Greek New Testament

I must bear this fact: that I did not think it necessary, right from the very beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, to provide the same abundance of scholarly preparation that I employed once the work had progressed a little further.

Since it is well established that the excellence of an edition of the New Testament books consists chiefly in two things—the critical apparatus the collection of variant readings from different manuscripts, usually found at the bottom of a page as it is called, and the skill by which the actual words of the sacred writers are determined—I must speak briefly about both. Regarding the apparatus, I did not consider it enough merely to transfer the material from my "seventh major critical edition" (which appeared at the beginning of 1859), adding bits here and there to expand or correct it; rather, the whole thing has been prepared entirely from scratch through renewed study. For whatever evidence was to be brought forward—whether from Greek codices ancient handwritten books, from early translations, or from ancient Christian writers—pains were taken to record it more accurately than had ever been done by anyone before. In that seventh edition, I had already corrected a flaw found in all the older editions—those of Wetstein, Griesbach, Schulz, and Scholz—namely, that authorities were only cited when their readings differed from the so-called Received Text original Latin: vulgato textu; the standard printed Greek Bible used since the Reformation. However, beyond this, the notes regarding early translations and ancient writers still required much work. This issue stems from the fact that it was not yet fully understood how much authority the oldest translations—among which the Latin, Syriac, and Coptic hold the primary place—possess in the search for the true writings of the apostles. But I shall speak more precisely about these and similar matters in the Prolegomena the formal introductory essay of a scholarly work. For the present, it seems sufficient to indicate briefly which codices written in uncials large, capital-letter handwriting used in the earliest Greek manuscripts have been added to the critical apparatus since the year 1859, and what labors I have undertaken regarding the primary authorities so that they might be used with confidence.

Therefore, eighteen manuscripts original Latin: hi 18 have been added to the uncial codices already used for the Gospels in the seventh edition¹: $\aleph$ The Hebrew letter Aleph, the symbol for the Codex Sinaiticus (of which a far greater part of these fragments has been added; for 12 leaves have been increased by another 33); o^f (hymns from the psalter of Abraham de Noroff); R (ac—

¹ For more accurate details concerning all these codices, see below.