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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.
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 loose leaves, the remnants of manuscripts disbound in the library.2 He selected two folios of a copy of Paul's letters that was by this time around six hundred years old, a copy that a previous generation of monastic bookmen had decided was not worth preserving intact. We now know this item as Codex H (GA 015), a possibly sixth-century majuscule copy of Paul's letters and the earliest witness to parts of the Euthalian apparatus in Greek.3
Taking one sheet from the end of Titus and another from a colophon mentioning Pamphilus and the library of Caesarea, Macarius placed them between the wood board of the cover and new parchment used as pastedown, connecting the cover to the text block. Buffering cover and quire, the two folios of Codex H became stowaways in the journey of these commentaries, which we now know as Paris, BnF, Coislin 57 (diktyon 49199).4
Completing his work, Macarius made a series of notes in large script, in the upper and lower margins of the first folio of his conserved manuscript (2r, fig. 1; see next page), something he would do many times in other manuscripts:5
...
...
Thirty-fourth book on the first shelf
added by the lord monk Macarius in the year 6726 (= 1217-1218 CE)
In addition to articulating a fixed location for this manuscript within the collection, he made a final note in the right margin, calling on the imprecatory powers of the fathers of the first council of Nicaea and the founder of the monastery:
...
If anyone removes [this book], let him incur the curses of the 318 God-bearing [fathers] and St. Athanasius6
Despite this typical warning, many manuscripts did leave the Megisti Lavra after his time. Other parts of Codex H, for example, left as cartonnage and flyleaves as early as 1600 and as recently as 1884 (see appendix). Codex H was one of the many earlier manuscripts that were reused in the book conservation efforts at the monastery.7 As part of a broader phenomenon, Codex H serves as an ideal case study to understand the variegated ways that manuscripts migrated from the Megisti Lavra in the post-Byzantine period.8 In addition to continuing to serve as a repository for Greek New Testament manuscripts (over 250 today), the Megisti Lavra functioned as a node in the broader circulation of manuscripts, facilitating the growing appetite of European bibliophiles and state institutions under royal patronage.9
The first hint of Codex H's existence in Europe came almost exactly five hundred years after Macarius arranged Coislin 57 in the Megisti Lavra's library. Cataloging the Coislin collection at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris at the behest of Henri-Charles du Cambout, Duc de Coislin, and nephew of Pierre Séguier (1588- 1672),10 Bernard de Montfaucon found in the bindings and beneath the pastedowns multiple folios from a late ancient manuscript, including two folios that he derived from Coislin 57 (fols. 93-94; Coislin 202 fols. 13-14). In all, he located fourteen folios in the bindings of the Coislin collection, giving these fragments the shelf mark Coislin 202.11 In subsequent years, folios from this same manuscript were identified in other locations, as cartonnage or flyleaves. Folios currently exist in eight institutions in seven locations: Paris, Torino, Kyiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Megisti Lavra (see appendix).
In light of this situation, the goal of this study is twofold: (1) to understand the dynamics of how Codex H came to be in its current dispersed state, and (2) to explore the importance of such histories for biblical scholarship, with attention to ethical concerns and the communities that preserved these manuscripts. Through this historical exploration we argue that the movement of manuscripts and their locations in time and space are the essential context for other critical activities like textual criticism. Stories like this one sit at the foundation of our disciplines, enabling the production of editions, exegesis, and other object-oriented research. We cannot understand our ongoing work in biblical studies today if we do not interrogate the details of our manuscript patrimony. Biblical scholars who work with the manuscripts rarely attend to the economic, political, and ethical issues that shaped the substantial manuscript tradition to which we have access today.12 Due to a prevailing concern for using manuscripts for text-critical purposes, research tends to emphasize the question of "how we got the Bible" as opposed to "how we got the manuscripts," eliding the roles played by monastic communities in preserving the documents on which we rely. It is more common to ask what a manuscript can tell us about the earliest state of the New Testament's text than to ask how the manuscript came down to us today and how this reality informs the ways we work with these objects today. But the latter questions are key for understanding the broader story of the New Testament as a diffuse, chronologically diverse, and heterogeneous set of nontypographic objects, valuable to many communities, in many places, for various reasons. Biblical scholarship does not end with the first century, or even late antiquity. Looking at the transmission history of individual copies and the ethics of manuscript migration contextualizes the other uses to which we put the manuscripts. The subtleties of manuscript migration, especially in the period in which Codex H left the Megisti Lavra, are often underpinned by combinations of colonial mindsets, unfair dealings, and silent ambiguity around the true nature of acquisitions.13
This work is especially relevant for us because we, in collaboration with Emanuele Scieri and Maxim Venetskov, are in the process of creating a new edition of Codex H that seeks to digitally recreate the manuscript as it existed before its disassembling, restoring its form when it first arrived at the Megisti Lavra in the tenth century. This process requires an understanding of the contours of its history as a backdrop for our editorial choices. Examining the bigger story of a manuscript shapes editorial decisions and the stories we tell about the earliest sources of our discipline.
What we have are snapshots of Codex H's history, frames of a larger story that show the paths that eventually enabled the manuscript to make its way to multiple European libraries, via Mount Athos, from an unknown location in the eastern Mediterranean. Our aim is to examine in greater depth the post-production history of Codex H, starting with its current institutional settings and working back to the Megisti Lavra, a kind of stratigraphic analysis based on partial evidence. If editions are tools for understanding manuscripts and their places in the broader transmission of the New Testament, then we must begin by understanding manuscripts' own histories and the actors that shaped them. We do this by first introducing Codex H in its current form before examining in chronological terms how each of its folios left the Megisti Lavra.
