CHAPTER IV. THE LARGER UNCIAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE GREEK TESTAMENT.

We proceed to describe in detail the uncial manuscripts of the Greek Testament, arranged separately as copies of the Gospels, of the Acts and Catholic Epistles, of the Pauline Epistles, and of the Apocalypse. They are usually indicated by the capital letters of the English and Greek alphabets, and stand on the list not in the order of their relative value or antiquity, but mainly as they were applied from time to time to the purposes of Textual criticism.

א (_Aleph_). CODEX SINAITICUS, now at St. Petersburg, the justly celebrated copy which sometime ago for a quarter of a century attracted general attention in the learned world. Tischendorf (Notitia Ed. Cod. Sinaitici, pp. 5, 6) when travelling in 1844 under the patronage of his own sovereign, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, picked out of a basket full of papers destined to light the oven of the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the forty-three leaves of the Septuagint which he published in 1846 as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus (_see_ p. 32). These, of course, he easily got for the asking, but finding that further portions of the same codex (e.g. the whole of Isaiah and 1, 4 Maccabees) were extant, he rescued them from their probable fate, by enlightening the brotherhood as to their value. He was permitted to copy one page of what yet remained, containing the end of Isaiah and the beginning of Jeremiah, which he afterwards published in the first volume of his “Monumenta Sacra Inedita” (1855), pp. xxx. and 213-16; and he departed in the full hope that he should be allowed to purchase the whole. But he had taught the monks a sharp lesson, and neither then, nor on his subsequent visit in 1853, could he gain any tidings of the leaves he had left behind;—he even seems to have concluded that they had been carried into Europe by some richer or more fortunate collector. At the beginning of 1859, after the care of the seventh edition of his N. T. was happily over, he went for a third time into the East, under the well-deserved patronage of the Emperor of Russia, the great protector of the Oriental Church; and the treasure which had been twice withdrawn from him as a private traveller, was now, on the occasion of some chance conversation, spontaneously put into the hands of one sent from the champion and benefactor of the oppressed Church. Tischendorf touchingly describes his surprise, his joy, his midnight studies over the priceless volume (“_quippe dormire nefas videbatur_”) on that memorable 4th of February, 1859. The rest was easy; he was allowed to copy his prize at Cairo, and ultimately to bring it to Europe, as a tribute of duty and gratitude to the Emperor Alexander II. To that monarch’s wise munificence both the larger edition (1862), and the smaller of the New Testament only (1863), are mainly due.

