Secondly. The quotations of the church fathers from the last part of the second to the end of the fourth century are so copious, that from them almost the entire text of our present gospels could be reconstructed.  These quotations agree substantially with each other and with the text of our existing manuscripts; only that the earlier fathers, as already noticed, chap. 2. 3, often quote loosely from memory, blend together different narratives, and interweave with the words of Scripture their own explanatory remarks.

Thirdly. We have two versions of the New Testament—­the Old Latin or Italic, and the Syriac called Peshito—­which learned men are agreed in placing somewhere in the last half of the second century.  The testimony of these witnesses to the uncorrupt preservation of the sacred text, from the time when they first appeared to the present, is decisive; for they also agree essentially with the Greek text of the gospel as we now possess it.  Nor is this all.  Davidson affirms of the Old Latin version, that “the more ancient the Greek manuscripts, the closer is their agreement with it.”  And Tischendorf says of the oldest known manuscript of the Bible—­the Greek Sinai Codex, brought by him from the convent of St. Catharine, Mount Sinai, in 1859—­that its agreement, in the New Testament portion, with the Old Latin version, is remarkable.  Through the joint testimony, then, on the one hand, of the most ancient Greek manuscripts, especially the Sinai Codex, which is the oldest of them all; and on the other, of the Old Latin version which belongs to the last half of the second century, we are carried back to a very ancient and pure form of the Greek text prevalent before the execution of this version, that is, about the middle of the second century.  Tischendorf adds arguments to show that the Syriac Peshito version, the text of which has not come down to us in so pure a state, had for its basis substantially the same form of text as the Old Latin and the Sinai Codex.

The substantial identity of the sacred text, as we now have it, with that which has existed since about the middle of the second century, is thus shown to be a matter not of probable conjecture, but of certain knowledge.  Here, then, we have a sure criterion by which to measure and interpret the complaints which textual critics, ancient or modern, have made, sometimes in very strong language, concerning the corruptions that have found their way into the text of the New Testament.  These writers have reference to what are called “various readings,” not to mutilations and alterations, such as those charged by the ancients upon Marcion, by which he sought to change the facts and doctrines of the gospel.  That this must be their meaning we know; for there are the manuscripts by hundreds as witnesses, all of which, the most corrupt as textual critics would call them, as well as the purest, give in the gospel narratives the same facts and doctrines without essential variation.