II. CODEX H TODAY
Codex H (GA 015) is a dispersed and fragmentary copy of Paul's letters. It was likely disassembled in the library of the Megisti Lavra, perhaps falling into disrepair before being reused by Macarius as conservation material for other manuscripts in the thirteenth century. At some point during its working life the entirety of the manuscript was reinked.14 Previous editors like Henri Omont thought that the full set of diacritical marks (diaereses, accents, breathing marks) must have been added when Codex H was reinked, but, as Elina Dobrynina has argued based on the Moscow and Paris folios, most of these features were also reinked, meaning that they were original to the initial production layer.15 This makes Codex H a fairly early witness to a robust accentuation system with relatively consistent use of diacritics (see fig. 2), although accents and other diacritics are known in the papyri.
Some corrections and other post-production (but pre-disassembly) annotations are present, along with annotations that postdate the folios's reuse, like the library locations of its host manuscripts written by Macarius.
Currently there are forty-one known folios (82 pages). In 2023 we worked with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) to create new multispectral images of the folios in Paris, Torino, and Mount Athos (78% of existing material). Following the observations of J. Armitage Robinson and Kirsopp Lake, who were able to partially reconstruct some nonexistent pages based on ink transfer on folios in Paris and Athos, we have isolated the text of a number of missing pages by identifying ink transfer from when the codex was closed in late antiquity, likely after its reinking.16 At some stage, the caustic nature of the ink (which continues to cause deterioration) subtly damaged the facing page, leaving imprints that we have been able to identify, at least to some degree, on nearly every extant folio.17 We have been unable to visit Ukraine or Russia, but we have recovered ink transfer from digital images supplied by the National Library of Russia and the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine (in part). If we were able to image in all locations, we believe that there would be 143 at least partially legible pages in total (81 extant folios plus 62 transfer images).18
The remnants of the codex also enable us to speculate as to its initial contents. Based on the partial quire information, we can assume that (if consistent) the codex was initially composed of quaternions, that is, quires made of four sheets, eight folios, sixteen pages. There are eight remaining attached bifolios: folios 11/18, 13/16, 21/26, 22/25, 33/36, 60/63, 66/69, and 72/73, two of which have quire signatures (10r and 21r). 10r, for example, reads ... (the lower half is cut off), signaling that it is the start of the twenty-first quire.19 Folios 11r-18v preserve consecutive text from 2 Cor 10:8-11:12a (with two missing pages between 1v and 2r and 2v and 3r, which we have recovered via ink transfer), totaling sixteen pages. This is the only complete quire that we have been able to reconstruct. However, Omont assumes a consistent structure throughout the codex based on the quire signatures also preserved on 66r (Supp. grec 1074, 5r, ...), which is also an attached bifolio (with f. 69), and 81r (Torino, B. I. 05 [A.1], 1r, ...).20 If each quire consisted of sixteen pages and the twenty-first quire starts at 2 Cor 10:8, then we can reconstruct about 320 pages before this point, which is significantly more than required to present Romans through 2 Cor 10:8, but approximate for the inclusion of Acts and the Catholic Epistles in this layout, perhaps with prefatory materials. If the quire numbers are correct and consistent, the manuscript would have originally held over 400 folios (800 pages). These are rough calculations based on the partial evidence, but the structure of the manuscript suggests that it likely once held at least Acts and the Catholic Epistles in addition to the Pauline Epistles.
Moreover, Codex H's text has an unusual layout. It is arrayed in such a way that sense lines are visually distinct, with subsequent lines of a thought unit indented from the left margin (fig. 3; see next page). This practice is perhaps in keeping with a statement in the Euthalian prologue to Acts (not extant in this codex), where the prologist notes that the text was written "in verses" (...). A similar statement is found in the colophon in Codex H, which claims that the text was arranged according to "verses" (...). The unusual layout of Codex H and its developed early accentuation system may represent the concerns of the author of the Euthalian Acts prologue to present a text "with the correct pronunciation" (...), accounting for both its thought-unit delimitation and full system of diacritics. Omont refers to its layout as the "Euthalian method," but its layout is unusual within the New Testament's tradition.21
The connection to Euthalian traditions is the main reason that Codex H has been of interest to biblical scholars to date.22 Parts of the Euthalian paratextual system are ubiquitous in the Greek tradition and are often attributed to a certain Euthalius, whose name appears in some of the titles of the system in the manuscripts that transmit these features, though not in any extant page of Codex H (see fig. 4; p. 177). In fact, the colophon in Codex H likely attributes the system to Evagrius (...), but the first line that preserves the name is heavily abraded (fig. 5; p. 177).23
The Euthalian system includes many features that are presented in varying configurations in the manuscripts, including prologues for Acts, Paul's Epistles, and the Catholic Epistles, biographical texts on Paul, chapter prefaces (hypotheses), chapter tables, two quotation lists for each corpus, text division lists, and textual annotations to mark quotations and chapters.24 Like most manuscripts, Codex H preserves only parts of the system, including the chapter lists before each letter (preserved for Galatians, Hebrews, 1 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon), markers for quotations and chapter numbers, and a colophon typical (in slightly varying form) of a few copies (96r-v).
Overall, Codex H presents many possible avenues of study. Its text, layout, reinking, material reconstruction, and relationship to the Euthalian tradition remain open questions, ones that we are continuing to address in our own editorial work. However, we think that it is necessary first to understand the contours of Codex H's transmission and the story of its dispersal, which helps us to make sense of it as a witness to a variety of acquisition behaviors and as a test case for thinking ethically about editing such a complex manuscript in a restorative way.
