i. 27), with C alone once: with several authorities against AB thirty-nine

times, with A against B fifty-two, with B against A ninety-eight. Hence, while the discovery of this precious document has unquestionably done much to uphold Cod. B (which is the more correctly written, and doubtless the more valuable of the two) in many of its more characteristic and singular readings, it has made the mutual divergencies of the very oldest critical authorities more patent and perplexing than ever(282).

8. Codd. אB were apparently anterior to the age of Jerome, the latest ecclesiastical writer whose testimony need be dwelt upon, since from his time downwards the stream of extant and direct manuscript evidence, beginning with Codd. AC, flows on without interruption. Jerome’s attention was directed to the criticism of the Greek Testament by his early Biblical studies, and the knowledge he thus obtained had full scope for its exercise when he was engaged on revising the Old Latin version. In his so-often cited “Praefatio ad Damasum,” prefixed to his recension of the Gospels, he complains of certain “codices, quos a Luciano et Hesychio nuncupatos, paucorum hominum asserit perversa contentio,” and those not of the Old Testament alone, but also of the New. This obscure and passing notice of corrupt and (apparently) interpolated copies has been made the foundation of more than one theory as fanciful as ingenious. Jerome further informs us that he had adopted in his translation the canons which Eusebius “Alexandrium secutus Ammonium” (_but __ see_ Vol. I. pp. 59, &c.) had invented or first brought into vogue; stating, and, in his usual fashion, somewhat exaggerating(283), an evil these canons helped to remedy, the mixing up of the matter peculiar to one Evangelist with the narrative of another. Hence we might naturally expect that the Greek manuscripts he would view with special favour, were the same as Eusebius had approved before him. In the scattered notices throughout his works, Jerome sometimes speaks but vaguely of “quaedam exemplaria tam Graeca quam Latina” (Luke xxii. 43-4, almost in the words of Hilary, his senior); or appeals to readings “in quibusdam exemplaribus et maximè in Graecis codicibus” (Mark xvi. 14). Occasionally we hear of “multi et Graeci et Latini codices” (John vii. 53), or “vera exemplaria” (Matt. v. 22; xxi. 31), or “antiqua exemplaria” (Luke ix. 23), without specifying in which language: Mark xvi. 9-20 “in raris fertur Evangeliis,” since “omnes Graeciae libri paene” do not contain it(284). In two places, however, he gives a more definite account of the copies he most regarded. In Galat.