Unpublished Sacred Monuments

Since, by God's providence, it has happened that the records of His book—than which nothing more sacred or greater has been given to the human race—written during the first nine centuries of the Christian era, were not destroyed in the same ruin that claimed nearly all other books of similar antiquity, and since their authority in the whole Church of Christ is and always remains supreme, it seemed a great service to Christian scholarship to publish such monuments with the utmost care.

While in the previous age, especially in England, this had been done here and there with several very famous biblical manuscripts (codices original: "codicibus"; ancient manuscript books) being printed, sixteen years ago I personally undertook the plan to search throughout the world for whatever remained of such antiquity and dignity, and from that to create a Critical Library of Sacred Monuments (Bibliotheca Monumentorum Sacrorum Critica). In this library, the oldest books would be represented as accurately as possible and placed, as if in a treasury, within the corpus of Christian literature. This undertaking, involving six years of travel—five through Europe and two through the East—succeeded so well that I have already published nine volumes containing twenty-two Greek or Latin manuscripts of the New and Old Testaments, which I either discovered for the first time or was certainly the first to examine thoroughly.

The first volume of this "New Collection" includes six of the most important books, for the most part discovered by my own efforts in the East. To complete this undertaking, I have decided to add four more volumes to the first. As for the second volume of this same collection which we have just now released, I am happy to report that it again contains remains of the sacred text, a wealth of material for which I congratulate both myself and Christian scholarship. Of these, six are parts of manuscripts written between the fourth and sixth centuries and are to be numbered among the rarest monuments of the highest Christian antiquity.

Of the three that remain, even the most recent of them—written around the eighth century—are highly distinguished for another reason: they contain the greater part of the book of Genesis, which is missing from the world-famous Vatican Codex The Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest and most important surviving Greek Bibles, which is missing its beginning, and its text is notable for showing signs of Egyptian origin more clearly than most surviving witnesses. Furthermore, four of the nine manuscripts in this volume are palimpsests parchment from which the original writing has been erased so it can be reused for new text; three of these consist of a few fragments of the Evangelist John, the prophet Ezekiel, and the third book of Kings; one, however, contains many parts of the Gospel of Luke.

Let us briefly say how it came about that we were able to publish all these. The manuscript containing Genesis written around the eighth century, which I just mentioned more specifically, is among those books I found in the East in the year 1853 and brought to Europe. Before [depositing] it in the most renowned Bodleian Library The primary research library of the University of Oxford...