III. FROM PALESTINE TO MOUNT ATHOS AND BEYOND
The origins of Codex H are obscure. Montfaucon suggested that it was produced in Palestine or Syria, a suggestion supported by some circumstantial evidence, such as its colophon, which mentions the library of Caesarea. The paleographic evidence, however, is inconclusive because of the reinking alongside the unusual layout and large letter forms.25 Instead of determining the origins of its production, we begin by examining how its folios left the Megisti Lavra from the early seventeenth century onward, starting with what we have and working backward as far as the evidence can take us.
Torino, Biblioteca nazionale universitaria di Torino (2 folios)
The first of Codex H's folios to leave the Megisti Lavra are found in the collection of the Biblioteca nazionale universitaria di Torino (fols. 81 and 84). They are bound as flyleaves in the back of a twelfth-century codex containing Nicetas of Heraclea's Catena on the Psalms (B. I. 05, Pasini 007, diktyon 63625), which is likely how they arrived in Torino. Due to fires in 1667 and 1904 that destroyed many of the library's records, details about the acquisition of the codex are lost. Nonetheless, we know that the manuscript containing Codex H's folios arrived in Torino between 1628 and 1629, if not earlier.26 Three hundred eight of the 405 Greek codices held in Torino came from the royal collection of the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel I, who purchased them from the estate of Gabriel Severos (ante 1540-1616), an Orthodox ecclesiarch and bibliophile, after his death.27 It is likely that B. I. 05, with leaves of Codex H in tow, were among this collection.28
The circumstances of how Severos acquired this manuscript and from whom remain uncertain. However, post-production notes on 81r of Codex H (314r of B. I. 05) tell us that this Psalms catena was housed in the Megisti Lavra (fig. 6). Here we can see a first line identical to the Macarius annotation in Coislin 57 (likely from Macarius himself), followed by two lines from a later sixteenth-century hand:29
...
...
...
Books of the katekoumena of the Holy Lavra in the katha kellion
Books of the katekoumena of the Holy Lavra in the katha kellion on the the 8th shelf
The protosygkellos of Andros, hieromonk Simon, 22 July 1586
It is unclear whether the kellion (monastic cell or small satellite community) mentioned here relates to the katholikon of the monastery or to a church in some now unknown cell. Similarly, the role of Simon of Andros remains uncertain.30 But from this note we can surmise that the Torino folios of Codex H were added to this copy of a Psalms commentary in the early thirteenth century as flyleaves (based on the presence of Macarius's hand) and that it was placed in the narthex of the Lavra's katholikon (the main church in the center of the monastery) or possibly associated with a specific kellion. There it remained, until Simon of Andros slightly reorganized it in 1586, not long before the manuscript came into the possession of Severos, perhaps through an intermediary monastery on Crete that he visited around this time.31
When Giuseppe Pasini compiled his inventory in 1749, he identified another ownership note in the manuscript at the start of this codex connected to the Megisti Lavra written on paper. This notation was recently located by Erika Elia and Rosa Maria Piccione in another Torino manuscript, B. I. 23 (dikyton 63643). Although these folios are not connected to Codex H, they also place the manuscript in two different locations in the Lavra in a hand similar to that of Macarius.32 We can assume that Severos acquired the manuscript at some point after 1586 and that, following his death, it came to the Ducal Library. Whether Severos acquired it directly from Athos or from Crete remains uncertain. We do not know if it was purchased, donated, or acquired in some other manner. But by the early seventeenth century, the manuscript, with its flyleaves of Codex H, had arrived in Italy.
Moscow, State Historical Museum (2 folios)
Around twenty years after the Torino folios were purchased from Severos's estate, two folios of Codex H (fols. 60 and 63) were acquired by Arseny Suchanov, a Russian monk, writer, and diplomat who traveled extensively in the Holy Land, Egypt, Constantinople, and Mount Athos. In 1649 he embarked from Moscow on an embassy to Jerusalem to investigate discrepancies between the Greek and Russian liturgical books. His lengthy report on this, the Proskynetarion, was published in 1653. The following year he was sent again by the Russian Patriarch Nikon to acquire manuscripts for the Synod in Moscow on Athos, which he accomplished with aplomb returning with over five hundred manuscripts.33 One of these was a copy of thirty of Gregory of Nazianzus's discourses produced in 975 (Sinod. gr. 60 [Vlad. 140], diktyon 43685) by a certain Nicholas, Presbyter of the Monastery of the Theotokos of Pelekanos in Asia Minor.34 At some point after 975 the copy had made its way from Asia Minor to the Megisti Lavra, where folios from Codex H were used in its rebinding process, perhaps as part of Macarius's reorganization program.
Similar to Severos's acquisition of the Torino folios, we know very little about the manner of Suchanov's collecting activities. Whether these items were gifts, purchases, or parts of broader negotiations remains uncertain, although the quantity of manuscripts he acquired intimates a healthy budget and other assistance, perhaps from Russian church or diplomatic officials.
More interesting is the fact that a copy produced in Asia Minor came to the library, suggesting that the Lavra was part of a broader network of manuscript migration, facilitated by monastic networks, donations, and, eventually, Orthodox bibliophiles and travelers in the Ottoman period. It is through the work of these intermediary agents like Suchanov, with connections to both the Orthodox world and European institutions under royal patronage, that parts of Codex H and its host manuscripts began to emerge into the consciousness of incipient critical scholarship. The desire to accumulate material was a symptom of a colonial mindset wherein manuscripts and other objects could be brought en masse to centers of cultural power without significant care for or acknowledgment of the labor of the monastic communities that maintained them.