The Codex Sinaiticus is 13-½ inches in length by 14-7/8 inches high, and consists of 346-½ leaves of the same beautiful vellum as the Cod. Friderico-Augustanus which is really a part of it whereof 199 contain portions of the Septuagint version, 147-½ the whole New Testament, Barnabas’ Epistle, and a considerable fragment of Hermas’ Shepherd. It has subsequently appeared that the Russian Archimandrite (afterwards Bishop) Porphyry had brought with him from Sinai in 1845 some pieces of Genesis xxiii, xxiv, and of Numbers v, vi, and vii, which had been applied long before to the binding of other books(113). Each page comprises four columns (_see_ p. 27), with forty-eight lines in each column, of those continuous, noble, simple uncials (_compare_ Plate iv. 11 a _with_ 11 b). The poetical books of the Old Testament, however, being written in στίχοι, admit of only two columns on a page (_above_, p. 52). “In the Catholic Epistles the scribe has frequently contented himself with a column of forty-seven lines(114).” The order of the sacred books is remarkable, though by no means unprecedented. St. Paul’s Epistles precede the Acts, and amongst them, that to the Hebrews follows 2 Thess., standing on the same page with it (p. 74). Although this manuscript has hitherto been inspected by few Englishmen (Tregelles, however, and Dean Stanley were among the number), yet its general aspect has grown familiar to us by the means of photographs of its most important pages taken for the use of private scholars(115), as well as from the facsimiles contained in Tischendorf’s several editions. Breathings and accents there are none except in Tobit vi. 9, and Gal. v. 21, as has been already mentioned: the apostrophus and the single point for punctuation are entirely absent for pages together, yet occasionally are rather thickly studded, not only in places where a later hand has been unusually busy (e.g. Isaiah i. 1-iii. 2, two pages), but in some others (e.g. in 2 Cor. xii. 20 there are eight stops). Even words very usually abridged (except _θσ_, _κσ_, _ισ_, _χσ_, _πνα_ which are constant) are here written in full though the practice varies, πατηρ, υιος, ουρανος, ανθρωπος, δαυειδ: we find ϊσραηλ´, ισλ or _ιηλ_: ϊερουσαλημ´, _ιημ_, _ιλμ_, _ιηλμ´_. Tischendorf considers the two points over iota and upsilon (which are sometimes wanting) as seldom from the first hand: the mark >, besides its rather rare marginal use in citations (_see_ p. 64, note 4), we notice in the text oftener in the Old Testament than in the New. Words are divided at the end of a line: thus Κ in ΟΥΚ, and Χ in ΟΥΧ are separated(116). Small letters, of the most perfect shape, freely occur in all places, especially at the end of lines, where the _superscript_ (_see_ p. 50) is almost always made to represent Ν (e.g. seventeen times in Mark i. 1-35). Other _compendia scribendi_ are Κ for και, and ΗΝ written as in Plate i. No. 2(117). Numerals are represented by letters, with a straight line placed over them, e.g. _μ_ Mark i. 13. Although there are no capitals, the initial letter of a line which begins a paragraph generally (not always) stands out from the rank of the rest, as in the Old Testament portion of Cod. Vaticanus, and less frequently in the New, after the fashion of certain earlier pieces on papyrus. The titles and subscriptions of the several books are as short as possible (_see_ p. 65). The τίτλοι or κεφάλαια _majora_ are absent; the margin contains the so-called Ammonian sections and Eusebian canons, but Tischendorf is positive that neither they nor such notes as στιχων _ρπ_ (_see_ p. 53, note 3) appended to 2 Thessalonians, are by the original scribe, although they may possibly be due to a contemporary hand. From the number of ὁμοιοτέλευτα and other errors, one cannot affirm that it is very carefully written. Its itacisms are of the oldest type, and those not constant; chiefly ι for ει, and δε and ε, and much more rarely η and υ and οι interchanged. The grammatical forms commonly termed Alexandrian occur, pretty much as in other manuscripts of the earliest date. The whole manuscript is disfigured by corrections, a few by the original scribe, or by the usual comparer or διορθώτης (_see_ p. 55); very many by an ancient and elegant hand of the sixth century (אa), whose emendations are of great importance; some again by a hand but little later (אb); far the greatest number by a scholar of the seventh century (אc), who often cancels the changes introduced by (אa); others by as many as eight several later writers, whose varying styles Tischendorf has carefully discriminated and illustrated by facsimiles(118).

