In the first sketch of this Introduction, written in the year 1895, I referred to the addition found in Matt. xxvii. 49, which is manifestly taken from John xix. 34, and is read by many authorities, among these being א B C.[240] I said then: “Only two possibilities are conceivable. Either the passage stood here originally, and was removed at an early date on account of its variance with John xix. 34, or it is an interpolation. In the latter case, it must have been inserted at a very early date, and all the witnesses containing it, which elsewhere are so frequently and so widely divergent, must then go back to one and the same exemplar. Because the third possibility—viz. that the same sentence was inserted in different copies in the same place quite independently of each other, no one will consider to be at all likely. But if the second supposition is to be held as correct, then we see just what amount of importance is to be attached to the concurrence of our oldest witnesses, particularly our chief manuscripts א B C L. They are not streams flowing independently from the same fountain of Paradise: they flowed together for a good part of their course, and were considerably polluted before they parted company.” [Sidenote: Salmon.] Two years later, when the first edition was issued, I added: “This too must now be asserted with far greater emphasis, that the concurrence of B א, on which so much stress has been laid hitherto by almost all textual critics, proves nothing at all. In Sirach the common archetype of B א was younger than the origin of the Latin version, manifestly a good deal younger, because it already contained errors that had not yet made their appearance in our other manuscripts (or in their sources). Salmon (p. 52) is of opinion that the text which Westcott and Hort have restored is one that was most in favour in Alexandria in the third century, and that came there, perhaps, in the century previous. This is not far from Bousset’s view that B perhaps contains the recension of Hesychius. Salmon calls the results of Westcott and Hort ‘an elaborate locking of the stable door after the horse has been stolen.’ Burgon’s paradox, that the reason why B and א have survived is that they were the worst, seemed to Salmon at first to be a joke, but he now thinks it not improbable that they were set aside on account of their divergence from the form of text that acquired ascendancy _at a later time_. If that be so, then they met the same fate that they themselves prepared for the primitive form they supplanted; and just as they, with the help of Tischendorf and Westcott and Hort, dislodged the _Textus Receptus_ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the hands of theologians, and made themselves the _Textus Receptus_ of the end of the nineteenth century, so perchance will Codex D, which the builders despised, become the foundation-stone of a new structure. In _Urtext_, p. 54, Oscar v.