Codex Sinaiticus

Column 1

sufficient evidence. I suggest that he should be called
'Scribe E'.
(4) Paragraph marks in the Gospels. An attempt has been
made in the first seven pages of Matthew to indicate the ends
of paragraphs by inserting a short horizontal line, sometimes
bifurcated split into two branches, between the last line of one paragraph and the
beginning of another. Either the same or nearly the same
system is found in Codex Vaticanus Another of the oldest and most important Greek Bible manuscripts, but with somewhat fewer
paragraphs. In the absence of any other clue it is difficult to
say whether these lines belong to one date rather than another.
An interesting discussion of their possible meaning in the
Codex Vaticanus will be found in Dr. Schmidtke's The Gospels
of an ancient Uncial Codex,¹ original: "Die Evangelien eines alten Unzialcodex" and in the correspondence
between him and Prof. Eb. Nestle in the Theological Literature
Gazette original: "Theologisches Literaturblatt" in 1903.
(5) and (6) The chapter divisions and 'titles' in Acts. The
'Euthalian' A system of chapter and verse-like divisions attributed to Euthalius chapter divisions which are given in the first part
of Acts—they stop at 42 original: "μϐ"—are added in a small neat hand which
must in any case be very early, and cannot, on palaeographical
grounds, be regarded as later than the MS. itself. The im-
pression made on my own mind is that these numbers were
added by the same scribe as added the 'titles' original: "tituli" or chapter head-
ings in Acts. The relation of these chapter headings to the
chapter divisions is a problem which ought to receive attention
from textual critics: it is here, however, out of place to do more
than draw attention to the obvious fact that neither system is
complete. There is also room for doubt whether all the 'titles'
were written by the same scribe: the curious way in which rho The Greek letter 'r' (ρ)
is sometimes written raises suspicions that two hands have
been at work. I am inclined, however, to think that this
curious letter is a peculiarity which the scribe only sometimes
used, especially since in some of the 'titles' both the ordinary
and the exceptional forms of rho are found. Moreover, a com-
parison of the writing in the 'titles' with that of the corrector A²
suggests strongly that he was the scribe who wrote them. If
this be so, and if the writer of the 'titles' were also responsible
for the chapter numeration, this part of the apparatus, like the
Eusebian canons A system of cross-referencing the Gospels, is brought within the scriptorium The writing room where the manuscript was produced.
(7) The line-counts original: "στίχοι" (stichoi); used to measure the length of a text in the Epistles. These are added in a small
neat hand, which does not seem to be identical with the

Column 2

corrector A², but to have more affinity with A⁴. As was shown
above (see p. xix) the evidence of the cancel-leaves shows that
these line-counts were added in the scriptorium; if, therefore, their
scribe were identical with A⁴ this would bring his corrections
(of which there are but few) within the scriptorium. In spite,
however, of the affinity between the line-counts and the corrections
of A⁴, I doubt whether they are really due to the same scribe:
A⁴'s style seems to be somewhat stiffer. I suggest that the
writer of the line-counts should be called 'Scribe S'.
The correctors properly so called. (1) The uncial corrector
A¹. In many places the text of the Codex Sinaiticus has been
corrected by a scribe who used uncial A script using large, rounded capital letters script, clearly intended
to resemble the original writing as nearly as possible. Some
of these corrections seem really to be in the same hand as
the text; some vary slightly from it, but so slightly that they
are clearly contemporary, and probably belong to the revision original: "διόρθωσις" (diorthosis)
made in the scriptorium. Tischendorf Constantin von Tischendorf, the discoverer of the Codex ascribes them as a rule
to the original scribe D: this is quite possible, and in some
cases extremely probable, as the scribe has added at the end
of a line the > which is characteristic of D (see p. xix), but
it must be remembered that corrections made on an erasure original: "in rasura"; where the original text was scraped away are
almost impossible to handle with certainty, as the inferiority
of the surface reacts unfavourably on the writing. Thus it
is possible that A¹ ought to be divided into two or more hands.
A small selection of illustrative places is given in the first
column of Plate II. Attention should especially be directed
to the second specimen, which shows the > at the end of
a line, and the third and fourth specimens should be com-
pared with the rest. Are they a different hand or not?
The corrector A². By far the greatest number of correc-
tions of early date were made by this hand, the main charac-
teristics of which are an alternation of large and small letters—
not, however, by any means always equally marked—and the
frequent use of a curious form of omega The Greek letter 'o' (ω) in which the middle line
is greatly elongated so that it becomes d. That this scribe
belonged to the scriptorium is rendered probable by the super-
scriptions and 'titles' in Acts, which seem to show that A² is
identical with the original scribe D (see p. xx). It appears,
however, that he did his work as corrector before the super-
scriptions were added, as in 1 Corinthians the superscription is
on folio 73 recto forced to one side by a correction in the hand of A²
which has already occupied the place where it ought to have

¹ The codex referred to is the archetype of MS. Paris. Nat. Gr. 97
(Cod. Evan. 579, or in von Soden's notation, epsilon original: "ε" 376).