The foregoing considerations were bringing even cautious students to a general conviction that Cod. א, if not, as its enthusiastic discoverer had announced, “omnium antiquissimus” in the absolute sense of the words, was yet but little lower in date than the Vatican manuscript itself, and a veritable relic of the middle of the fourth century—the presence in its margin of the sections and canons of Eusebius [d. 340?], by a hand nearly if not quite contemporaneous, seems to preclude the notion of higher antiquity(119)—when Constantino Simonides, a Greek of Syme, who had just edited a few papyrus fragments of the New Testament alleged to have been written in the first century of the Christian era, suddenly astonished the learned world in 1862 by claiming to be himself the scribe who had penned this manuscript in the monastery of Panteleemon on Mount Athos, as recently as in the years 1839 and 1840. The writer of these pages must refer to the Introduction to his Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus (pp. lx-lxxii, 2nd edition, 1867) for a statement of the reasons which have been universally accepted as conclusive, why the manuscript which Simonides may very well have written under the circumstances he has described neither was nor possibly could be that venerable document. The discussion of the whole question, however, though painful enough in some aspects, was the means of directing attention to certain peculiarities of Cod. א which might otherwise have been overlooked. While engaged in demonstrating that it could not have been transcribed from a Moscow-printed Bible, as was “Cod. Simoneidos” (to borrow the designation employed by its author), critics came to perceive that either this copy or its immediate prototype must have been derived from a papyrus exemplar, and that probably of Egyptian origin (Collation, &c. pp. viii; xiv; lxviii), a confirmation of the impression conveyed to the reader by a first glance at the eight narrow columns of each open leaf (p. 28). The claim of Simonides to be the sole writer of a book which must have consisted when complete of about 730 leaves, or 1460 pages of very large size (Collation, &c. p. xxxii), and that too within the compass of eight or ten months(120) (he inscribed on his finished work, as he tells us, the words Σιμωνίδου τὸ ὅλον ἔργον), made it important to scrutinize the grounds of Tischendorf’s judgement that four several scribes had been engaged upon it, one of whom, as he afterwards came to persuade himself, was the writer of its rival, Codex Vaticanus(121). Such an investigation, so far as it depends only on the handwriting, can scarcely be carried out satisfactorily without actual examination of the manuscript itself, which is unfortunately not easily within the reach of those who could use it independently; but it is at all events quite plain, as well from internal considerations as from minute peculiarities in the writing, such as the frequent use of the apostrophus and of the mark > (_see above_, p. 50) on some sheets and their complete absence from others (Collation, &c. pp. xvi-xviii; xxxii; xxxvii), that at least two, and probably more, persons have been employed on the several parts of the volume(122).

It is indeed a strange coincidence, although unquestionably it can be nothing more, that Simonides should have brought to the West from Mount Athos some years before one genuine fragment of the Shepherd of Hermas in Greek, and the transcript of a second (both of which materially aided Tischendorf in editing the remains of that Apostolic Father), when taken in connexion with the fact that the worth of Codex Sinaiticus is vastly enhanced by its exhibiting next to the Apocalypse, and on the same page with its conclusion, the only complete extant copy, besides the one discovered by Bryennios in 1875, of the Epistle of Barnabas in Greek, followed by a considerable portion of this self-same Shepherd of Hermas, much of which, as well as of Barnabas, was previously known to us only in the Old Latin translation. Both these works are included in the list of books of the New Testament contained in the great Codex Claromontanus D of St. Paul’s Epistles, to be described hereafter, Barnabas standing there in an order sufficiently remarkable; and their presence, like that of the Epistles of Clement at the end of Codex Alexandrinus (p. 99), brings us back to a time when the Church had not yet laid aside the primitive custom of reading publicly in the congregation certain venerated writings which have never been regarded exactly in the same light as Holy Scripture itself. Between the end of Barnabas and the opening of the Shepherd are lost the last six leaves of a quaternion (which usually consists of eight) numbered 91 at its head in a fairly ancient hand. The limited space would not suffice for the insertion of Clement’s genuine Epistle, since the head of the next quaternion is numbered 92, but might suit one of the other uncanonical books on the list in Cod. Claromontanus, viz. the Acts of Paul and the Revelation of Peter.

With regard to the deeply interesting question as to the critical character of Cod. א, although it strongly supports the Codex Vaticanus in many characteristic readings, yet it cannot be said to give its exclusive adherence to any of the witnesses hitherto examined. It so lends its grave authority, now to one and now to another, as to convince us more than ever of the futility of seeking to derive the genuine text of the New Testament from any one copy, however ancient and, on the whole, trustworthy, when evidence of a wide and varied character is at hand.

