The Criticism of the New Testament. Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener
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. θυ 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 history133. 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 1587134), 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 xvi. 3 μιν τον λιθον to the end of verse 8, where the Gospel ends abruptly; both the arabesque ornament and the subscription ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ being in a later hand (for M see p. 37). All who have inspected the Codex are loud in their praises of the fine thin vellum, the clear and elegant hand of the first penman, the simplicity of the whole style of the work: capital letters, so frequent in the Codex Alexandrinus, were totally wanting in this document for some centuries. In several of these particulars our manuscript resembles the Herculanean rolls, and thus asserts a just claim to high antiquity, which the absence of the divisions into κεφάλαια, of the sections and canons, and the substitution in their room of another scheme of chapters of its own (described above, p. 56), beyond question tend very powerfully to confirm. Each column contains ordinarily forty-two lines135, each line from sixteen to eighteen letters, of a size somewhat less than in Cod. A, much less than in Cod. א (though they all vary a little in this respect), with no intervals between words, a space of the breadth of half a letter being left at the end of a sentence, and a little more at the conclusion of a paragraph; the first letter of the new sentence occasionally standing a little out of the line (see pp. 51, 93). It has been doubted whether any of the stops are primâ manu, and (contrary to the judgement of Birch and others) the breathings and accents are now universally allowed to have been added by a later hand. This hand, referred by some to the eighth century (although Tischendorf, with Dr. Hort's approval, assigns it to the tenth or eleventh136), retraced, with as much care as such an operation would permit, the faint lines of the original writing (the ink whereof was perhaps never quite black), the remains of which can even now be seen by a keen-sighted reader by the side of the thicker and more modern strokes; and, anxious at the same time to represent a critical revision of the text, the writer left untouched such words or letters as he wished to reject. In these last places, where no breathings or accents and scarcely any stops137 have ever been detected , we have an opportunity of seeing the manuscript in its primitive condition, before it had been tampered with by the later scribe. There are occasional breaks in the continuity of the writing, every descent in the genealogies of our Lord (Matt. i, Luke iii138), each of the beatitudes (Matt. v), of the parables in Matt. xiii, and the salutations of Rom. xvi, forming a separate paragraph; but such a case will oftentimes not occur for several consecutive pages. The writer's plan was to proceed regularly with a book until it was finished: then to break off from the column he was writing, and to begin the next