4. MATT. xvi. 2, 3. The whole passage from Ὀψίας ver. 2 to the end of ver. 3 is set within brackets by Tischendorf in his eighth edition, within double brackets by Westcott and Hort, who holds (Notes, p. 13) that “both documentary evidence and the impossibility of accounting for omission prove these words to be no part of the text of Mt.” Yet it might seem impossible for any one possessed of the slightest tincture of critical instinct to read them thoughtfully without feeling assured that they were actually spoken by the Lord on the occasion related in the Received text, and were omitted by copyists whose climate the natural phenomena described did not very well suit, the rather as they do not occur in the parallel text, ch. xii. 38, 39. Under these circumstances, the internal evidence in favour of the passage being thus clear and irresistible, the witnesses against it are more likely to damage their own authority than to impair our confidence in its genuineness. These witnesses are אBVXΓ, 2, 13, 34, 39, 44, 84, 124 _primâ manu_, 157, 180, 194, 258, 301, 511, 575. Cod. 482 has the words, but only in a later hand at the foot of the page (Nicholson). Of these cursive codices 157 alone is of the first class for importance, and the verses are explained in the scholia of X (for ver. 3) and of 39. E and 606 have them with an asterisk; but they are wanting in the Curetonian Syriac, the Bohairic according to Mill (but not so other Coptic manuscripts and editions), and the Armenian, as unaltered from the Latin. Origen passes them over in his commentary, and Jerome, in his sweeping way, declares “hoc in plerisque codicibus non habetur.” They are recognized in the Eusebian canons (Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text, p. 205). The united testimony of אB and the Curetonian version suffices to show that the omission was current as early as the second century, while the accordance of CD, of all the Latins and the Peshitto, with the mass of later codices assures us that the words were extant at the same early date. If any one shall deem this a case best explained by the existence of two separate recensions of the same work, one containing the disputed sentences, the other derived from copies in which they had not yet been inserted, he may find much encouragement for his conjecture by considering certain passages in the latter part of St. Luke’s Gospel, where the same sort of omissions, supported by a class of authorities quite different from those we have to deal with here, occur too often to be merely accidental.