DESCRIPTION OF THE CODEX

Column 1

In the New Testament the earliest of these hands, who
also made the most corrections, is C^a. This scribe wrote
a clear but not beautiful hand resembling, but certainly
distinct from that of the scribe who wrote the colophons A colophon is a finishing stroke or note at the end of a book, often providing details about its production. to
Ezra and Esther. Whether he used the same ink as this
scribe is perhaps doubtful. At first sight it seems clear that
the colophons in question are in a different colour, as they are
faint and scarcely legible, but it is possible that this is due to
some accidental circumstance, and in other places it is not
easy to see much difference between the inks of the two
scripts. In any case the ink is brighter and redder than that
of the original manuscript. C^a has been assigned to dates varying
from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the seventh
century. Dr. Kenyon inclines to the latter, and Dr. Hunt
to the former view. He corrected the whole of the New
Testament, as well as much of the Old, and the Shepherd of Hermas An early Christian literary work considered scriptural by some early communities., but
omitted the Epistle of Barnabas; examples of his script will be seen in the
last column of Plate II.

C^b might be judged from the style of his writing and the
colour of his ink to have been a contemporary of C^a, to whose
script, though easily distinguishable in passages of more than
a few words, his own has a general resemblance. The most
characteristic feature is the 'feathers' attached to the end of
letters containing a vertical line. In the Old Testament he has, it
seems, occasionally altered a correction of C^a, and is therefore
actually later, but it may have been only by a very short time,
and the probability is rather that C^b, like C^a, belonged to the
scriptorium A room in a monastery or library set apart for writing and copying manuscripts. at Caesarea. His corrections in the New Testa-
ment are confined to the Gospels; specimens will be found in
the last column of Plate II.

Besides C^a and C^b, who are the chief of the intermediate
correctors, two other hands of the same or almost the same
period can be discerned—C^c and C^c*, to use Tischendorf's
rather cumbrous notation. C^c has taken the place of C^a in
Barnabas, and freely corrected the text. Specimens are given
in the last column of Plate II, from which it will be seen that
it is similar to the scripts of C^a and C^b, though probably some-
what later. Tischendorf thinks that this scribe is also the
writer of the sign $\dot{ω}$ original: "$\dot{ω}ρα\hat{ι}ον$" (hōraion), meaning "beautiful" or "noteworthy." which has been sometimes added
in the margin, especially in the prophets. C^c* is a somewhat
similar hand which corrected the Apocalypse The Book of Revelation.; it also belongs
to much the same type as the other C hands, but is probably

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Column 2

a little later. Specimens are given in the last column of
Plate II.

On the whole the C hands so closely resemble each other,
and can with such little confidence be much separated in date,
that there is considerable force in the suggestion that they all
come from the scriptorium at Caesarea, and represent a
thoroughgoing attempt to accommodate the Codex Sinaiticus
to a model which in the fifth and sixth century was more
fashionable than the original text.

The early correctors, and original scribes. The discrimina-
tion of these hands is the most difficult point in the palaeo-
graphical treatment of the manuscript. The clearest and simplest
way appears to be to break off from the method, which has
hitherto been followed, of starting with the most recent hands,
and to begin by trying to establish the condition of the manuscript
when it left the scriptorium.

To the work of the scriptorium, then, obviously belongs the
text itself; so that the first question of all is concerned with
the scribes of the text. After the text comes the 'apparatus'
of the manuscript—superscriptions, subscriptions, titles, paragraph
marks, Ammonian sections, Eusebian canons Systems of numbering and cross-referencing used to locate parallel passages in the four Gospels., and other chap-
ter divisions. These may or may not belong to the scrip-
torium. Finally, it is well known that it was the custom to
submit manuscripts to a correction original: "$δι\acute{o}ρθωσι\varsigma$" (diorthōsis), the formal process of proofreading and correcting a manuscript.: so that the earliest
corrections may possibly belong to the work of the scriptorium,
and the question is to what extent this can be shown to have
or not to have been the case with the various hands which
seem to have corrected the manuscript in the earliest period. Thus
there are three points to discuss. (1) The original scribes,
(2) the 'apparatus', (3) the corrections properly so called.

The original scribes. At the first sight the whole Codex seems
to have been written by the same hand; but a closer inspection
shows that this is erroneous, and according to Tischendorf
four scribes A, B, C, and D were engaged on the text, of
whom A, B, and D are represented in the New Testament. In
his Sacred Names original: "Nomina Sacra" (pp. 67 f.) Traube goes further, and dis-
tinguishes the A who wrote part of the New Testament from
the A who wrote the historical books of the Old Testament
and Barnabas, and the B who wrote Isaiah from the B who
wrote Hermas and the other prophetic books. So far as B is
concerned this must remain a question to be discussed in
connexion with an edition of the Old Testament part of the