Scribal Habits in Greek New Testament Manuscripts 117 1.- Scribes of all eras tend to omit rather than to add. 2.- Brief omissions are not an exception to any rule but, in large part, the rule itself. 3.- Among longer omissions, roughly one third have no detectable mechanical cause. 4.- Ad hoc correction played a significant role in the expansion of the text over time. 5.- There is very little evidence among singular readings for lectio difficilior potior. 6.- Sub-singular readings also provide little support for the Harder Reading canon. 7.- Colwell’s, Royse’s, Head’s, Hernández’s and Hurtado’s studies show little evidence of the Harder Reading canon in action. 8.- The common sense case for this canon lacks acqaintance with the realities of scribal corruption. 9.- Scribes tended to produce a harsher text rather than a more pol- ished text, largely due to their tendency to omit. 10.- Correctors, on the other hand, heavily tended to produce a fuller, more polished text. 11.- Scribes tended to disharmonize in shorter variation units, but to harmonize in longer variation units. 12.- Correctors disproportionately remedied disharmonizations, re- sulting in a more harmonized text after correction. One general observation from the study is worth considering: the way in which the transcriptional canons are related to each other. The harsher reading canon can be treated as a sub-category of the harder reading canon. The harsher reading canon also fails largely because of the fact that scribes frequently omit single words, producing a more stylistically terse text. Further, this same fact of short omissions largely explains the numerical predominance of disharmonizations over harmonizations. Eberhard Nestle argued that Bengel reduced “all Gerhard von Mae- stricht’s 43 canons to one comprehensive rule”: proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua57. Nestle also argued that Prefer the Shorter Reading is “but an- other form”, “a subdivision of Bengel’s canon”58. Nestle would appear to be correct in arguing that the transcriptional canons stand (or, better, fall) together. Here we see that the effect of scribal activity is largely to corrupt the text, not to evolve new and ever more beautiful forms of it. 57 E. Nestle, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament (London 1901) 16-17. 58 Nestle, Introduction, 240, 245.