422 Clarence Russell Williams, 



"The type of text of W is curiously heterogenious, showing 

 three somewhat distinct strata, neutral, Western, and Syrian. 

 Matthew and Luke, chaps. 8—24, are decidedly Syrian in type. 

 John, and the early part of Luke (chaps. 1—7) which follows it 

 are neutral, with some interesting Western readings interspersed ; 

 e. g., the omission of the Lucan genealogy. The primitive sub- 

 scription Y.ot.-a. i(i)avvY]v is a further hint of the neutral ancestry of 

 this part of the manuscript. Mark is decidedly Western through- 

 out, and while its readings are often not those of D they are 

 usually of the same general kind as they, and so illustrate Hort's 

 feeling that the Western is as much a textual tendency as a 

 definite textual type." 



(American Journal of Theology, April 1914, p. 279.) 



" In its Syrian parts it stands with Alexandrinus as a second 

 and hardly inferior Greek witness. In its neutral parts, while 

 less pure thanB, it has sustained probably no more adulteration 

 than X, with which it shows certain external affinities ; and in 

 antiquity it ranks next after these codices among uncial witnesses. 

 In its W'estern portions it is certainly no less free than D, and 

 with its greater probable age, it promises to play an important 

 part in further studies of the Western text." (Ibid. p. 281.) 



We note it omits some, but not all of Hort's "Western non- 

 interpolations," and in some other omissions betrays a like affinity, 

 although in its omission of the pericope adulterae it is non-Western. 

 And in the insertion of thislogion it exemplifies one of Hort's marks 

 of the Western MSS, readiness to adopt extraneous material. 



Its date, then, that must be placed early, as its antiquitjns testified 

 to by the simplicity of its hand, its freedom from ornaments and 

 exaggeration, and the character of the ornaments at the end. Scholars 

 are inclined to date it in the fifth century at latest, and there seems 

 a tendency to place it in the fourth. 



As to the place from which it came, the dealer who sold it to Mr. 

 Freer stated that it was from Akhmim. 



Dr. Carl Schmidt in 1905 bought a manuscript of I Clement in Cop- 

 tic (the Akhmimic dialect) of the fourth or fifth century, a MS of 

 Proverbs in the same dialect and of the same date, and a Greek Easter 

 letter of the early viiic.and all three proved to have come from the 

 library of the White Monastery near Sohag opposite Akhmim. He 

 suggested (Theolog. Literaturz. 1908, p. 359) that all four of the Freer 

 ]\ISS came from the same source, inferring that they were found when 

 the library was repaired. Since none of the MSS of this group are 



