9 Who Was Manifested in the Flesh? A Consideration of Internal Evidence 2. Canons of Internal Evidence As was stated earlier, it is in the enumeration, if not the application of canons of internal evidence, that the three species of text critics are most in agreement. Elliott, a thoroughgoing eclectic, identifies the three broad questions that all critics ask in assessing internal evidence: “Which reading best accounts for the rise of the other variants? Which reading is the likeliest to have suffered change at the hands of early copyists? Which reading is in keeping with the style and thought of the author and makes the best sense in context?”20 The factors addressed in the second question are also referred to by reasoned eclectics such as Bruce Metzger as “trans- criptional probabilities,” which can be further classified as intentional and unintentional alterations, while the last question is said to deal with “intrinsic probabilities.”21 There is further agreement among the text critics concerning the types of unintentional errors that can account for variant readings. Such errors include (a) confusion of similar Greek letters such as Ο, Ε, Θ and C when dealing with uncials, (b) omission of entire lines, or parts of lines when the scribe’s eye skips from one series of letters to an identical series and fails to copy the intervening text, or (c) the recopying of a word or series of letters when the scribe’s eye returns to the same location on the exemplar as that from which he just copied, duplicating the text (dittography.) All agree that where a reading can be attributed to any of these factors, it is less likely to be the original. Scribes also intentionally altered the text they were copying, although text critics disagree about their propensity and motives for doing so. Metz- ger calls such alterations “frequent,”22 while M. Robinson, a Byzantine priorist, states that “A careful examination of scribal practices will reveal how rarely conflation or other supposed ‘scribal tendencies’ actually oc- curred, and how limited was the propagation of such among the MSS.”23 Both agree, however, that scribes did on occasion (a) harmonize readings to match those in either the near context of the MSS being copied, in other works by the same author, or in other passages of Scripture with which the scribe was familiar, (b) expand divine names for piety’s sake, such as modifying “Jesus” to “Jesus Christ” to “Jesus Christ our Lord,” and occasionally (c) combine the wording of two or more readings into one (conflation). Metgzer goes on to have scribes replace unfamiliar with Elliott, “Thoroughgoing Eclecticism”, 322. 20 Metzger, The Text of the NT, 209-10. 21 Metzger, The Text of the NT, 210. 22 Robinson, “NT Textual Criticism”, 11 n. 25. 23