402 Clarence Russell Williams, 



The liandwritin^- is ani^'ular ratlicr than round, without ornament 

 or flourish, and in spite of tlu- fact tliat it is written with great neat- 

 ness in "a very firm and practical hand like that of a professional 

 scribe" (Wordsworth) it contains many scribal blunders, some of them 

 extraordinary in character. A mere glance at the last folio of Mark 

 will illustrate this fact. To account for these two seemingly contra- 

 dictory facts the most probable hypotheses seems to be that the writer 

 was a Greek scribe with very little knowledge of Latin. This would 

 lead us to suspect an Alexandrian scribe, as Tischendorf has already 

 done. 



"As to the Greek affinities of the book besides the CATA of the 

 headlines, the blunders that meet us on nearly every page prove to 

 us that F, R, and S were unfamiliar letters to our scribe, and his 

 occasional substitution of P for R is probabty a Graecism. In view 

 of circumstances like this Tischendorf hazards the same conjecture 

 as he had previously made in regard to the cognate MS., the Palatine 

 Gospels (c, Vienna no. 1185), that it w^as wTitten in Africa by an 

 Alexandrian calligraph, wdio was wholly ignorant of Latin (Wiener 

 Jahrbiicher, cxx. Anz. Blatt., p. 45, 1845, cp. Evangelium Pala- 

 tinum Prolegomena, p. xix., Lipsiae 1847.)" 



W^ordsworth in O.L. Bibl. Texts. No. IL p. xv. 



Certainly any scribe who could write "abrode aps te exredist tibi 

 ut sicreat" could not have been much of a Latin scholar. 



The text of k, however, is a pure one, in spite of the many blunders 

 of the scribe. Sanday, after a most careful critical examination con- 

 cludes : "Corruption in the sense of transmitted and aggravated 

 blunders of the scribe it has suffered from severely enough, but the 

 intrusive element derived from foreign texts is, so far as we have seen, 

 comparatively small." (O.L. Bibl. Texts II, p. Ixxxiv.) 



The MS is to be dated in the V century (Tischendorf, Wordsworth) 

 though Swete says IV or V and Fleck, the earl\^ editor says \l or per- 

 haps V. 



As for the type of Greek text underlying k, Sanday, after a careful 

 examination, finds that two elements stand out with great clearness, 

 the Western and the Neutral. "Each of these enters in large pro- 

 portion into k ; the ' Western ' is naturally somewhat the larger, but 

 the 'Neutral' is also strongly pronounced." (O.L. Bibl. Texts, II, 

 p. 116.) 



As to the readings which k has in common with the Okl Latin, 

 Sanday concludes that they "present all the characteristics of ' \\'es- 

 tern ' readings in general." "Few of these can lay a claim to the text 

 as it was originally written." 



