HKB
century (אc), who often cancels the changes introduced by (אa); others by as many as eight several later writers, whose varying styles Tischendorf has carefully discriminated and illustrated by facsimiles(118).
The foregoing considerations were bringing even cautious students to a general conviction that Cod. א, if not, as its enthusiastic discoverer had announced, “omnium antiquissimus” in the absolute sense of the words, was yet but little lower in date than the Vatican manuscript itself, and a veritable relic of the middle of the fourth century—the presence in its margin of the sections and canons of Eusebius [d. 340?], by a hand nearly if not quite contemporaneous, seems to preclude the notion of higher antiquity(119)—when Constantino Simonides, a Greek of Syme, who had just edited a few papyrus fragments of the New Testament alleged to have been written in the first century of the Christian era, suddenly astonished the learned world in 1862 by claiming to be himself the scribe who had penned this manuscript in the monastery of Panteleemon on Mount Athos, as recently as in the years 1839 and 1840. The writer of these pages must refer to the Introduction to his Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus (pp. lx-lxxii, 2nd edition, 1867) for a statement of the reasons which have been universally accepted as conclusive, why the manuscript which Simonides may very well have written under the circumstances he has described neither was nor possibly could be that venerable document. The discussion of the whole question, however, though painful enough in some aspects, was the means of directing attention to certain peculiarities of Cod. א which might otherwise have been overlooked. While engaged in demonstrating that it could not have been transcribed from a Moscow-printed Bible, as was “Cod. Simoneidos” (to borrow the designation employed by its author), critics came to perceive that either this copy or its immediate prototype must have been derived from a papyrus exemplar, and that probably of Egyptian origin (Collation, &c. pp. viii; xiv; lxviii), a confirmation of the impression conveyed to the reader by a first glance at the eight narrow columns of each open leaf (p. 28). The claim of Simonides to be the sole writer of a book which must have consisted when complete of about 730 leaves, or 1460 pages of very large size (Collation, &c. p. xxxii), and that too within the compass of eight or ten months(120) (he inscribed on his finished work, as he tells us, the words Σιμωνίδου τὸ ὅλον ἔργον), made it important to scrutinize the grounds of Tischendorf’s judgement that four several scribes had been engaged upon it, one of whom, as he afterwards came to persuade himself, was the writer of its rival, Codex Vaticanus(121). Such an investigation, so far as it depends only on the handwriting, can scarcely be carried out satisfactorily without actual examination of the manuscript itself, which is unfortunately not easily within the reach of those who could use it independently; but it is at all events quite plain, as well from internal considerations as from minute peculiarities in the writing, such as the frequent use of the apostrophus and of the mark > (see above, p. 50) on some sheets and their complete absence from others (Collation, &c. pp. xvi-xviii; xxxii; xxxvii), that at least two, and probably more, persons have been employed on the several parts of the volume(122).