The Appendices to the Gospel according to Mark. 363 



may perhaps only prove that the archetype of B came from Alexan- 

 dria, but scarcely that B itself must have been written there. 



Prof. Lake, from whom most of these arguments are taken, con- 

 cludes his discussion of the original provenance and date of Codex 

 Sinaiticus, in the introduction to his edition of the same (p. xv) as 

 follows : 



"It remains true that all the arguments from history, criticism, 

 palaeography, and orthography combine to give the view that the 

 codex is an Egyptian MS of the fourth century, a probability which 

 cannot be approached by any other theory. It would be too much 

 to call it certain : but short of this it may fairly be regarded as the 

 hypothesis which ought to be used as the general basis of any dis- 

 cussion as to the critical value of the Codex Sinaiticus." 

 We therefore hold, a point of considerable importance for our dis- 

 cussion and therefore argued at some length, that S and B are both 

 to be traced to Egypt. 



Text. 



While to ^^'H, N and B are the great representatives of the so-called 

 "Neutral" text, it is today recognized that the}' represent fairly well 

 the quotations of Origen, the great Alexandrian scholar. The resear- 

 ches of Bernard into the text used by Clement of Alexandria indi- 

 cate that in Alexandria itself an earlier and different type of text was 

 employed at the end of the second and beginning of the third century. 

 The text of Clement seems to have more in common with the Old 

 Latin, or "geographically Western" text than with this "Neutral" 

 text, though the quotations of Clement agree with no text as yet found 

 either in the MSS or the versions. 



If in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus we have representatives ol the 

 text of Origen, we may conclude that about the middle of the third 

 century the last twelve verses were not considered an authentic part 

 of Mark by the dominant text. With this conclusion agrees the fact 

 that in the extant writings of Clement and Origen no trace of these 

 verses have been found. And if, as we shall see later, Eusebius takes 

 from Origen his testimony concerning the lack of these verses in the 

 best Greek MSS, a supposition of Burgon adopted by some critics, we 

 have additional support for this supposition. 



The investigations of von Soden support these conclusions as to 

 the text, for he holds that N and B go back to a common original and 

 that this common original is the best representative of the text called 

 by him H, a text which represents and includes both the "Neutral" 

 and "Alexandrian" texts of WH. This text he holds to have been 



Trans. Conn. Acad., Vol. XVIII. 25- February, 1915 



