CODEX
86
CODEX
taining, beyond all his dreams, a great part of the Old
Testament and the entire New Testament, besides the
Epistle of Barnabiis, and part of the "Shepherd" of
liermas, of which two works no copies in the original
< ireek were known to exist. Thinking it " a crime to
sleep ", Tischendorf spent the night copying Barnabas;
he had to leave in the morning, after failing to per-
suade the monks to let him have the manuscript. At
Cairo he stopped at a monastery belonging to the
same monks (they were of the Orthodox Greek
C^hurch) and succeeded in having the manuscript sent
to him there for transcription; and finally, in obtain-
ing it from the monks as a present to the Czar, Tisch-
endorf's patron and the protector of their Church.
Years later, in 18G9, the Czar rewarded the two mon-
asteries with gifts of money (7000 and 2000 roubles
each) and decorations. The manuscript is treasured
in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg. Tischen-
dorf published an account of it in 1860; and, under
the auspices of the czar, printed it in facsimile in
1862. Twenty-one lithographic plates made from
photographs were included in this edition, which was
issued in four volumes. The following year he pub-
lished a critical edition of the New Testament. Fi-
nally, in 1867, he published additional fragments of
Genesis and Numbers, which had been used to bind
other volumes at St. Catherine's and had been dis-
covered by the Archimandrite Porfirius. On four dif-
ferent occasions, then, portions of the original manu-
script have been discovered; they have never been
published together in a single edition.
The Codex Sinaiticus, which originally must have contained the whole Old Testament, has suffered severely from mutilation, especially in the historical books from Genesis to Esdras (inclusive) ; the rest of the O. T. fared much better. The fragments and books extant are: several verses from Gen., xxiii and xxiv, and from Nvmi., v, vi, vii; I Par., ix, 27-xix, 17; Esdras, ix, 9 to end; Nehemias, Esther, Tobias, Judith. Joel, Abdias, Jonas, Nahum, Habacuc, Sopho- nias, Aggeus, Zacharias, Malachias, Isaias, Jeremias, Lamentations, i, 1-ii, 20 ; I Mach., IV Mach. (apocry- phal, while the canonical II Mach. and the apocryphal III Mach. were never contained in this codex). A curious occurrence is that Esdras, ix, 9, follows I Par., xix, 17 without any break; the note of a corrector shows that seven leaves of I Par. were copied into the Book of Esdras, probably by a mistake in the binding of the MS. from which N was copied. Our Esdras is called in this codex, as in many others, Esdras B. This may indicate that it followed Esdras A, as the book called by Jerome III Esdras (see Esdr.^s) is named in ancient codices ; the proof is by no means sure, how- ever, as IV Mach. is here designated Mach. D, as was usual, although the second and third books of Mach. were absent from the MS. The New Testament is com- plete, likewise the Epistle of Barnabas; si.x leaves fol- lowing Barnabas are lost, which probably also con- tained uncanonical literature : the " Shepherd ' ' of Hermas is incomplete, and we cannot tell whether other works followed. In all, there are 346t leaves. The orderof theN. T. is to be noted, St. Paul's Epistles pre- ceding Acts ; Hebrews following II Thess. The manu- script is on good parchment; the pages measure about 15 inches by 13i inches; there are four columns to a page, except in the poetical books, which are WTittcn stichometrically in two columns of greater width; there are 48 lines to a column, but 47 in the Catholic Epistles. The four narrow columns give the page the app<'arance of an ancient roll ; it is not impossible, as Kenyon .says, that it was in fact copied from a papjTUs roll. It is written in uncial characters, well formed, without accents or breathings, and with no punctua- tion except (at times) the apostrophe and the single point for a period. Tisrhendorf judged that there were four hands engaged in the writing of the manu- script; in this he has been generally "followed. He
has been less happy in obtaining acceptance of his
conjecture that one of these scribes also wrote the
New Testament of the Vatican Codex. He recog-
nized seven correctors of the text, one of them con-
temporaneous with the writing of the MS. The
Ammonian Sections and the Eusebian Canons are in-
dicated in the margin, probably by a contemporary
hand; they seem to have been unknown to the
scribe, however, who followed another division. The
clerical errors are relatively not numerous, in Greg-
ory's judgment.
In age this manuscript ranks alongside the Codex Vaticanus. Its antiquity is shown by the writing, by the four colmnns to a page (an indication, probably, of the transition from the roll to the codex form of MS.), by the absence of the large initial letters and of ornaments, by the rarity of punctuation, by the short titles of the books, the presence of divisions of the text antedating Eusebius, the addition of Barnabas and Hermas, etc. Such indications have induced experts to place it in the fourth century, along with B and some time before A and C; this conclusion is not seri- ously questioned, though the possibility of an early fifth-century date is conceded. Its origin has been assigned to Rome, Southern Italy, Egypt, and Ciesa- rea, but cannot be determined (Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the N. t., London, 1901, p. 56 sqq.). It seems to have been at one time at Csesarea; one of the correctors (probably of seventh century) adds this note at the end of Esdras: "This codex was compared with a verj^ ancient exemplar which had been corrected by the hand of the holy martyr Pamphilus [d. 309]; which exemplar contained at the end the subscription in his own hand: 'Taken and corrected according to the Hexapla of Origen: Antonius compared it: I, Pamphilus, corrected it'." Pamphilus was, with Eusebius, the founder of the library at Casarea. Some are even inclined to regard N as one of the fifty MSS. which Constantine bade Eusebius of Csesarea to have prepared in 331 for the churches of Constantinople ; but there is no sign of its having been at Constantinople. Nothing is known of its later his- tory till its discovery by Tischendorf. The te.xt of X bears a very close resemblance to that of B, though it cannot be descended from the same immediate ances- tor. In general, B is placed first in point of purity by contemporary scholars and X ne.xt. This is especi- ally true, for the N. T., of the Gospels. The differ- ences are more frequent in the O. T. where X and A often agree.
The editions of Tischendorf (see above): Swete. Introduc- tion to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge, 1900); see also works on N.-T. criticism mentioned under Codex .\lex.4n- DRl.N-us.
John F. Fenlon.
Codex Vaticanus (Codex B), a Greek manuscript, the most important of all the manuscripts of Holy Scripture. It is so called because it belongs to the Vatican Library {Codex Vaticanus, 1209).
This codex is a quarto volume written in uncial letters of the fourth century, on folios of fine parch- ment bound in quinterns. Each page is divided into three columns of forty lines each, with from sixteen to eighteen letters to a line, except in the poetical books, where, owing to the stichometric division of the lines, there are but two columns to a page. There are no capital letters, but at times the first letter of a section extends over the margin. Several hands worked at the manuscript; the first writer inserted neither pauses nor accents, and made use but rarely of a simple punctuation. Unfortunately, the codex is mutilated; at a later date the missing folios were replaced by others. Thus, the first twenty original folios are mi.ssing; a part of folio 178, and ten foHos after fol. 348; also the final quinterns, whose number it is impossible to establish. There are extant in all 759 original fohos.
