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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
One of the great glories of the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington is the MS. of the Four Gospels, commonly cited as W, which was bought in Egypt in 1906, and may have been found in the ruins of an Egyptian monastery. With regard to it Professor A. S. Hunt, after again looking at photographs of the MS., writes me: “A date within the fourth century seems to me quite possible, but the early fifth century is not to be excluded. Personally I should incline to put it towards the end of the fourth century…. But… the first quire of John is obviously considerably later.” Thus W is probably the third oldest MS. of the gospels in Greek. Yet on account of the extraordinary variety in the types of early text contained in it, W is of all MSS. the most enigmatic. I hope in this article to contribute something towards the solution of the enigma.
1 Facsimile of the Washington Manuscript of the Four Gospels in the Freer Collection, University of Michigan, 1912Google Scholar. The prolegomena with full collation and two facsimile pages are included in The New Testament Manuscripts in the Freer Collection (University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, vol. VIII), New York, 1912.
2 Codex 1 of the Gospels and its Allies (Texts and Studies VII), Cambridge, England, 1902, p. lxxiii.Google Scholar
3 Among the 17 cases there are three in which, the family being divided against itself, one or more members of the family support W.
4 Possibly some of the sporadic ‘Hesychian’ readings in Matthew (Sanders, p. 53) were due to this corrector.
5 Cf. Oxyrhynchus Papyri I, No. 3. A vellum leaf of the fifth—sixth century contains a fragment of Mark with Byzantine text. A fragment of a papyrus lectionary of the same date in the Rainer collection in Vienna has this text; and a lectionary is likely to be based on an already familiar text. Most fifth-century papyri have a text predominantly Alexandrian, but several of them have a sprinkling of Byzantine readings, and thus betray the presence of such texts in Egypt. I cannot quote the Codex Alexandrinus as evidence for a fifth-century Byzantine text in Egypt because I do not believe it was written in Egypt (cf. “The Four Gospels,” p. 120), although it was long domiciled there.
6 Cf. “The Four Gospels,” pp. 63 f.