A. CODEX ALEXANDRINUS in the British Museum, where the open volume of the New Testament is publicly shown in the Manuscript room. It was placed in that Library on its formation in 1753, having previously belonged to the king’s private collection from the year 1628, when Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople (whose crude attempts to reform the Eastern Church on the model of Geneva ultimately provoked the untoward Synod of Bethlehem in 1672(123)), sent this most precious document by our Ambassador in Turkey, Sir Thomas Roe, as a truly royal gift to Charles I. An Arabic inscription, several centuries old, at the back of the Table of Contents on the first leaf of the manuscript, and translated into Latin in another hand, which Mr. W. Aldis Wright recognizes as Bentley’s (Academy, April 17, 1875), states that it was written by the hand of Thecla the Martyr(124). A recent Latin note on the first page of the first of two fly-leaves declares that it was given to the Patriarchal Chamber in the year of the Martyrs, 814 [A.D. 1098]. Another, and apparently the earliest inscription, in an obscure Moorish-Arabic scrawl, set at the foot of the first page of Genesis, was thus translated for Baber by Professor Nicoll of Oxford, “Dicatus est Cellae Patriarchae in urbe munitâ Alexandriâ. Qui eum ex eâ extraxerit sit anathematizatus, vi avulsus. Athanasius humilis” (Cod. Alex. V.T., Prolegomena, p. xxvi, note 92). That the book was brought from Alexandria by Cyril (who had been Patriarch of that see from 1602 to 1621) need not be disputed, although Wetstein, on the doubtful authority of Matthew Muttis of Cyprus, Cyril’s deacon, concludes that he procured it from Mount Athos. In the volume itself the Patriarch has written and subscribed the following words: “Liber iste scripturae sacrae N. et V. Testamenti, prout ex traditione habemus, est scriptus manu Theclae, nobilis foeminae Aegyptiae, ante mile [sic] et trecentos annos circiter, paulò post Concilium Nicenum. Nomen Theclae in fine libri erat exaratum, sed extincto Christianismo in Aegypto a Mahometanis, et libri unà Christianorum in similem sunt reducti conditionem. Extinctum ergo est Theclae nomen et laceratum, sed memoria et traditio recens observat.” Cyril seems to lean wholly on the Arabic inscription on the first leaf of the volume: independent testimony he would appear to have received none.

This celebrated manuscript, the earliest of first-rate importance applied by scholars to the criticism of the text, and yielding in value to but one or two at the utmost, is now bound in four volumes, whereof three contain the Septuagint version of the Old Testament almost complete(125), the fourth volume the New Testament with several lamentable defects. In St. Matthew’s Gospel some twenty-five leaves are wanting up to ch. xxv. 6 ἐξέρχεσθε, from John vi. 50 ἵνα to viii. 52 καὶ σύ(126) two leaves are lost, and three leaves from 2 Cor. iv. 13 ἐπίστευσα to xii. 6 ἐξ ἐμοῦ. All the other books of the New Testament are here entire, the Catholic Epistles following the Acts, that to the Hebrews standing before the Pastoral Epistles (_see above_, p. 74). After the Apocalypse we find what was till very recently the only known extant copy of the first or genuine Epistle of Clement of Rome, and a small fragment of a second of suspected authenticity, both in the same hand as the latter part of the New Testament. It would appear also that these two Epistles of Clement were designed to form a part of the volume of Scripture, for in the Table of Contents exhibited on the first leaf of the manuscript under the head Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ, they are represented as immediately following the Apocalypse: next is given the number of books, ΟΜΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΑ, the numerals being now illegible; and after this, as if distinct from Scripture, the eighteen Psalms of Solomon. Such uncanonical works (ἰδιωτικοὶ ψαλμοὶ ... ἀκανόνιστα βιβλία) were forbidden to be read in churches by the 59th canon of the Council of Laodicea (A.D. 363?); whose 60th canon, which seems to have been added a little later, enumerates the books of the N. T. in the precise order seen in Cod. A, only that the Apocalypse and Clement’s Epistles do not stand on the list.

