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1 How this came about, the editor has sought to explain in his "Lectures on the History of Preaching" (New York, Armstrong), p. 103 f.
2 Persons interested in text-criticism may care to know that Field's volume for the Homilies on these Epistles, with a digest of various readings, would strikingly illustrate for them, in different material, the scientific principles and methods of Westcott and Hort. In the Homilies on Colossians they will find (out of six mss. collated for Field, viz., A b.c. D E H), a well-marked and singularly uniform group of three, viz., b.c. H, presenting the peculiarities of the altered text, adopted in many passages by Savile and followers, but in many others not adopted. The "internal evidence of groups," as described by Westcott and Hort in vol. ii., Schaff's Companion to the Bible, or Warfield's Textual Criticism, may be here applied with great ease and assured results. In Thessalonians (out of five mss., b.c. I K L) B and C are the same documents as before, but C here presents marked differences of text. B K, with or without one or two other mss., will be found very generally wrong, with the peculiarities of the altered text. C sometimes joins them, but oftener stands aloof, frequently uniting with I or L in giving the true text, and sometimes standing alone for the right. In Philippians (out of four mss., C E F G) C G will quite frequently give the altered text, but there is not such uniformity as in the Homilies on the other Epistles. It may be added that (as Field also remarks) the alterations throughout the Homilies on these Epistles show a marked family likeness, and doubtless came from the same early critical editor, who, however, altered much more freely in some Homilies (as on Philippians) than in others (as on 2 Thess.). The altered text sometimes places Chrysostom among the supporters of a "Syrian" reading of the New Testament, where his real text is not so, but the instances observed in these Homilies are not so numerous as to affect his general position. It is to be hoped that other mss. of Chrysostom will be collated, and more complete materials be at hand for future critics to settle details now remaining uncertain, and perhaps to throw light on the origin of the altered or Savilian text; but the superiority of the Verona type, as given by Field, is not at all likely to be ever again otherwise than clear and assured.
1 [Properly so-called. His other works on the Scriptures are in the form of homilies, or expository sermons, with the exception of his continuous commentary on the first six chapters of Isaiah. But as Schaff says "his homilies are expository and his commentaries are homiletical."-G. A.]
3 Vid. also Preface to Translation of Homilies on 1 Cor., p. xiii.