HKB
admits that “in the Vatican the originality of the stops may be doubtful.” In the judgement of Fabiani, “vix aliqua primo exscriptori tribuenda” (Praef. N. T. Vat. 1881, p. xviii).
138 The publication of the Roman edition (1868-81) enables us to add (Abbot, ubi supra, p. 193) that the blessings of the twelve patriarchs in Gen. xlix are in separate paragraphs numbered from A to IB, that the twenty-two names of the unclean birds Deut. xiv. 12-18, twenty-five kings in Josh. xii. 10-22, eleven dukes in 1 Chr. i. 51-54, each stand in a separate line. In Cod. א, especially in the New Testament, this arrangement στιχηρῶς is much more frequent than in Cod. B, although the practice is in some measure common to both.
139 The Roman edition (1868-81) also makes known to us that in the Old Testament two columns are left blank between Nehemiah and the Psalms, which could not have been otherwise, inasmuch as the Psalms are written στιχηρῶς with but two columns on a page. Between Tobit and Hosea (which book stands first of the Prophetical writings) a column is very naturally left blank, and two columns at the end of Daniel, with whose prophecy the Old Testament concludes. But these peculiarities obviously bear no analogy to the case of the end of St. Mark’s Gospel.
140 See above, pp. 49-51.
141 The writer of the Preface to the Roman edition (vol. vi. Praef. p. 9, 1881) vainly struggles to maintain the opposite view, because the Cardinal, in his Preface to the Complutensian N. T., speaks about “adhibitis Vaticanis libris,” as if there was but one there.
142 Rulotta’s labours are now printed in Bentleii Critica Sacra by Mr. A. A. Ellis, 1862, pp. 121-154.
143 Thus the correspondence of Codex B with what St. Basil (c. Eunom. ii. 19) states he found in the middle of the fourth century, ἐν τοῖς παλαιοῖς τῶν ἀντιγράφων, in Eph. i. 1, viz. τοῖς οὖσιν without ἐν Ἐφέσῳ, though now read only in this and the Sinaitic manuscript primâ manu, and in one cursive copy (Cod. 67) secundâ manu, seems in itself of but little weight. Another point that has been raised is the position of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But this argument can apply only to the elder document from which the Vatican MS. was taken, and wherein this book unquestionably followed that to the Galatians. In Cod. B it always stood in its present place, after 2 Thess., as in the Codices cited p. 74, note.
144 Besides the twenty-five readings Tischendorf observed himself, Cardinal Mai supplied him with thirty-four more for his N. T. of 1849. His seventh edition of 1859 was enriched by 230 other readings furnished by Albert Dressel in 1855.
145 “They would not let me open it,” he adds, “without searching my pocket, and depriving me of pen, ink, and paper.... If I looked at a passage too long the two prelati would snatch the book out from my hand.” Tregelles, Lecture on the Historic Evidence of the N. T., p. 84.
146 The great gap in the Pauline Epistles is filled up from Vatic. 1761 (Act. 158, Paul. 192) of the eleventh century.
147 Other editions of the Vatican N. T. appeared at Ratisbon; at Leyden (1860) by A. Kuenen and C. G. Cobet, with a masterly Preface by the latter; and at Berlin (1862) by Philip Buttmann, furnished with an Appendix containing the varying results of no less than nine collations, eight of which we have described in the text, the ninth being derived from Lachmann’s Greek Testament (1742, 1850), whose readings were all obtained second-hand. Tischendorf does not much commend the accuracy of Buttmann’s work.