A paraphrase and annotations upon all the books of the New Testament briefly explaining all the difficult places thereof / by H. Hammond.

In the first place, that concerning the Greek Text, Many learned men, especi∣ally Lucas Brugensis and Robertus Stephanus, have used great industrie to observe the various readings of the many Manuscript Copies which had been diligently col∣lected and compared. And these are already to be had by those that please to con∣sult them. Yet because this Kingdome of ours hath been enriched with some monuments of Antiquity in this kind, which were probably designed by God for more honorable uses then onely to be laid up in Archives, as dead bodies in vaults and charnel-houses, to converse with dust, and worms, and rottenness; some of these I have chosen to advise with, and from them to offer sometimes a various reading; yet not permitting this to supplant or turn out that which hath vulgarly been received, but setting it in the inner margent, that those that have judgement may, as they see cause, make use of it.

The first MS. which I have my self twice compared, I found in the place of my Education, in the Librarie of S^t Mary Magdalene College in Oxford, a fair and an ancient Copie.

The second is that more known in the King's Librarie at S^t James's, presented to our late Soveraigne by Cyrill the Patriarch of Constantinople, written in Capital letters by a very antient hand, of Thecla, as it is thought, and now happily pre∣pared for the presse by the great pains and judgment of M^r Patrick Young, from whose hands the most Reverend Father in God, the Archbishop of Armagh, having long since received a Copie of the various readings, was pleased to communicate them to me.

The third is the Greek and Latine MS. of the four Gospels and the Acts, found ninety years since in a Monasterie at Lions in the time of the Civil warre in France, and twenty years after presented by Theodore Beza, as a monument of ve∣nerable Antiquity, to the University of Cambridge, the variations of which from the vulgar printed Copies I also acknowledge to have received from the favour of the most Reverend Archbishop of Armagh. What hath from any of these appeared use∣ful to be proposed, is in the inner margent of this Book translated, and set over against the Text, with an [or] in the front of it, as the Characteristick note to distinguish it from the changes of the English Translation, which, without that mark, are put in the same margent.