As was natural in a pupil of J. L. Hug of Freyburg (_see_ vol. i. p. 111), who had himself tried to build a theory of recensions on very slender grounds, Dr. Scholz attempted to settle the text of the N. T. upon principles which must be regarded as a modification of those of Griesbach. In his earliest work, like that great critic, he had been disposed to divide all extant authorities into five separate classes; but he soon reduced them to two, the Alexandrian and the Constantinopolitan. In the Alexandrian family he included the whole of Griesbach’s Western recension, from which indeed it seems vain to distinguish it by any broad line of demarcation: to the other family he referred the great mass of more recent documents which compose Griesbach’s third or Byzantine class; and to this family he was inclined to give the preference over the other, as well from the internal excellency of its readings, as because it represents the uniform text which had become traditional throughout the Greek Church. That such a standard, public, and authorized text existed he seems to have taken for granted without much enquiry. “Codices qui hoc nomen [Constantinopolitanum] habent,” he writes, “parum inter se dissentiunt. Conferas, quaeso, longè plerosque quos huic classi adhaerere dixi, atque lectiones diversas viginti trigintave in totidem capitibus vix reperies, unde conjicias eos esse accuratissimè descriptos, eorumque antigrapha parum inter se discrepasse” (N. T., Proleg., vol. i. § 55). It might have occurred to one who had spent so many years in studying Greek manuscripts, that this marvellous concord between the different Byzantine witnesses (which is striking enough, no doubt, as we turn over the pages of his Greek Testament) is after all due to nothing so much as to the haste and carelessness of collators. The more closely the cursive copies of Scripture are examined, the more does the individual character of each of them become developed. With certain points of general resemblance, whereby they are distinguished from the older documents of the Alexandrian class, they abound with mutual variations so numerous and perpetual as to vouch for the independent origin of nearly all of them, and their exact study has “swept away at once and for ever” (Tregelles’ “Account of Printed Text,” p. 180) the fancy of a standard Constantinopolitan text, and every inference that had been grounded upon its presumed existence. If (as we firmly believe) the less ancient codices ought to have their proper weight and appreciable influence in fixing the true text of Scripture, our favourable estimate of them must rest on other arguments than Scholz has urged in their behalf.