Paris, BnF, Coislin 202 (12 folios)
The largest collection of Codex H's folios is held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, under two call numbers. The first, Coislin 202, includes twelve folios that were collected from several different manuscripts by Montfaucon, as noted above. The Coislin manuscripts were originally the collection of Séguier, which he purchased through another Orthodox intermediary, the Cypriot-born priest and scholar Athanasius Rhetor. After a failed trip to Mount Athos in 1646, Athanasius accessed the enclave the following year with diplomatic help from Ottoman authorities. He returned with around 150 manuscripts, which were divided between his patrons (Séguier and Cardinal Mazarin) and himself. While Robert Devreesse's and Omont's narratives on the origins of the Coislin collection emphasize Athanasius's unfair dealings with Séguier, possibly holding back material purchased with his patron's funds,35 his purported unfair practices in obtaining manuscripts from the various monasteries came to the attention also of Dositheos II Notaras, patriarch of Jerusalem. In his 1715 Historike Dodekabiblos, the patriarch noted:
A Cypriot named Athanasios, loyal to the pope, but dressed as a Greek and pretending to be an Orthodox, visited Mount Athos and other monasteries in Thrace, Thessaly and Macedonia, and after he had chosen many books of the holy fathers and of secular wisdom, he bought them at a low cost. Indeed, the fathers of the monastery called Meteoron were greatly deceived, because Athanasios also used a trytanē, which is called in the common language statērion (i.e. scales), to buy books of the monastery, giving to the monks the amount of silver coins they agreed for every three litres of weight.36
This notice is the first that sheds light on the circumstances in which the manuscripts that brought parts of Codex H from Athos in the seventeenth century were acquired, offering some insight into the perspectives of the monastic communities themselves. This view is filtered through the church hierarchy and specific to the Thessaly monasteries in this case, but it is feasible that this description applies to the Athonite monasteries as well. Athanasius's acquisitions were viewed as extractive and dishonest, taking advantage of the financial insecurities of the monasteries, along with disingenuous self-presentation, even if details on specific acquisitions are lacking. According to Demetrios Agoritsas, Notaras's depiction of the transaction also had the effect of propagating the idea that the monks were "uneducated, ignorant and unaware of the value of their manuscripts, which they destroyed or sold for worthless amounts."37 The desire to warn monastic communities of unscrupulous practices also fed the notion that Orthodox monasteries were fertile grounds for Western collectors, who perceived themselves to have financial, diplomatic, and cultural advantages over their monastic counterparts. Perceived power imbalances were at the heart of Codex H's movements.
Saint Petersburg, National Library of Russia, φ. ? 906 / Gr. 14 (3 folios)
Three folios of Codex H (fols. 22, 25, 37) are currently held in Saint Petersburg at the National Library of Russia. Two of these leaves (fols. 22 and 25; φ. ? 906 / Gr. 14, fols. 1-2) were also acquired by Athanasius Rhetor and originated as part of the Coislin collection, functioning as binding cartonnage in Coislin 299 (diktyon 49440). These leaves were once folios 3-4 in the Coislin 202 folios of Codex H, and the folder that holds this part of the manuscript in Paris still has cardboard prints of the Saint Petersburg folios as placeholders for these "missing" leaves. They were purchased (or "taken," depending on whom you ask) as part of a lot from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-de-Prés in Paris in the early 1790s by Piotr Dubrovsky, an official at the Russian Embassy in Paris and a keen bibliophile.38 Dubrovsky's collection was then purchased for the revamped Saint Petersburg public library by Tzar Alexander I shortly after he came to the throne in 1801. Dubrovsky's name is preserved in an owner's note in the top right margin of 22r.
The third Saint Petersburg folio (fol. 37) came courtesy of Bishop Porphyrius Uspensky from his travels to Athos, Egypt, Palestine, and Sinai, one of the many Russian Orthodox scholar-pilgrims who acquired material from Mount Athos and elsewhere in the nineteenth century.39 He is more famous for his "discovery" and description of Codex Sinaiticus at Saint Catherine's Monastery, but his travels also took him to Athos between 1845 and 1846, and then again in 1858 with the support of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Based on Uspensky's note in Russian on 37r, Kurt Treu reported that this folio came not from the Megisti Lavra, but from another large Athonite monastery, Vatopedi.40 However, Louis Duchesne, who made his own acquisitions in Athos a few years later, suggests that all six known folios in Russia, especially the Dubrovsky folios, were stolen or otherwise ill-gotten. Writing in 1876 on the Coislin 202 folios, he states:
We can see in the Bibliotheca Coisliniana the description and text of these leaves, then numbering fourteen; since then, two [the Dubrovsky leaves] have been stolen and taken to Russia (été volés et transportés en Russie), where the traveler archimandrite Porphyrius brought back four others, undoubtedly from the Lavra monastery.41
Duchesne is mistaken on the details-Dubrovsky would have denied the accusation of theft and that other Russian travelers were responsible for the movement of folios to Russia-but the language of theft and dishonesty in dealings with the monastery by visitors is commonplace. This is especially so for the parts of Codex H acquired in the nineteenth century, since these folios were found not as reused portions in subsequent host manuscripts but acquired directly as loose leaves from the monastery. Uspensky's own correspondence, preserved in Saint Petersburg, includes multiple letters from Athonite monks asking for the return of stolen items.42 Lora Gerd, writing on Russian travelers to Athos, notes Uspensky's "bad reputation of a thief among the Athonites," but ultimately justifies his actions as laudable,savingthevaluablematerialfromtheineptclutchesofuneducatedmonks.
