was begun, and not at the taking of Alexandria by the the space being proportioned to the break in the sense. Arabians, under the Caliph Omar in A.D. 612. The Capital letters of various sizes abound at the begin- story, at least, is ridiculously exaggerated which re- ning of books and sections, not painted as in later kites that the Arabs found a sufficient number of books copies, but written by the original scribe in common remaining to heat the baths of the city for six months, j ink. Vermilion is freely used in the initial lines of The historian Orosius, who visited the place after the j books. Accents and breathings are found in the be- destruction of the temple by the Christians, relates that j ginning of Genesis only. At the end of each book are he then saw onlv the empty shelves of the library neat and unique ornaments in the ink of the first hand. (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 51). See Petit-Radel, \ Contractions occur as in other very ancient MSS. It Recherches sur les BibUoth'»ques Anciennes et Modernes I has the Ammonian divisions of the Gospels, with ref- ( Paris, 1819); and Ritschl, Die Alexandriniscken Bib- ! erencestothe canons of Eusebius ; the headings of the liotheken (Berlin, 1838). Compare Alexandria. j large sections are placed at the top of the page, the
ALEXANDRIAN MANUSCRIPT (Codex Alex- places where they begin being indicated in the text, andkTnus, so called from its supposed origin at Alex- and in Luke and John the numbers being set in the andria), one of the three or four most famous copies of i margin of the column. The subdivisions of the Acts, the Holy Scriptures, and designated as A of the N. T. I Epistles, and Apocalypse, by Euthalius and others, are It contains the whole Bible in Greek, including the ! not indicated ; a cross occasionally appears as a sepa- Septuagint version of the O. T., with the first (or j ration of the chapters of the Acts— a large initial de- genuine) Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, and j noting a paragraph throughout (Davidson, Bib. Cut. part of his second (or apocrvphal). It is defective, | ii, 271 sq ).
This MS. is now in the manuscript- room of the British Museum, where it was placed on the formation of that li- brary in 1753. It previously belonged to the king's private collection, having been presented to Charles I through Sir Thomas Roe, En- glish ambassador t<> Turkey, by Cyril Lu- car, patriarch of Con- stantinople. An Ara- bic inscription, sev- eral centuries old, at the back of the table of contents, on the first leaf of tli.' MS., states that it was written by the hand of Thecla the mar- tyr, and given to the Patriarchal Chamber in the year of the
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Specimens of the Codex Alexandrine. The first is in bright red, with breathings and accents, and contains Gen. i, 1, '2, Sept. (Ei/ ttpxh iiroinaev 6 tic tov bv | pavov nai tT,v friv h Si yn fiv «o \ pcxTotr kul aKaTuffKetW-roo-- | Koi ckotoc kvavia tT,c hfiviroov.). The second specimen is in com- mon ink, and contains Acts x.\, 2S (Ilpoo>exefe eauroia km Train tw | irot^ius- ev w vixac to irva to | ayiov etiero eiricKonovc- | 7ro<jUu<i'e<i< -rnv tKK\t}ctav | tov kv t]V 7repi£7rou|<7uTO oia | TOU aijuaTor tov idtov').
ALEXANDRIAN
131
ALEXANDRIAN
Martyrs 814 (A.D. 1098). Another, and apparently an earlier inscription, in Moorish Arabic, declares that the book was dedicated to the Patriarchal Chamber at Alexandria. But upon neither of these notices can much reliance be placed. That the codex was brought from Alexandria by Cyril (who had previously been patriarch of that see), need not, however, be doubted, though Wetstein, on the dubious authority of Matthew Muttis of Cyprus, Cyril's deacon, concluded that it came from Mt. Athos. It is now very generally as- signed to the beginning or middle of the fifth century. The reasons for this are in part the general style of the characters, especially the shape of certain distinc- tive letters (e. g. a, S, e, 7r, <x, <p. and tu), the presence of the Eusebian canons (A.D. 2(18-340?), and of the Epistle of Marcellinus by Athanasius before the Psalms (303 ?-373), which place a limit in one direction ; while the absence of the Euthalian divisions of the Acts and Epistles, and the shortness of the subscriptions appear tolerably decisive against a later date than A.D. 450. The insertion of Clement's Epistles points likewise to a period when the canon was yet unsettled. These were added as parts of the specified number of the N. T. books ; while the apocryphal Psalms bearing the name of Solomon, which the MS. appears to have once contained, were separated in the list, as some- thing wholly different in point of authority. The lat- ter were prohibited by the Council of Laodicea, soon after the middle of the fourth century, from being read in the churches; and to this prohibition the MS. is conformed, although it treats the epistles of Clement so differently. Wetstein's and Woide's objections to this date (such as the use of Bsotokoq as a title of the Virgin in her song added to the Psalms) are anachronous. Woide believes that a different hand was employed upon it from 1 Cor. v, onward, but this is not clear. The original copyist was not very care- ful, and the later corrector was by no means accurate. Yet of all the uncials, this holds a rank as one of the first value. It contains indeed the itacisms (inter- change of / and a, i] and i, t and ai) common to that period, and certain orthographical peculiarities (e. g. XTifiif/oficu, tXafiafiev, etc.) frequent in the Egyptian MSS. The reference to St. Thecla as its writer is plausibly explained by Tregelles, who remarks that, inasmuch as the text (Matt, xxv, 6) where this MS. now begins was the lesson in the Greek Church for her festival, the Egyptian scribe may have hastily con- cluded that she wrote it (Scrivener, Introd. to N. T. p. 82).