398 Clarence Rtissel Williams, 



in the British Museum acquired since the year 1847, London, 1877 ( ?) 

 and Zotenberg, Cat. des MSS Ethiopiens de la Bibhotheque Nationale, 

 1877, p. 141 ff. together with Sanday, Appendices ad Novum Testa- 

 mentum. 



No critical edition of the Ethiopic Version has as yet been published, 

 and therefore it is impossible to obtain the full testimony of this 

 version upon the matter we are discussing. 



Arafuc 13 



An Arabic MS, Rom. Vat. Arab. 13 (formerly 71), is included by 

 Tischendorf and TregeUes as a witness for the form of the Gospel 

 which ends at v. 8. \VH do not contain any mention of it in their 

 notes. 



Abbe Martin, after examining the MS, declares that it cannot be 

 considered a witness against the last twelve verses, that at most it 

 can only be cited as doubtful, and that the probability is that it con- 

 tained the Longer Conclusion. The following is practically a con- 

 densed translation of his argument. 



The MS contains portions of the first three Gospels and two epistles, 

 in a good text. It is written in a Cufic character and belongs to tlie 

 eighth or ninth century, though many of its lost folios have been 

 supplied at a comparatively recent time. 



The last line of folio 74 originally did not end with the last words 

 of 16 : 8 but with " they were." The end of the verse must there- 

 fore have been written on folio 75 which has disappeared. But if this 

 folio was to contain only the concluding words of v. 8 would not the 

 scribe have found means, by a little crowding, of writing them on the 

 verso of folio 74 ? Would he have wished to take a whole folio 

 of parchment for two or three words ? Anyone who has had any 

 experience in the study of manuscripts knows that this would not 

 be the case. 



It is true that today one reads under this original last line the words 



-T- after "they were afraid" but these words were supplied by a 



secondar}^ hand, and therefore jn-ove that v. 8 was finished on the 

 recto of folio 75. 



Folio 75 is on a different parchment, and in a different hand, not 

 Cufic but Neskhi in character, proving that a folio of the original MS 

 has disappeared at this point. This has happened in this manuscript 



