Note 151 — Chapter III · THEORY AND PRAXIS OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.[129]

The opposite view is expressed in Scrivener, ii. 244: “It is now agreed among competent judges that Conjectural Emendation must never be resorted to, even in passages of acknowledged difficulty”; and he quotes from Roberts (Words of the New Testament): “conjectural criticism is entirely banished from the field ... simply because there is no need for it.” With this, however, he does not quite agree. He admits that there are passages respecting which we cannot help framing a shrewd suspicion that the original reading differed from any form in which they are now presented to us. He notes as passages for which we should be glad of more light, Acts vii. 46, xiii. 32, xix. 40, xxvi. 28; Rom. viii. 2; 1 Cor. xii. 2, where Ephes. ii. 11 might suggest ὅτι ποτέ; 1 Tim. vi. 7; 2 Pet. iii. 10, 12; Jude 5, 22, 23. G. Krüger expresses himself to the same effect. He would have no conjecture, however well founded, received into the text. See his notice of Koetschau’s Origen in the L. Cbl., No. 39, 1899. I find that Swete has had no objection to adopt a conjecture of mine in his second edition of the last volume of the Cambridge Septuagint (Enoch xiv. 3). If such a thing is permissible in the case of Enoch, why should it not be allowable in the New Testament? As clever suggestions maybe noted ἐκολάφισαν for the hapax legomenon ἐκεφαλίωσαν, Mark xii. 4 (Linwood, Van de Sande-Bakhuyzen) and λανθάνουσι for μανθάνουσι, 1 Tim. v. 13 (Hitzig). Lagrange (Revue Biblique, 1900, p. 206) cautions us against “prêter de l’esprit à l’Esprit Saint.”