General attention was first directed to the question of the Western text, when Blass came forward with his view that it was quite wrong to present the problem in the shape of an alternative between D and A B, because both groups were right, D and its associates representing a first edition of the Acts and a second of Luke, and the other group conversely. I hailed this solution of the difficulty at once as a veritable Columbus Egg, and to this day I am firmly persuaded that Blass’s theory is nearer the mark than the previous estimate of the Western text. [Sidenote: Zahn.] Readers may, perhaps, be struck by the fact, which Zahn has since made public (_Einl._, ii. 348), that in his practical class at Erlangen, in the winter of 1885-6, he set as the subject of the prize essay an “Investigation of the materially important peculiarities of Codex D in the Acts,” and made a note at the time of the result which he hoped to see the investigation arrive at—viz., “either the author’s first draft before publication or his hand copy with his own marginal notes inserted afterwards.” Zahn himself got no further, but he was not surprised when Blass came forward with his clearly-defined and thoroughly-elaborated hypothesis. In one point, certainly, Zahn does not agree with Blass, and that is in the application of the hypothesis to Luke. He holds that the text which Blass restored as the Roman form or second edition of Luke is essentially nothing but a bold attempt to restore what is called the Western text; that the question to which such different answers have been made as to the value of this type of text—for it is not to be spoken of as a recension in the proper sense of that term—is by no means confined to the Third Gospel, but touches the others as well and the Pauline Epistles also; that the reason why the divergence of the Western text from that exhibited in the oldest manuscripts and the great majority of Greek witnesses is more conspicuous in Luke, is simply that we have the additional testimony of Marcion for that Gospel, but the question is essentially the same in all the cases; that whereas in Acts we have two parallel texts both possessing equal authority, in Luke the case is different, where in determining what the evangelist actually wrote, we have to choose one or the other of two mutually exclusive propositions; that this verdict on the text of Luke, however, in no way invalidates the conclusion come to as regards the text of the Acts. But further, Zahn, who even before this had avowed himself an “admirer of the Western text,” stands up determinedly for the view that this same Western text, which I shall, like Zahn and Blass, indicate henceforward as β, contains much that is original. He says that just as we must beware of a superstitious idolatry of what are styled the best manuscripts,[239] which goes hand in hand with a disparagement of much older tradition (Marcion, Irenæus), so we have equally to be on our