Petersburg, and Parham Park ; one each a.t Vienna, Dresden, Frankfort- on-the-Oder, Mayhingen, Leicester, and Cheltenham. It is thus seen that t.h.e bulk of those not yet fully known are situated in Rome (thirty-three) and Paris (twenty). The manuscripts vary in age very widely, the earliest belonging to the fonrth century, and the la.test having been written as recently as the seventeenth eeutury;' The average age is less than in the case of manu- scripts of any other portion of the New Testament, and a. surprisingly large number were written after the inventioa of printing. It is not always easy to fix the date of a Greek manuscript, even within a century ; and different scholars have expressed different opinions regarding the dates of several of ,these hundred &lld twenty manllBCripts of the Apocalypse; but they may be approximately classified in date as follows : One belongs to the fourth century, two to the fifth, one to the eighth, one to the ninth, perhaps two to the tenth, sixteen to the eleventh, -fifteen to the twelfth, eighteen. to the thirteenth, twenty-one to the fourteenth, eighteen to the fifteenth, seventeen to the sixteenth, and one t.o · the seventeenth ; of the .remaining seven the age is not known. , The five most ancient of these manuscripts are written in uncial che.- racters; all the others in cursive. In Qritical apparatus the uncials are designated by capital letters (A, B, C, P, and the Hebrew letter H [called "Aleph"]); the cursives a.re indicated by .A.rabi9 numeraJs 0, 2, 3; etc.). All the five uncials have been well collated. . .- . The usnal material of Greek manuscripts is vellum or parchiw:,nt, and the majority of the man11Scripts of the Apocalypse a.re made of this sub,. stance. But it is a natural consequence of the late date a.t which so many of them were written that no less than forty out of the hundred and twenty are made of paper. Three others are made partly of parchment and partly of,pa.per; the Leicester mai:J:nscript is of this kind, The contents of the Apocalyptic manuscripts a.re very various, only a. few codices (about a. dozen) containing the Apocalypse alone of the books of the New Testament. At least fonr combine St. Paul's Epistles with the ReveJation,..e.nd a.t least another four combine the Revelation with one o:r more of the Gospels; But far la.rger groups, including more tha.11 thirty il;l each case, contain either the whole New Testament or all ~oept ~e Gospels. At least ten include some part of the Greek version of the Old Testament. And a. large number include much matter which is extra.neons to Holy Scripture, snob as patristic treatises and lives of the saints. Often the text of the Apocalypse is accompanied by a. Greek commentary, either in full, or epitomized, or in fragmentary parts. Thus, in some form or other, the commentary of Andreas is known to exist in twenty-one of these manuscripts, that of Arethas in seven, and that of CEcumenius in three ; while six others are known to contain some Greek commentary, and probably these are not all that are similarly enriched. Until the manuscripts have been properly examined, it cannot be known INTRODUCTION TO
how many of them contain the whole of the Book of Revelation, but probably it is only in rare exceptions that this book ie mutilated. .As may be expected, when a. mutilated copy is found, the lost portions are either the beginning or the end of the book. The Basle ma.nuscri pt is a mere fragment, containing only twenty-seven verses; the Ba.rberini codex at Rome has but seventy-one verses; the one belonging to Moscow University contains a.bout one-third, and "Va.tica.nus, 1904" at Rome only about one-fifth of the Apocalypse; and eighteen other manuscripts have less c~>nsidera.ble mntila.tions, which in several instances affect only a. few verses. But the great majority of the copies e.re believed to contain the whole of the 405 verses of the Book of Revelation. The primary authority for the Greek text of our book is the fourth. century uncial, N (.Aleph), the famous Sinaitio manuscript discovered by Tischendorf in 1844, brought to Europe in 1859, and first published at Petersbnrg in 1862. Ea.oh of the two fifth-century nncia.ls must also be placed in the front rank of documentary witnesses. They e.re .A, the .Alexandrian manuscript in the British Museum, first used for New Testament criticism in Walton's Polyglot; and C, the Ephrmmi codex a.t Paris, first used in Knster's reprint of Mill's Greek Testament in 1710. Then, separated by the broad gap of three or four centuries, we have a second ~ of authorities, consisting of the two remaining uncials, B and P. Bis the manuscript numbered 2066 in the Vatican Library at Rome, first mentioned by Bianchini in 1748, but very imperfectly known nntil a. century later: it must be specially borne in mind that tku is II totally distincl manuacnpt from the one called Bin other paHtl of the New Pestamumt. P is Bishop Porphyry's manuscript at Petersburg, published by Tischendorf in 1865-9. The cnl"Sives have been so imperfectly investigated that it is premature as yet to attempt to classify them as to their relative value. Some of those which llol"8 still uncollated may be among the best. H, however, we were asked to select the cursives which seem to ua the best among such as a.re well known, and whose readings have been made accessible io aJl sobola.n, we shonld choose those numbered I, 7, 88, 93, 94, e.nd 95. - The following tables ma-, be useful for :refereuoe , - THE REVELATION OF ST. J0HN THE DIVINE. :d ------------------------------- L TABLll OP TJlB GBllU. MAl!IU80R1PTS OP THE BooK 01P 'REVELATION WIDCH JUVB BED BATISFAC'l'OHILY COLLATED.
~~1 Century Year when Book In which Library [andye,,r] Name of good colla- good oollalion wu or Locality. designation. in which collator. tlon was Numb.• published. publiohed. written.
-K A I
Petersburg London Siuaiticue Alexandrinus IV. v. Tischendorf Woirle 1862 1786 Special v. Tiscbendorf 1843 " C B Paris Rome Ephrmmi Vatieanus, 2066 VIII, . lti69 " Appendix N; T.
p Petersbnrg Porphyrianns IX, . 1869 Vaticani Mon. 8acra Inooit., vol. vi. 1 Mayhingen .Renchlini. XII. Delitzsch a.nd 1861-2 Handschriftl. Tregelles Funde, i. and ii. 7 London B. M. Har• x1., Bru:iven"'r 1859 Oodex Angiell8is,
8 . leian, 5537 B. M. Har- xn. leian, 5778 1087 . • . . eto.
18 Fn.nkfort- Seidulii XL N. Wester- 1710 Kuster's Mill's on-Oder mann Gk.T. 14 Leicester Ha.yne's Gift XIV, Scrivener 1859 Codex Augiensia,
26 Oxford Ch. Oh. Wa.ke, 12 XL . [Collated 181H] etc. In the pNl88 (1888), 'r1 ,. Oh. Oh. Wake, XI. or . [Collated In the p»esB