ter may sufficiently account for all that has happened to the
_pericope_ de adultera: And so it may, no doubt. But then, once admit
_this_, and the hypothesis under consideration becomes simply nugatory:
fails even to _touch_ the difficulty which it professes to remove. For
if men were capable of thinking scorn of these twelve verses when they
found them in the 'second and improved edition of St. John's Gospel,'
why may they not have been just as irreverent in respect of the same
verses, when they appeared in the _first_ edition? How is it one whit
more probable that every Greek Father for a thousand years should have
systematically overlooked the twelve verses in dispute when they
appeared in the second edition of St. John's Gospel, than that the same
Fathers should have done the same thing when they appeared in the
first[615]?

(4) But the hypothesis is gratuitous and nugatory: for it has been
invented in order to account for the phenomenon that whereas twelve
verses of St. John's Gospel are found in the large majority of the later
Copies,--the same verses are observed to be absent from all but one of
the five oldest Codexes. But how, (I wish to be informed,) is that
hypothesis supposed to square with these phenomena? It cannot be meant
that the 'second edition' of St. John did not come abroad until after
Codd. [Symbol: Aleph]ABCT were written? For we know that the old Italic
version (a document of the second century) contains all the three
portions of narrative which are claimed for the second edition. But if
this is not meant, it is plain that some further hypothesis must be
invented in order to explain why certain Greek MSS. of the fourth and
fifth centuries are without the verses in dispute. And this fresh
hypothesis will render that under consideration (as I said) nugatory and
shew that it was gratuitous.

What chiefly offends me however in this extraordinary suggestion is its
_irreverence_. It assumes that the Gospel according to St. John was
composed like any ordinary modern book: capable therefore of being
improved in the second edition, by recension, addition, omission,
retractation, or what not. For we may not presume to limit the changes
effected in a second edition. And yet the true Author of the Gospel is
confessedly God the Holy Ghost: and I know of no reason for supposing
that His works are imperfect when they proceed forth from His Hands.

The cogency of what precedes has in fact weighed so powerfull