This manuscript is in quarto, 12-¾ inches high and 10-¼ broad, and consists of 773 leaves (of which 639 contain the Old Testament), each page being divided into two columns of fifty or fifty-one lines each, having about twenty letters or upwards in a line. These letters are written continuously in uncial characters, without any space between the words, the uncials being of an elegant yet simple form, in a firm and uniform hand, though in some places larger than in others. Specimens of both styles may be seen in our facsimiles (Plate v, Nos. 12, 13)(127), the first, Gen. i. 1, 2, being written in vermilion, the second, Acts xx. 28, in the once black, but now yellowish-brown ink of the body of the Codex. The punctuation, which no later hand has meddled with, consists merely of a point placed at the end of a sentence, usually on a level with the top of the preceding letter, but not always; and a vacant space follows the point at the end of a paragraph, the space being proportioned to the break in the sense. Capital letters of various sizes abound at the beginning of books and sections, not painted as in later copies, but written by the original scribe in common ink. As these capitals stand entirely outside the column in the margin (excepting in such rare cases as Gen. i. 1), if the section begins in the middle of a line, the capital is necessarily postponed till the beginning of the next line, whose first letter is always the capital, even though it be in the middle of a word (_see_ p. 51). Vermilion is freely used in the initial lines of books, and has stood the test of time much better than the black ink: the first four lines of each column on the first page of Genesis are in this colour, accompanied with the only breathings and accents in the manuscript (_see above_, pp. 45, 46). The first line of St. Mark, the first three of St. Luke, the first verse of St. John, the opening of the Acts down to δι, and so on for other books, are in vermilion. At the end of each book are neat and unique ornaments in the ink of the first hand: see especially those at the end of St. Mark and the Acts. As we have before stated this codex is the earliest which has the κεφάλαια proper, the so-called Ammonian sections, and the Eusebian canons complete. Lists of the κεφάλαια precede each Gospel, except the first, where they are lost. Their titles stand or have stood at the top of the pages, but the binder has often ruthlessly cut them short, and committed other yet more serious mutilation at the edges. The places at which they begin are indicated throughout, and their numbers are moreover set in the margin of Luke and John. The sections and Eusebian canons are conspicuous in the margin, and at the beginning of each of these sections a capital letter is found. The rest of the New Testament has no division into κεφάλαια, as was usual in later times, but paragraphs and capitals occur as the sense requires.

The palaeographic reasons for assigning this manuscript to the beginning or middle of the fifth century (the date now very generally acquiesced in, though it may be referred even to the end of the fourth century, and is certainly not much later) depend in part on the general style of the writing, which is at once firm, elegant and simple; partly on the formation of certain letters, in which respect it holds a middle place between copies of the fourth and sixth centuries. The reader will recall what we have already said (pp. 33-40) as to the shape of _alpha_, _delta_, _epsilon_, _pi_, _sigma_, _phi_, and _omega_ in the Codex Alexandrinus. Woide, who edited the New Testament, believes that two hands were employed in that volume, changing in the page containing 1 Cor. v-vii, the vellum of the latter portion being thinner and the ink more thick, so that it has peeled off or eaten through the vellum in many places. This, however, is a point on which those who know manuscripts best will most hesitate to speak decidedly(128).

The external arguments for fixing the date are less weighty, but all point to the same conclusion. On the evidence for its being written by St. Thecla, indeed, no one has cared to lay much stress, though some have thought that the scribe might belong to a monastery dedicated to that holy martyr(129), whether the contemporary of St. Paul be meant, or her namesake who suffered in the second year of Diocletian, A.D. 286 (Eusebius de Martyr. Palaestin. c. iii). Tregelles explains the origin of the Arabic inscription, on which Cyril’s statement appears to rest, by remarking that the New Testament in our manuscript at present commences with Matt. xxv. 6, this lesson (Matt. xxv. 1-13) _being that appointed by the Greek Church for the festival of St. Thecla_ (_see above_, Menology, p. 87, Sept. 24). Thus the Egyptian who wrote this Arabic note, observing the name of Thecla in the now mutilated upper margin of the Codex, where such rubrical notes are commonly placed by later hands, may have hastily concluded that she wrote the book, and so perplexed our Biblical critics. It seems a fatal objection to this shrewd conjecture, as Mr. E. Maunde Thompson points out, that the Arabic numeration of the leaf, set in the _verso_ of the lower margin, itself posterior in date to the Arabic note relating to Thecla, is 26(130); so that the twenty-five leaves now lost must have been still extant when that note was written.

