have arisen, would hardly I presume be doubted.
But I suspect that the hypothesis is generally a wholly mistaken one;
having been imported into this subject-matter (like many other notions
which are quite out of place here), from the region of the
Classics,--where (as we know) the phenomenon is even common. Especially
is this hypothesis resorted to (I believe) in order to explain those
instances of assimilation which are so frequently to be met with in
Codd. B and [Symbol: Aleph].

Another favourite way of accounting for instances of assimilation, is by
taking for granted that the scribe was thinking of the parallel or the
cognate place. And certainly (as before) there is no denying that just
as the familiar language of a parallel place in another Gospel presents
itself unbidden to the memory of a reader, so may it have struck a
copyist also with sufficient vividness to persuade him to write, not the
words which he saw before him, but the words which he remembered. All
this is certainly possible.

But I strongly incline to the suspicion that this is not by any means
the right way to explain the phenomena under discussion. I am of opinion
that such depravations of the text were in the first instance
intentional. I do not mean that they were introduced with any sinister
motive. My meaning is that [there was a desire to remove obscurities, or
to reconcile incongruous passages, or generally to improve the style of
the authors, and thus to add to the merits of the sacred writings,
instead of detracting from them. Such a mode of dealing with the holy
deposit evinced no doubt a failure in the part of those who adopted it
to understand the nature of the trust committed to the Church, just as
similar action at the present day does in the case of such as load the
New Testament with 'various