he next session of the Company, I took
due note of the readings as well as of the renderings, but I formed my
judgement independently on the evidence supplied to me by the notes of
the critical edition, whether that of Tischendorf or Tregelles, which I
then was in the habit of using. This evidence was always fully stated to
the Company, nearly always by Dr. Scrivener, and it was upon the
discussion of this evidence, and not on the reading of any particular
editor, on which the decision of the Company was ultimately formed. We
paid in all cases great attention to the arguments of our two eminent
colleagues and our experienced colleague, Dr. Scrivener; but each
question of reading, as it arose, was settled by the votes of the
Company. The resulting text, as afterwards published by the Oxford
University Press, and edited by Archdeacon Palmer, was thus the direct
work of the Company, and may be rightly designated, as it will be in
these pages, as the Revisers' text.

It is of considerable importance that this should be borne in mind; for,
in the angry vituperation which was directed against the Revisers' text,
it was tacitly assumed that this text was practically identical with that
of Westcott and Hort, and that the difficulties which are to be found in
this latter text (and some there certainly are) are all to be found in
the text of the Revisers. How very far such an assumption is from the
true state of the case can easily be shown by a simple comparison of one
text with the other. Let us take an example. I suppose there are very
few who can entertain the slightest doubt that in Acts xii. 35, St. Luke
tells us that Barnabas and Saul returned _from_ Jerusalem after their
mission was over, and took with them (from Jerusalem) St. Mark. Now what
is the reading of Westcott and Hort?--"to Jerusalem" with the Vatican
Manuscript, and a fair amount of external support. We then turn at once
to the Revisers' text and find that _from_ ([Greek text]) is maintained,
in spite of the clever arguments which, in this case, can be urged for an
intrinsically improbable reading, and, most likely, were urged at the
time, as I observe that the Revisers have allowed the "to" to appear in a
margin.

I regret that I have never gone through the somewhat laborious process of
minutely comparing the Revisers' text with the text of Westcott and Hort,
but I cannot help thinking that the example I have chosen is a typical
one, and does show the