Other more trustworthy reasons for assigning Cod. A to the fifth century may be summed up very briefly. The presence of the canons of Eusebius [A.D. 268-340?], and of the epistle to Marcellinus by the great Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria [300?-373], standing before the Psalms, place a limit in one direction, while the absence of the Euthalian divisions of the Acts and Epistles (_see above_, p. 64), which came into vogue very soon after A.D. 458, and the shortness of the ὑπογραφαί (_above_, p. 65), appear tolerably decisive against a later date than A.D. 450. The insertion of the Epistles of Clement, like that of the treatises of Barnabas and Hermas in the Cod. Sinaiticus (p. 92), recalls us to a period when the canon of Scripture was in some particulars a little unsettled, that is, about the age of the Councils of Laodicea (363?) and of Carthage (397). Other arguments have been urged both for an earlier and a later date, but they scarcely deserve discussion. Wetstein’s objection to the name Θεοτόκος as applied to the Blessed Virgin in the title to her song, added to the Psalms, is quite groundless: that appellation was given to her by both the Gregories in the middle of the fourth century (_vid._ Suicer, Thesaur. Eccles. i. p. 1387), as habitually as it was a century after: nor should we insist much on the contrary upon Woide’s or Schulz’s persuasion that the τρισάγιον (ἅγιος ὁ θεός, ἅγιος ἰσχυρός, ἅγιος ἀθάνατος) would have been found in the ὕμνος ἑωθινός after the Psalms, had the manuscript been written as late as the fifth century.

Partial and inaccurate collations of the New Testament portion of this manuscript were made by Patrick Young, Librarian to Charles I(131), who first published from it the Epistles of Clement in 1633: then by Alexander Huish, Prebendary of Wells, for Walton’s Polyglott, and by some others(132). The Old Testament portion was edited in 1707-20, after a not very happy plan, but with learned Prolegomena and notes, by the Prussian J. E. Grabe, the second and third of his four volumes being posthumous.

In 1786, Charles Godfrey Woide, preacher at the Dutch Chapel Royal and Assistant Librarian in the British Museum, a distinguished Coptic scholar [d. 1790], published, by the aid of 456 subscribers, a noble folio edition of the New Testament from this manuscript, with valuable Prolegomena, a copy of the text which, so far as it has been tested, has been found reasonably accurate, together with notes on the changes made in the codex by later hands, and a minute collation of its readings with the common text as presented in Kuster’s edition of Mill’s N. T. (1710). In this last point Woide has not been taken as a model by subsequent editors of manuscripts, much to the inconvenience of the student. In 1816-28 the Old Testament portion of the Codex Alexandrinus was published in three folio volumes at the national expense, by the Rev. Henry Hervey Baber, also of the British Museum, the Prolegomena to whose magnificent work are very inferior to Woide’s, but contain some additional information. Both these performances, and many others like them which we shall have to describe, are printed in an uncial type, bearing some general resemblance to that of their respective originals, but which must not be supposed to convey any adequate notion of their actual appearance. Such quasi-facsimiles (for they are nothing more), while they add to the cost of the book, seem to answer no useful purpose whatever; and, if taken by an incautious reader for more than they profess to be, will seriously mislead him. In 1860 Mr. B. H. Cowper put forth an octavo edition of the New Testament pages in common type, but burdened with modern breathings and accents, the lacunae of the manuscript being unwisely supplied by means of Kuster’s edition of Mill, and the original paragraphs departed from, wheresoever they were judged to be inconvenient. These obvious faults are the more to be regretted, inasmuch as Mr. Cowper has not shrunk from the labour of revising Woide’s edition by a comparison with the Codex itself, thus giving to his book a distinctive value of its own. An admirable autotype facsimile of the New Testament was published in 1879, and afterwards of the Old Testament, by Mr. E. Maunde Thompson, then the Principal Keeper of Manuscripts, now the Principal Librarian, of the British Museum.

