Four Columns of Parchment, and What Survives of Them

Open the codex at almost any page and the first thing that registers is the layout. Four narrow columns of Greek run across the opening, so a reader looking at two facing pages sees eight of them, an arrangement that survives in no other biblical codex and which some have read as an echo of the scroll it replaced. The letters are a formal biblical majuscule, unspaced and unpunctuated in the manner of the period, written on parchment prepared from calf and sheep skin to a quality that implies serious expense. At least three scribes shared the work, and their hands can be told apart by habits as small as how they space a line ending.

What the codex contains is as important as how it looks. Its New Testament is complete, the earliest surviving example of that, and it does not stop there: it goes on to the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas, two works that fourth-century Christians read and that later canons excluded. That is not a scribe padding a book. It is evidence of what a Bible could be before the question was closed, and it is the sort of evidence a printed edition cannot give.

Roughly four hundred leaves survive of an estimated seven hundred and thirty. About half the Greek Old Testament is gone. The rest is spread across four institutions in four countries, and correctors from several later centuries have worked over the text, scraping and rewriting, so the manuscript carries a visible record of its own revision.