ii. 14. How does the Christmas song of the angels run exactly? Is it ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας, or ἐν ἀνθ. εὐδοκία? The question belongs more to exegesis than textual criticism. The whole matter turns upon a single letter, but it divides Western Christendom in two parts. The Latin Church reads it as in _hominibus bonae voluntatis_, “among men of goodwill,” or, as modern critics understand it, “among men of God’s good pleasure.” The second reading makes it “goodwill to men.” Which should it be? The former reading, the genitive, is supported by א* A B* D, the Latin, and the Gothic, whereas nearly all the other witnesses, including the Bohairic, the three Syriac, and A itself in the Hymns at the end of the Old Testament Psalter, have the nominative. One thing seems to me decisive in favour of the nominative. Scarcely any part of the New Testament is so steeped in the Hebrew spirit as the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. As Field points out in the third part of his _Otium Norvicense_, the Greek ἄνθρωποι corresponds to the Hebrew expression “son of Adam,” which cannot take another genitive after it—“sons of Adam of goodwill.” On the other hand, the word _goodwill_ in Hebrew is always followed by the preposition corresponding to the Greek ἐν. So that, till we have further testimony, I would retain the nominative and the tripartite division, notwithstanding the authority of Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, Weizsäcker, Stage, and Blass, who, by the way, mentions no variants in the β text. ii. 40. D here reads ἐν αὐτῷ in place of ἐπ’ αὐτό. The difference is slight, but not unimportant from a theological point of view. It is not accidental, as is shown by the corresponding change of ἐπ’ into εἰς in ch. iii. 22. iii. 22. Zahn regards this as one of the passages wherein D and its associates have preserved the original reading. They exhibit here ἐγὼ σήμερον γεγέννηκά σε in place of ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα. He says, moreover, that “those who hold the former as original need not lament its disappearance from tradition subsequent to the year 300” (_Einl._, ii. 240, 356). See Burkitt in Barnard’s _Biblical Text of Clement_, pp. xiii. 38. iii. 23 ff. May not the peculiar form of the genealogy in D be explained by the Diatessaron, which originally had no genealogy? The index of the Latin edition shows that there was none originally, but we find in the text one compiled from Matt. i. 1-16, Luke iii. 34-37, Matt. i. 17. The first-known manuscript of the Arabic Diatessaron had Matt. i. 1-17 in § 2, and Luke iii. 24-38 in § 9. The better manuscript, discovered later, has no genealogy in the text, but it contains one compiled from Matt. and Luke, inserted between the close of the work and the subscription by way of appendix. See Zahn, _GK._, ii. 539; J. H. Hill, _Earliest Life of Christ_ etc., p. 3 f.