One should not forget ... that in the 19th century it was common practice for European scholars, who saw the precious codices kept in bad condition or misused (for example, to roll cigarettes, fill holes, wrap bread or glue windows) to expropriate them from their uneducated owners in order to save them.43
Uspensky himself made a similar claim: that his acquisition, "safely preserved in the dry rooms of a Russian library, could be studied by everybody 'in our common Orthodox home.'"44
These claims by both Uspensky and Gerd are notably unevidenced, part of the stock colonial language justifying unscrupulous methods. Unsubstantiated claims of monastic ineptitude, undergirded by nationalistic sentiments, justified Uspensky's problematic practices, making him a savior that the monasteries did not know they needed. Jennifer Wright Knust has referred to this practice as "colonial aphasia," whereby Western scholars and others "regard persons, territories, and things as possessions designated for those with the technology to 'save' them," a practice that usually tends to victimize those it purports to save.45 In the case of Codex H, the Megisti Lavra was relieved of portions of their oldest manuscript (and its host manuscripts) in unclear circumstances, even though they had preserved it for centuries and had maintained a substantial library as part of a broader monastic book network.
Uspensky's own dubious justifications notwithstanding, the only information on his acquisition of the Codex H folio comes from his own explanation of his "saving" activity. But the fact that he reports it came from Vatopedi, not the Megisti Lavra, suggests dissembling on his part. Scholarly perspectives on Uspensky's acquisition of this folio are divided, but it would not be surprising if some form of unscrupulous dealing contributed to his acquisition.46
Kyiv, Vernadsky Library, φ. 301 (КДА) 26п (3 folios)
The next set of Codex H folios to leave the Megisti Lavra (fols. 8, 40, 43) came courtesy of another Russian traveler, Antonin Kapoustin. Now held in Kyiv's Vernadsky Library, these folios were used as flyleaves in an eleventh-century copy of Barlaam and Josaphat (diktyon 37437).47 Kapoustin brought these pages to Ukraine, having likely acquired the host manuscript from the Megisti Lavra during one of his trips described in periodicals published in Kyiv from 1861.48 Again, the details of acquisition are notably absent. At some point before his death in 1894 he donated the folios to the Kyiv Theological Academy, an Orthodox educational institute established in 1819 by the Brotherhood Monastery. From there the leaves of Codex H were given to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a museum of ecclesiastical artifacts within Kyiv's Monastery of the Caves. The Vernadsky Library opened in 1918, receiving manuscripts from what had been Kapoustin's collection during the 1920s and 1930s, including the folios from Codex H.49
Moscow, Russian State Library (1 folio)
Another folio of Codex H (fol. 48) is now at the Russian State Library in the Kremlin. It was part of a larger collection of seventy-seven manuscripts belonging to Pyotr Ivanovich Sevastyanov (1811-1867), a Russian lawyer and archaeologist who founded the first collection of Christian antiquities at the Rumyantsev Museum in Saint Petersburg shortly before his death.50 After inheriting a significant fortune in 1851, he retired from law, focusing on traveling to discover and photograph Christian artifacts. Sevastyanov visited Athos several times in the 1850s, photographing manuscripts and other antiquities.51 It was in his fourteen-month trip beginning in April 1859 supported by Tsar Alexander II (joined in August by Kapoustin) that he procured the Codex H leaf as part of a selection of manuscripts, icons, wall-painting fragments, and other items, again under ambiguous circumstances.52 Upon the closure of the Rumyantsev Museum in 1924, his collection was divided among a number of Russian cultural institutions, with the State Library procuring the leaf of Codex H.
Paris, BnF, Supplement grec 1074 (10 folios)
Ten other folios of Codex H are preserved in Paris under the call number Supplement grec 1074. Folios 2-10 of this call number were donated by the estate of Emmanuel Miller (1812-1886), a French philologist, in 1886.53 Miller visited Athos on his travels under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belleslettres, funded by Napoleon III, and collected multiple loose leaves and old flyleaves from the Megisti Lavra and other Athonite monasteries in 1863.54 Omont assumes that he acquired these folios on this trip, although Miller is noticeably silent on the circumstances of this procurement.55
Duchesne provided the last folio to this group between 1875 and 1876.56 Following their journey to Athos, Duchesne and Charles Bayet published a transcription of nine folios of Codex H that remained in the Lavra at that time.57 Omont does not credit Duchesne with bringing any of the folios back with him, but the ninth folio in Duchesne's transcription, covering Gal 4:30-5:5, now appears as folio 1 in the Supplement grec dossier in Paris. There is no direct report of the acquisition, but the simplest explanation for this page appearing both in Duchesne's description and physically in Paris is that Duchesne acquired it before donating the folio to the Bibliothèque nationale in the 1870s.58
As in previous cases, the exact details of the acquisitions of the Supplement grec folios remain opaque, probably by design. Like Uspensky, the French travelers also held an overly negative view of the monks and their superintendence of the manuscripts, an orientation that likely justified for them their acquisition of manuscripts. Miller, for example, in a lengthy travelogue (where he often complains about the food and vermin) characterizes the upkeep and maintenance of the Vatopedi library as evidence of the "ignorance and barbary" of the anonymous monk who was charged with rebinding many volumes.59 He also relates a story in which monks appear at his room under the cover of darkness with an eleventh-century gospel manuscript, which he purchased for the "right" price.60 Miller's report also demonstrates his disdain for the monks, who hire painters with no talent to "profane" older Byzantine artwork61 or who use priceless manuscripts as binding material, for window repair, or to seal jam jars.62 Like Uspensky's accusations, Miller's also lack specificity or corroboration.
This attitude is common to many nineteenth-century collectors who procured folios of Codex H, and the lack of detail (or total silence, in the case of Miller and Duchesne) on the process or location of acquisition reflects a desire to keep the nature of the transaction private. Perhaps they were able to procure these folios surreptitiously and on the cheap. Perhaps the keepers of the library did not value the collection of older loose leaves at this time for whatever reason. Because we do not have any information on how these fragments were viewed in the library at the time, it is difficult to reconstruct the monastery's view of this material and its value. But the silence in official reports and in the history of the Supplement grec collection is suggestive. An aspect of colonial aphasia is not only that the rhetoric of salvation is used to victimize, but that the voice of those effected is erased altogether, to the benefit of the those wielding colonial attitudes.
