( b. ) Some of the More Important Minuscules

When the Greek New Testament began to be printed, the editors had necessarily to be content with indifferent and late minuscules, and even those who followed them, like Bentley and Lachmann, thought they were at liberty to disregard these altogether and to found their text exclusively on the oldest uncials. They forgot that the text of a late manuscript may be derived from a very early and good source through comparatively few intermediaries, and that it is possible to reconstruct a lost original by means of a comparison of several witnesses. Accordingly, in more recent times, English editors like Tregelles, Burgon, Ferrar, Hoskier, and Scrivener have rendered great service in the way of collating manuscripts, and the last-mentioned as well as Gregory in Germany has also catalogued them. At the present moment a systematic investigation in this department is being carried on in Berlin. Most of the minuscules are still written on parchment which began to be mixed with paper in the ninth century, and was ultimately superseded by it. Various minuscules contain commentaries and other additional matter, such as the List of the Seventy Apostles, short Biographies of the Apostles, Summaries of the journeys of St. Paul, or notes as to the date and place of the composition of the different books. When dates are given in the manuscripts, they are still as a rule computed in the Byzantine manner, reckoning from the Creation of the world (5508 B.C.). In only a few cursives is the date reckoned from the Birth of Christ.

Since the time of Wettstein the minuscule manuscripts have been indicated by Arabic numerals, the numbers in each of the four groups beginning with 1, so that one and the same manuscript may have three or four numbers—18evv. e.g. being 113Acts, 132Paul, and 51Apoc., while 209evv is the same as 95Acts, 108Paul, and 46Apoc. It is still more awkward that in the two principal works on the minuscules, that of Scrivener and of Gregory, the recently discovered manuscripts are numbered differently. Our enumeration will follow that of Scrivener.