of readings, none of which seems to be original." "Shall be burned up" certainly cannot be said to be meaningless. NASV abandons UBS here, giving the Byzantine reading; NEB and NIV render "laid bare"; TEV has "will vanish".

The previous examples may not strike the reader as being uniformly convincing; however, there is a cumulative effect. By ingenuity and mental gymnastics, it may be possible to appear to circumvent one or another of these examples but with each added instance, credibility decreases. One or two such circumventions may be deemed as possible, but five or six become highly improbable. There are dozens of further examples any one of which taken singly may not seem to be all that alarming. But they too have a cumulative effect and dozens of them should give the responsible reader pause. Is there a pattern? If so, why? But for now, enough has been presented to permit us to turn to the implications.

IMPLICATIONS1

How is all of this to be explained? The answer lies in the area of presuppositions. There has been a curious reluctance on the part of conservative scholars to come to grips with this matter. To assume that the editorial choices of an unbelieving scholar will not be influenced by his theological bias is naive in the extreme.

To be sure, both such scholars and the conservative defenders of the eclectic text will doubtless reply "Not at all - our editorial choices are derived from a most straightforward application of the generally accepted canons of N.T. textual criticism." And what are those canons? As stated in chapters VI and VII herein, the four main ones are:

(1) the reading that best accounts for the rise of the other reading(s) is to be preferred;

(2) the harder reading is to be preferred;

(3) the "shorter" is to be preferred; and

(4) the reading that best fits the author's style and purpose is to be preferred.

 From B.M. Metzger's presentation of the UBS Committee's reasoning in the cited examples, it appears that for nearly half their decision was based on the "harder reading canon". But, how are we to decide which variant is "harder"? Will not our theological bias enter in?

Consider, for example, Luke 24:52. The Nestle editions 1-25 omit "they worshipped him" (and in consequence NASV, RSV and NEB do also). UBS retains the words, but with a {D} grade (a very high degree of doubt). Yet only one solitary Greek manuscript omits the words (Codex D) supported by part of the Latin witness. In spite of the very slim external evidence for the omission, it is argued that it is the "harder" reading.

If the clause were original, what orthodox Christian would even think of removing it? On the other hand, the clause would make a nice pious addition that would immediately become popular, if the original lacked it. However, not only did the Gnostics dominate the Christian church in Egypt in the second century, there were also others who did not believe that Jesus was God come in the flesh. As unbelievers, would they be likely to resist the impulse to delete such a statement?

How shall we choose between these two hypotheses? Will it not be on the basis of our presuppositions? Indeed, in discussing this variant, along with Hort's other "Western non-interpolations", Metzger explains (p. 193) that a minority of the UBS committee argued that "there

1 The reader is reminded that this Appendix has been adapted from Dr. Pickering's 1990 What Difference Does It Make? Beginning at this section to the end of Appendix C has been adapted from his pp. 12-16.

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