Megisti Lavra (8 folios)
Finally, we return to the library of the Megisti Lavra, which retains custody of eight folios of Codex H, first transcribed by Duchesne and later photographed by Kirsopp Lake.63 These folios do not have a shelf number but are part of a larger collection of loose leaves from disbound manuscripts. Exactly when the manuscript came to Athos is difficult to determine. However, as a location of continued production, the Megisti Lavra regularly maintained portions of older folios as raw material to ensure the maintenance of the collection, which grew through the production of new manuscripts on site and the procurement of copies from other monastic communities.64 The community played a central role in the care and production of manuscripts on Mount Athos. The evidence is circumstantial, but it appears that Codex H came to the monastery early in its history, possibly as a gift from a patron or as part of a broader movement of manuscripts from threatened monasteries in the Levant. Our best conjecture is that it was reinked when it arrived at the Megisti Lavra, perhaps coming in an already imperfect state, only to fall into disrepair over the decades, leading to its eventual repurposing. There is a notable difference between the legibility of the flesh and hair sides of the parchment, making for an uncomfortable reading experience, perhaps leading to its obsolescence. Regardless of the details of its journey to the Lavra, the community today maintains these folios as a valuable part of its substantial library holdings.
IV. BIBLICAL STUDIES AND THE STORY OF CODEX H
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mount Athos, like other monastic communities, was vulnerable to the collecting impulses of wealthy bibliophiles and their agents who possessed the requisite financial means and ecclesiastical or diplomatic connections. Parts of Codex H left the Megisti Lavra piecemeal, migrating incognito in the bowels of other manuscripts or procured directly from the loose leaves that remained in the library. We are reliant not only on the material evidence of the existing folios, but also on the intentionally selective records of the individuals involved in their departure, presenting one side of the transaction, making it difficult to understand the financial, political, and religious dynamics in play. We know about the transactions only through the eyes of those who acquired the folios; the perspective of the monastic community has been erased, likely to the benefit of the "discoverer." The story of Codex H is obscured by what Katerina Seraïdari calls the Western "imaginary" of the Athonite libraries, which combines narratives about great men and their beneficence, like Séguier; imperial patronage and European states; and adventures to save antiquities from barbarous lands.65 As a type of narrative colonial aphasia, these imaginaries shape the unarticulated narratives that contextualize our scholarship, a reality that requires we explore the post-production histories of our manuscripts as a genuine form of biblical scholarship. The story of Codex H in its dispersed state is a result of colonial aphasia, as Knust describes it, an attempt to "save" objects from those who did not have the perceived capacity to understand their value.66 The manuscript is a microcosm that helps us to understand not only the composition of European collections but the shape of primary evidence for New Testament scholarship and the ideologies that led to our current situation. In one sense, New Testament textual scholarship is part of a broader colonial enterprise, even if only by the fact that many of the manuscripts we have today are available because of problematic acquisition practices. Telling these stories is one way to begin to unravel these legacies and to think anew about what the manuscripts tell us about both the earliest forms of the New Testament's text and the lives of the manuscripts used to make text-critical judgments.
The relevance of this discussion for biblical scholarship depends on our perspective on the goals of research. If we are interested only in reconstructing the text of the New Testament's writings as they existed at some early stage (still a viable critical goal), then the story of Codex H is largely immaterial insofar as only its text, irrespective of its material history, is relevant to the production of an Ausgangstext. We might even be thankful that most of Codex H's folios are in locations more accessible than the Megisti Lavra. But if, as current trends suggest, a coexistent goal of biblical scholarship is to understand the New Testament as a diffuse literary tradition, presented in many material states and valuable to many communities since the time of its production, the story of Codex H and other manuscripts is central to the discipline. Because Codex H appeared in Europe alongside the emergence of critical biblical scholarship itself, it is a window onto the development of the discipline and its ideological underpinnings. The paternalistic and colonial attitudes that undergird the ways in which its folios were acquired are material to the ways we understand our own scholarship within the broader historical-critical enterprise.
When we examine "how we got the manuscripts," perhaps as a precursor for thinking about "how we got the Bible," we open new vistas in biblical scholarship, enabling scholars to view their work on the manuscripts, even those that extend beyond the early papyri and great late ancient pandects, as genuine instantiations of biblical research, putting our work on the New Testament into a broader conversation with paleographical and codicological research in Byzantine studies. Telling the story of Codex H and other manuscripts also helps us to undermine the colonial impulses and national rivalries that stand at the origins of disciplines, providing opportunities to get beyond the one-sided narratives propagated by powerful individuals and to glimpse the perspective of the communities from which this material came. It is troubling that the monks of the Megisti Lavra, as guardians of Codex H for a millennium, play no role in the traditional story of the manuscript and that the details of the ways that each of the folios was procured are lacking, if not absent altogether. The relationship between acquirers and the monastery appears to have been entirely extractive.
Part of our goal in working with Codex H is to be restorative, not only in our editing of the manuscripts but also in our relationships with the monastery, a living community that has played a significant role in preserving and transmitting the Greek New Testament from the time of its founding. Following Garrick Allen's visits in 2023, where the folios the Megisti Lavra hold were photographed by EMEL, we have invited Fr. Athanasius, Secretary of the Synaxis and keeper of the Library, to write a foreword to our edition as a way to acknowledge the monastery's role as a guarantor of the manuscript for over a thousand years. Building relationships with communities like the Megisti Lavra and acknowledging their substantial role in preserving Codex H is one way to begin to engage in a restorative book history. Even when it was beyond repair as a stand-alone object, the monastery's reparation work ensured the ongoing existence of dozens of pages. It is because of the work of the Megisti Lavra monastery that Codex H exists, not in spite of it. Research on the New Testament's manuscripts enables us to understand their texts and broader critical value, while also working to restore partnerships damaged by previous generations, creating a new ethical framework for working with the New Testament's manuscripts that will lead to a better understanding of the tradition.
