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This article explores the complex life and significance of Codex H (GA 015), a copy of Paul's letters in Greek preserving the earliest evidence for the Euthalian apparatus. Codex H was disassembled in the Megisti Lavra monastery on Mount Athos sometime between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and used as binding material and flyleaves in multiple other medieval manuscripts produced and restored there. Codex H's surviving folios are now held in Paris, Torino, Kyiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Megisti Lavra. Its story highlights the ethical complexities inherent in scholarship on the New Testament's manuscripts, especially as it relates to digital tools and emerging forms of restorative textual scholarship. In order to begin to reconstruct Codex H before it was disassembled, we first work to understand its post-production life, tracing the paths its pages took in reverse chronological order, from their current holding institutions to Mount Athos. We argue that the story of Codex H is important because it helps us to understand the ways late ancient copies traversed time and space to their current forms as we encounter them today, offering new ways to think about the most primary sources of New Testament scholarship.
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I. FROM MACARIUS TO MONTFAUCON
In 1218, a monk named Macarius in the library of the Megisti Lavra monastery on Mount Athos set about conserving a tenth-century copy of Gregory of Nyssa's commentary on the Song of Songs and Metrophenes of Smyrna's commentary on Ecclesiastes. Founded in 963, the Megisti Lavra had by the time of Macarius's bookwork become a location of manuscript production and a major repository, preserving many older manuscripts that came from Constantinople and other areas of Byzantine hegemony to this remote community under various circumstances.1 Over two hundred years after its founding, some of the library's holdings required maintenance, including this copy of patristic commentary on Jewish wisdom literature.
Macarius would have begun by excising the manuscript's flyleaves, scraping its pastedowns, trimming the bindings, and removing its covers. After resewing the quires, he would have reconnected the text block to the cover boards. It was at this stage, when looking for cartonnage material to buffer the cover from the pastedown, that he must have reached for a pile of...