The Codex Alexandrinus has been judged to be carelessly written; many errors of transcription no doubt exist, but not so many as in some copies (e.g. Cod. א), nor more than in others (as Cod. B). None other than the ordinary abridgements are found in it (_see_ pp. 49-50): numerals are not expressed by letters except in Apoc. vii. 4; xxi. 17: ι and υ have usually the dots over them at the beginning of a syllable. Of itacisms it may be doubted whether it contains more than others of the same date: the interchange of ι and ει, η and ι, ε, αι, are the most frequent; but these mutations are too common to prove anything touching the country of the manuscript. Its external history renders it very likely that it was written at Alexandria, that great manufactory of correct and elegant copies, while Egypt was yet a Christian land: but such forms as λήμψομαι, ἐλάβαμεν, ἦλθαν, ἔνατος, ἐκαθερίσθη, and others named by Woide, are peculiar to no single nation, but are found repeatedly in Greek-Latin codices which unquestionably originated in Western Europe. This manuscript is of the very greatest importance to the critic, inasmuch as it exhibits (especially in the Gospels) a text more nearly approaching that found in later copies than is read in others of its high antiquity, although some of its errors are portentous enough, e.g. θ_υ_ for _ιυ_ in John xix. 40. This topic, however, will be discussed at length in another place, and we shall elsewhere consider the testimony Codex A bears in the celebrated passage 1 Tim. iii. 16.

B. CODEX VATICANUS 1209 is probably the oldest large vellum manuscript in existence, and is the glory of the great Vatican Library at Rome. To this legitimate source of deep interest must be added the almost romantic curiosity which was once excited by the jealous watchfulness of its official guardians. But now that an acquaintance with it has been placed within the reach of scholars through the magnificent autotype edition issued by the authorities of the Vatican, it may be hoped that all such mystic glamour will soon be left with the past. This book seems to have been brought into the Vatican Library shortly after its establishment by Pope Nicolas V in 1448, but nothing is known of its previous history(133). It is entered in the earliest catalogue of that Library, made in 1475. Since the missing portions at the end of the New Testament are believed to have been supplied in the fifteenth century from a manuscript belonging to Cardinal Bessarion, we may be allowed to conjecture, if we please, that this learned Greek brought the Codex into the west of Europe. It was taken to Paris by Napoleon I, where it was studied by Hug in 1809. Although this book has not even yet been as thoroughly collated, or rendered as available as it might be to the critical student, its general character and appearance are sufficiently well known. It is a quarto volume, arranged in quires of five sheets or ten leaves each, like Codex Marchalianus of the Prophets written in the sixth or seventh century and Cod. Rossanensis of the Gospels to be described hereafter, not of four or three sheets as Cod. א, the ancient, perhaps the original, numbering of the quires being often found in the margin. The New Testament fills 142 out of its 759 thin and delicate vellum leaves, said to be made of the skins of antelopes: it is bound in red morocco, being 10-½ inches high, 10 broad, 4-½ thick. It once contained the whole Bible in Greek, the Old Testament of the Septuagint version (a tolerably fair representation of which was exhibited in the Roman edition as early as 1587(134)), except the books of the Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasses. The first forty-six chapters of Genesis (the manuscript begins at πολιν, Gen. xlvi. 28) and Psalms cv-cxxxvii, also the books of the Maccabees, are wanting. The New Testament is complete down to Heb. ix. 14 καθα: the rest of the Epistle to the Hebrews (the Catholic Epistles had followed the Acts, _see_ p. 74), and the Apocalypse, being written in the later hand alluded to above. The peculiar arrangement of three columns on a page, or six on the opened leaf of the volume, is described by eye-witnesses as very striking: in the poetical books of the Old Testament (since they are written στιχηρῶς) only two columns fill a page. Our facsimile (Plate viii, No. 20) comprises Mark