1 Timothy. i. 4. Οἰκοδομίαν, or οἰκοδομὴν, which is attested by Irenæus and a good many Latin witnesses, and received into his text by Erasmus, is nothing but an early transcriptional error for οἰκονομίαν. iii. 1. “The reading ἀνθρώπινος ὁ λόγος is attested in Greek only by D*, but it was the prevailing reading in the West till the time of Jerome. When I consider the improbability of its being invented, and its liability to alteration in conformity with 1 Tim. i. 15, iv. 9; 2 Tim. ii. 11; Tit. iii. 8, I am compelled, in spite of the one-sided nature of the testimony, to conclude that it is original. It is a proverbial expression of general application and profane origin” (Zahn, _Einleitung_, i. 482). This reading is usually ignored by our editors and commentators, and yet the passage is one that plays an important part in the ordination of the clergy, and therefore one on the correct interpretation of which a good deal might depend. Westcott and Hort merely mention it in their _Notes on Select Readings_ and insert it in their _Appendix_. It is not cited by von Gebhardt in his edition. For my own part I am not quite convinced of its originality. At the same time it is hard to understand how ΠΙΣΤΟΣ by any clerical error could be transformed into Α̅Ν̅Ι̅ΝΟΣ, and so become ΑΝΘΡΩΠΙΝΟΣ. iii. 16. In his _Forschungen_, vol. iii., Beilage iv. p. 277, “Zum Text von 1 Tim. iii. 16,” Zahn published two or three lines from some parchment fragments in the Egyptian Museum of the Louvre, which, he thinks, belong to the IV-VI century. The last three lines run—ευσεβειας μυστηρ ... | ω εφανερωθη ε ... | και εδ.... He says, “The ω in the second last line is undoubtedly meant for ὃ. This adds another to the Greek witnesses supporting this reading, which has till now been attested only by the Latin manuscripts, by other ambiguous or doubtful witnesses, and probably by the first Greek hand of Codex Claromontanus. The και in the last line is, so far as I am aware, supported by no other evidence.” The reading θεος, which was formerly so much discussed, seems to be simply an early transcriptional error, ΟϹ being read as Θ̅Ϲ̅—_i.e._ θεος with the usual mark of abbreviation. The old dispute over the reading of the earliest manuscripts (most of them exhibit a correction at the place), whether the middle stroke of the Θ in the oldest codices A C is by the first or second hand, or whether in the case of A it may not be simply the tongue of an E shining through from the other side of the parchment, cannot seemingly be decided now in the present state of the manuscripts.[285] Codex A was examined by Scrivener both with and without the aid of a magnifying glass perhaps twenty times in as many years. Dean Burgon devotes seventy-seven pages of his _Revision Revised_ to a discussion of the reading. The facility with which a variant of this sort may arise is shown by the perfectly analogous passage, Joshua ii. 11.