1 Little documentary evidence exists for the early years of the Megisti Lavra's library, which is true of Byzantine monastic libraries generally. Knowledge about the libraries must be recovered from the manuscripts that once existed in them and the scribes who worked in these spaces. See Nigel G. Wilson, "The Libraries of the Byzantine World," GRBS 8 (1967): 53-80, esp. 66-69; Michael Grünbart, "Securing and Preserving Written Documents in Byzantium," in Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al., Studies in Manuscript Cultures 11 (De Gruyter, 2018), 319-37; Jean Irigoin, "Centres de copie et bibliothèques," in Byzantine Books and Bookmen, ed. Cyril A. Mango and Ihor Ševčenko, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium 1971 (Dumbarton Oaks, 1975), 17-27, esp. 23. On the Megisti Lavra, see B. L. Fonkič, "Bibliotyeka Lavry Sv. Afanasiya na Afone v X-XIII vv." [Russian], Palestinskii Sbornik 17 (1967): 167-75.
2 On the processes and material of rebinding medieval manuscripts, see J. A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Ashgate, 1999), esp. 62-92; Georgios Boudalis, "Chains, Links, and Loops: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Sewing Structure in Eastern Mediterranean Bookbinding," in Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding, ed. Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich, Studies in Manuscript Cultures 33 (De Gruyter, 2023), 73-120.
3 The dating of Codex H to the sixth century has been questioned by Elina Dobrynina, who argues, based on a taxonomy of diacritical marks, that it was produced in the eighth or ninth century ("On the Dating of Codex H [Epistles of the Apostle Paul]," in Le livre manuscrit grec: Écritures, matériaux, histoire; Actes du IXe Colloque international de paléographie grecque, Paris, 10-15 septembre 2018, ed. Marie Cronier and Brigitte Mondrain, TMCB 24.1 [Association des Amis du Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2020], 137-49). We are not yet convinced by this conclusion, but Dobrynina's analysis does shed new light on Codex H's materials and usage. Evidence for the date of Codex H-its script, materials, layout, ornamentation, reinking, and post-production annotations-point in multiple directions, making any firm claim to dating uncertain. Additionally, some versional witnesses to the Euthalian tradition may be earlier than Codex H. For example, Carla Falluomini suggests that the Gothic Codex Carolinus was produced in the fifth century (The Gothic Version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles: Cultural Background, Transmission and Character, ANTF 46 [De Gruyter, 2015], 36-38).
4 In addition to the known host manuscripts of Codex H (see appendix) it is feasible that other folios exist in the bindings of other copies at the Megisti Lavra or elsewhere. We have been told by our partners at the Megisti Lavra that other unpublished trimmed fragments of Codex H existinaflyleavesfoldertoday,somethingnotedbyEfthymiosLitsas,"PalaeographicalResearches in the Lavra Library on Mount Athos," ¾ÅÀÁŠ 50 (2000): 217-30, here 221-22.
5 Similar notes exist in other manuscripts. The note in Coislin 8 (diktyon 49150) says that it was the "14th book on the ninth shelf," placed there by Macarius in February 1218. Transcriptions can be found in Bernard de Montfaucon, Bibliotheca Coisliniana olim Segueriana ... (Ludovicum Guérin, 1715), 43, 252. A list of all the manuscripts that preserve library locations in the Paris and Moscow collections are listed in Fonkič, "Bibliotyeka Lavry," 167-68 (33 in total).
6 Similar warnings are found elsewhere, for example, in Paris, BnF, Coislin 292 (dikyton 49433), a fourteenth-century manuscript once at Meteora (1v). See Demetrios C. Agoritsas, "Western Travellers in Search of Greek Manuscripts in the Meteora Monasteries (17th-19th Centuries)," Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6 (2020): 115-60, here 120.
7 For other examples of manuscripts reused as binding material or flyleaves at the Megisti Lavra in this period, see Elina Dobrynina, "Some Observations on the 9thand 10th-Century Greek Illuminated Manuscripts in Russian Collections," in The Legacy of Bernard de Montfaucon: Three Hundred Years of Studies on Greek Handwriting; Proceedings of the Seventh International Colloquium of Greek Palaeography (Madrid-Salamanca, 15-20 September 2008), ed. Antonio Bravo García and Inmaculada Pérez Martín, Bibliologia 31 (Brepols, 2010), 45-53. For example, parts of an eighth-century copy of Paul of Aegina's De re medica, produced in the Sakkoudion monastery on Mount Olympus, were used as flyleaves in six subsequent manuscripts in Paris and Moscow. The library regularly used older manuscripts, produced elsewhere, to manage their collection.
8 On the history of manuscript production at Athonite monasteries more generally, see Erich Lamberz, "Die Handschriftenproduktion in de Athosklöstern bis 1453," in Scritture, libri e testi nelle aree provinciali di Bisanzio: Atti del seminario di Erice (18-25 settembre 1988), ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Giuseppe De Gregorio, and Marilena Maniaci, Biblioteca del "Centro per il collegamento degli studi medievali e umanistici nell'Università di Perugia" (Centro Italiano di Studi sull'alto Medioevo, 1991), 25-78.
9 Jean Duplacy suggested that there were over 950 New Testament manuscripts on Athos, and at least 200 others now located elsewhere that can be traced back to various monasteries ("La provenance athonite des manuscrits grecs légués par R. Bentley à Trinity College, Cambridge et en particulier de l'oncial 0131 du Nouveau Testament," in Studies in the History and Text of the New Testament in Honor of Kenneth Willis Clark, ed. Boyd L. Daniels and M. Jack Suggs, SD 29 [University of Utah Press, 1967], 113-26). See also Efthymios K. Litsas, "The Mount Athos Manuscripts in the Kurzgefasste Liste der Griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments," ¾ÉÇÅÇÄţ 32 (2000): 245-50.
