18 MRS. A. S. LEWIS, ON THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD. 



interpolation ; the statement that our Lord, though He was 

 sitting on the well when His disciples left Him at Sychar, was 

 found by them when they returned, standing and talking to the 

 woman, and many other little points of a like kind. A recent 

 critic of my book The Old Syriac Gospels, the Eev. Dr. Moffatt, 

 who has shown himself slow to adopt new theories like 

 Sir William Eamsay's South Galatian one, judges them to be 

 due to revision rather than to an original text. I do not think 

 so. It cannot be due to revision when the supposed discrepancy 

 between St. John and the Synoptists as to the scene of our 

 Lord's trial has quite disappeared by the rearrangements 

 of the matter in the XVIIlth chapter of St. John's Gospel,* 

 whereby verse 24 is restored to its true place after verse 13 ; 

 my discovery, partly at Sinai and partly at home, that the 

 Greek word tt/owto? or irpcoTov (for and B differ) in John i, 41, 

 was originally TrpcoL, that the two dots over the last letter of 

 this word caused it to be mistaken for a r, and that Andrew found 

 his brother Simon not after the tenth hour, but at the dawn of the 

 next day after his meeting with the Saviour (a reading found also 

 in three of the best Latin ]\1SS. a.e.r.) as "mane." Dr. liurkitt 

 accepted this reading immediately after I had published 

 it in the Expository Times, and he made the further suggestion 

 that Luke vi, 1, with its impossible grammar (in some MSS.) is 

 capable of a similar solution. Dr. Wilkins, of T.C.D., has pointed 

 out another instance in the Odyssey, book xxiv, line 24, where 

 for the last twenty years all editors have printed irpwi instead 

 of 7rp(0T0(; or nrpoiTov. These and many other things cannot 

 surely be due to revision ; quite probably they are records from 

 the memory of some of the early disciples. Dr. Moffatt approves 

 of those in John i, 41, John xviii, 13, 24, 14, and Luke xvii, 10. 

 These might have predisposed him in favour of the others. To 

 on e of these I wish to draw your attention, before I close, as it 

 is connected with the Birth story. The Sinai text makes the 

 wise men say in Matthew ii, 2, "We have seen His star from 

 the east, and are come to worship him." One day I happened 

 to be transcribing this passage : and I asked myself, " What can 

 ' from the east ' mean ? " Is there any justification for it in the 

 Gree k ? Looking closely at the original text, I saw that if you 

 take it to be a loose construction, common in popular speech, 

 you might just as easily read, " We, being in the east, have seen 

 His star," as you might say, "I have seen Brooks' comet in Cam- 



This was perceived by Dr. Martin Luther in his translation of the 

 Bible into German, edit. 1558, 1664. 



