Lectio difficilior potior
The principle was one among a number that became established in early 18th-century text criticism, as part of attempts by scholars of the Enlightenment to provide a neutral basis for discovering an "urtext" that was independent of the weight of traditional authority. History. According to Paolo Trovato, who cites as source Sebastiano Timpanaro, the principle was first mentioned by Jean Leclerc in 1696 in his "Ars critica". It was also laid down by Johann Albrecht Bengel, as , in his "Prodromus Novi Testamenti Graeci Rectè Cautèque Adornandi", 1725, and employed in his "Novum Testamentum Graecum", 1734. It  was widely promulgated by Johann Jakob Wettstein, to whom it is often attributed. Usefulness. Many scholars considered the employment of an objective criterion that would even override other evaluative considerations. The poet and scholar A. E. Housman challenged such reactive applications in 1922, in the provocatively titled article "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism". On the other hand, taken as an axiom, the principle produces an eclectic text, rather than one based on a history of manuscript transmission. "Modern eclectic praxis operates on a variant unit basis without any apparent consideration of the consequences", Maurice A. Robinson warned. He  suggested that to the principle "should be added a corollary, difficult readings created by individual scribes do not tend to perpetuate in any significant degree within transmissional history". A noted proponent of the superiority of the Byzantine text-type, the form of the Greek New Testament in the largest number of surviving manuscripts, Robinson would use the corollary to explain differences from the Majority Text as scribal errors that were not perpetuated because they were known to be errant or because they existed only in a small number of manuscripts "at the time". Most textual-critical scholars would explain the  corollary by the assumption that scribes tended to "correct" harder readings and so cut off the stream of transmission. Thus, only earlier manuscripts would have the harder readings. Later manuscripts would not see the corollary principle as being a very important one to get closer to the original form of the text. However, is not to be taken as an absolute rule either but as a general guideline. ""In general" the more difficult reading is to be preferred" is Bruce Metzger's reservation. "There is truth in the maxim: ('the more difficult reading is the more probable reading')", write Kurt  and Barbara Aland. However, for scholars like Kurt Aland, who follow a path of reasoned eclecticism based on evidence both internal and external to the manuscripts, "this principle must not be taken too mechanically, with the most difficult reading () adopted as original simply because of its degree of difficulty". Also, Martin Litchfield West cautions: "When we choose the 'more difficult reading'... we must be sure that it is in itself a plausible reading. The principle should not be used in support of dubious syntax, or phrasing that it would not have been natural for the author to use. There is  an important difference between a more "difficult" reading and a more "unlikely" reading".