Apocalypse, with Hebrews placed before the Pastoral Epistles. Originally one large volume, the codex is now bound in four volumes, bearing on their covers the arms of Charles I. Three volumes contain the Old Testament, and the remaining volume the New Testament with Clement. The leaves, of thin vellum, 12 inches high by 10 inches broad, number at present 773, but were originally 822, according to the ordinary reckoning. Each page has two columns of 49 to 51 lines.
The codex is the first to contain the major chapters
with their titles, the Ammonian Sections and the
Eusebian Canons complete (Scrivener). A new para-
graph is indicated by a large capital and frequently
by spacing, not by beginning a new line; the enlarged
capital is placed in the margin of the next line, though.
curiously, it may not
correspond to the be-
ginning of the para-
graph or even of a
word. The manu-
script is written in
uncial characters in a
hand "at once firm,
elegant, simple"; the
greater part of Volume
III is ascribed by
Gregory to a different
hand from that of the
others; two hands are
discerned in the N.
T. by Woide, three
by Sir E. Maunde
Thompson and Ken-
yon-experts differ
on these points. The
handwriting is gener-
ally judged to belong
to the beginning or
middle of the fifth
century or possibly
to the late fourth. An
Arabic note states
that it was written by
Thecla the martyr;
and Cyril Lucar the
Patriarch adds in his
note that tradition
says she was a noble
Egyptian woman and
wrote the codex
shortly after the Nicene Council. But nothing is
known of such a martyr at that date, and the value of
this testimony is weakened by the presence of the
Eusebian Canons (d. 340) and destroyed by the in-
sertion of the letter of Athanasius (d. 373). On the
other hand. the absence of the Euthalian divisions is
regarded by Scrivener as proof that it can hardly be
later than 450. This is not decisive, and Gregory
would bring it down even to the second half of the fifth
century. The character of the letters and the history
of the manuscript point to Egypt as its place of origin.
The text of Codex A is considered one of the most valuable witnesses to the Septuagint. It is found, however, to bear a great affinity to the text embodied in Origen's Hexapla and to have been corrected in numberless passages according to the Hebrew. The text of the Septuagint codices is in too chaotic a con- dition, and criticism of it too little advanced. to per- mit of a sure judgment on the textual value of the great manuscripts. The text of the New Testament here is of a mixed character. In the Gospels, we have the best example of the so-called Syrian type of text, the ancestor of the traditional and less pure form found in the textus receptus. The Syrian text, however, is rejected by the great majority of scholars in favour of the "neutral" type, best represented in the Codex Vaticanus. In the Acts and Catholic Epistles, and still more in St. Paul's Epistles and the Apocalypse, Codex A approaches nearer, or belongs, to the neutral type. This admixture of textual types is explained on the theory that A or its prototype was not copied from a single MS., but from several MSS. of varying value and diverse origin. Copyist's errors in this codex are rather frequent.
Codex Alexandrinus played an important part in developing the textual criticism of the Bible, particularly of the New Testament. Grabe edited the Old Testament at Oxford in 1707-20, and this edition was reproduced at Zurich 1730-32, and at Leipzig, 1750-51, and again at Oxford, by Field, in 1859; Woide published the New Testament in 1786, which B. H. Cowper reproduced in 1860. The readings of Codex A were noted in Walton's Polyglot, 1657, and in every important collation since made. Baber published an edition of the Old Testament in facsimile type in 1816-28; but all previous editions were superseded by the magnificent photographic facsimile of both Old and New Testaments produced by the care of Sir E. Maunde Thompson (the N. T. in 1879, the O. T. in 1881-83), with an introduction in which the editor gives the best obtainable description of the codex (London, 1879–80).
WESTCOTT AND HORT, The New Testament in the Original Greek (New York, 1887); NESTLE, Tertual Criticism of the Grock New Testament (London, 1901); GREG- ORY, Canon and Tert of the New Testament (New York. 1907); KENYON, Handbook to the Tertual Criticism of the New Testa- ment (London. 1901); SWFTE, Introduction to the Old Testament in Greck (Cambridge, 1900); IDEM, Old Testa- ment in Greek (Cambridge, 1894); SCRIVENER-MILLER, Intro- duction to the Criticism of the New Testament (London, 1894),
Codex Amiatinus, the most celebrated manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible, remarkable as the best witness to the true text of St. Jerome and as a fine specimen of medieval calligraphy, now kept at Florence in the Bibliotheca Laurentiana. The symbol for it is written am or A (Wordsworth). It is preserved in an immense tome, measuring in height and breadth 19 inches by 13 inches, and in thickness 7 inches-so impressive, as Hort says, as to fill the beholder with a feeling akin to awe. Some consider it, with White, as perhaps "the finest book in the world"; still there are several manuscripts which are as beautifully written and have besides, like the Book of Kells or Book of Lindisfarne, those exquisite ornaments of which Amiatinus is devoid. It contains 1029 leaves of strong, smooth vellum, fresh-looking to-day, despite their great antiquity, arranged in quires of four sheets, or quaternions. It is written in uncial characters, large, clear, regular, and beautiful, two columns to a page, and 43 or 44 lines to a column. A little space is often left between words, but the writing is in general continuous. The text is
