444 
These are Church reading books con- 
taining the text of sections of the 
Scriptures which were appointed to be 
read on the several days of the ecclesi- 
astical and the civil year, comprising, 
respectively, the synaxarion and the 
menologion (see pl. 4). Scholars have 
only recently begun to realize the 
importance of lectionaries in tracing 
the history of the text of the New Testa- 
ment during the Middle Ages. Inas- 
much as the form of the citation of the 
Scriptures in official liturgical books 
always tends to be conservative and 
almost archaic, lectionaries are valu- 
able in preserving a type of text which 
is frequently much older than the ac- 
tual age of the manuscript would lead 
one to suspect.® Although 1,678 lec- 
tionaries have been cataloged, only a 
comparatively few have been critically 
studied. They are usually referred 
to by the letter ‘I’ preceding an 
Arabic numeral. 
Short portions of six books of the 
New Testament have been preserved 
on ostraca, or broken pieces of pottery 
used by the poorest people as writing 
material. Those which have been 
cataloged are 25 in number and are 
referred to by the Old English or 
Gothic letter ‘‘O” followed by a nu- 
meral. Thus, the treasure of which Paul 
wrote (II Cor. 4: 7) has been commit- 
ted, in a quite literal fashion, to 
“earthen vessels’’; worthless, castaway 
potsherds have been inscribed with the 
imperishable words of the Gospel 
(Seexple 5). 
13'Thus, for example, the Psalter in the 
Anglican Book of Common Prayer retains a 
translation of the Psalms which derives from 
the Great Bible of 1539, having resisted all 
efforts to make it conform to the King James 
Version of 1611. 
14@The University of Chicago has been 
sponsoring the study of this long-neglected 
source of information about the text of the 
New Testament; President E. C. Colwell has 
projected a series of publications under the 
general title “Studies in the Lectionary 
Text of the Greek New Testament’”’ to which 
the most recent contribution was made by 
the present writer under the title ““The Satur- 
day and Sunday Lessons from Luke in the 
Greek Gospel Lectionary” (Chicago, 1944). 
ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1948 
Finally, a curious but quite unim- 
portant source of our knowledge of the 
Greek text of the New Testament is 
comprehended under a group of nine 
talismans, or good luck charms. These 
amulets range in date from the fourth 
to the twelfth or thirteenth century 
and are made of vellum, papyrus, 
clay potsherd, and wood. The super- 
stitious use of talismans, so prevalent 
in the ancient world, was scarcely 
less popular—if we may judge from 
repeated remonstrance against them 
by ecclesiastical authorities—among 
the faithful than among the pagans.’® 
Four of those cataloged contain the 
Lord’s Prayer and the others include 
scattered verses from other parts of the 
Old and New Testaments. They are 
referred to by the letter ““T’’ followed 
by a numeral. 
In evaluating the significance of 
these statistics of the amount of Greek 
evidence for the text of the New Testa- 
ment, attention ought to be given, by 
way of contrast, to the number of 
manuscripts which preserve the text 
of the ancient classics. The “Bible” 
of the Greek nation, and for which the 
largest number of manuscripts are 
available today, was Homer’s Iliad. 
The most recent figures for this work 
are 288 papyri, 2 uncials, and 188 
minuscule manuscripts.® Next in 
quantity of evidence are Plato with 
23 manuscripts, Thucydides with 21, 
Hesiod with 20, and so on down to 
many authors who are represented 
today by only one manuscript. In 
contrast to these figures, the textual 
16 'Thus, in addition to remonstrances by 
Eusebius and Augustine, the Synod of 
Laodicea issued a separate canon proscribing 
the manufacture and use of amulets: “... 
and those who wear such we command to be 
cast out of the Church.” For these and other 
references, see ‘“The Fever Amulet,” edited by 
the present writer in Papyri in the Princeton 
University Collections, under the general 
editorship of A. C. Johnson, vol. 3, pp. 
78-79, Princeton, 1942. 
16 For further details, reference may be 
made to my article, ‘‘Trends in the Textual 
Criticism of the Iliad, the Mahabhfrata, and 
the New Testament,” Journ. Biblical Lit., 
vol. 65, pp. 339-352, 1946. 