10 Séguier first purchased the manuscripts as part of his collection through the collaboration of an agent, a Fr. Athanasios Rhetor, with the support of the French ambassador to Constantinople, Jean de La Haye. See Robert Devreesse, Catalogue des manuscrits grecs, vol. 2: Le fonds Coislin (Imprimerie nationale, 1945), I-XV; Henri Auguste Omont, who lays out the voluminous correspondence between actors in Fr. Athanasios's purchases in Athos and elsewhere on behalf of Séguier (Missions archéologique françaises en Orient aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols. [Imprimerie nationale, 1902], 1-26). On Athanasius Rhetor, see Dominic J. O'Meara, "The Philosophical Writings, Sources, and Thoughts of Athanasius Rhetor (ca. 1571-1663)," PAPS 121 (1977): 483- 99. On Montfaucon, see Brigitte Mondrain, "Bernard de Montfaucon et l'étude des manuscrits grecs," Scriptorium 66 (2012): 281-316.
11 Folios 1-2 and 9-10 of Coislin 202 were extracted from Coislin 275 (diktyon 49416); folios 2-3 (now folios 1-2 in Saint Petersburg) from Coislin 299 (diktyon 49440); folios 5-8 from Coislin 241 (diktyon 49382); folios 11-12 from Coislin 23 (diktyon 49165); and folios 13-14 from Coislin 57 (diktyon 49199).
12 A good counterexample is found in An-Ting Yi, From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship, ANTF 58 (De Gruyter, 2024).
13 See, e.g., Yii-Jan Lin, "Reading across the Archives: Mining the Beatty Narrative," in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety: Literature, Papyrology, Ethics, ed. Garrick V. Allen et al., Manuscripta Biblica 10 (De Gruyter, 2023), 83-96.
14 Henri Auguste Omont describes the reinking undermining the "purity and elegance of the first letter forms" (une qui altera la pureté et l'élégance de leurs forms permières), noting that this hand also "sans doute" added the punctuation and accents (Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec en onciales des épÎtres de saint Paul [Imprimerie nationale, 1889], 10). See also Bernadino Peyron, who thinks that Codex H was reinked in the tenth or eleventh century and accentuated at that time ("Due frammenti greci delle epistle di San Paolo del V o VI secolo che si conservano nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino," Atti della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino 15 [1879]: 493-98).
15 Based on our work with the manuscript, we agree with Dobrynina, "On the Dating," that the first layer of diacritics and main text were part of the earliest production layer, although the reinker did revise some diacritics in the process. In a recent paper at the University of Glasgow in October 2024, Dobrynina confirmed to us that an analysis of the inks in Codex H in the Moscow folios show two chemically different compositions in the lower and upper layers of ink.
16 Kirsopp Lake, Facsimiles of the Athos Fragments of Codex H of the Pauline Epistles (Clarendon, 1905); J. Armitage Robinson, Euthaliana, vol. 3 of Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1895; repr., Wipf & Stock, 2004), 48-65.
17 Of the folios we have imaged, only 95v (Coislin 202, 14v) appears to have no ink transfer, suggesting that the end of the colophon was likely the end of the manuscript.
18 Eighty-two existing pages plus sixty-two transfer pages. Some existing folios are sequential, making ink transfer analysis redundant in those cases.
19 The quire number on 21r is cut off almost entirely.
20 Omont argues that Codex H is composed consistently of quaternions (Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec, 10). On 71r (Coislin 10r) a quire number (either ...) has been scraped off. The mu is legible in some bands of the multispectral images.
21 Omont, Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec, 7.
22 Omont's Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec was the first edition to connect all known folios and instigated significant interest in the Euthalian tradition from the 1890s to the First World War, an interest that waned until recently, with some notable exceptions along the way. For an overview, see Garrick V. Allen, "Early Textual Scholarship on Acts: Observations from the Euthalian Quotation Lists," Religions 13.5 (2022): art. 435, pp. 1-14, https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13050435. On the history of research on the Euthalian systems, see Vemund Blomkvist, Euthalian Traditions: Text, Translation and Commentary, TUGAL 170 (De Gruyter, 2012), 8-30. On the Euthalian system and its features, see Louis Charles Willard, A Critical Study of the Euthalian Apparatus, ANTF 41 (De Gruyter, 2009).
23 The lack of attribution and context of the Euthalian system is one reason that contemporary scholarship has avoided it. For theories on the system's origins, see Blomkvist, Euthalian Traditions, 11-25.
24 See Blomkvist, Euthalian Traditions, 8-10; Willard, Critical Study; Allen, "Textual Scholarship."
25 Montfaucon, Bibliotheca Coisliniana, 252.
26 On Torino's Greek manuscript collection, see Paolo Eleuteri and Erika Elia, "Per un catalogo dei manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino," Medioevo greco: Rivista di storia e filologia bizantina 19 (2019): 83-92, here 84.
27 On Severos and his bibliophilia, see Susan Pinto Madigan, "Gabriel Severo's Private Library," StVen 20 (1990): 253-71.
28 Erika Elia and Rosa Maria Piccione, "A Rediscovered Library: Gabriel Severos and His Books," in Greeks, Books and Libraries in Renaissance Venice, ed. Rosa Maria Piccione, Transmissions 1 (De Gruyter, 2021), 35; Agamemnon Tselikas, "..." ("Remnants of the Library of the Metropolitan of Philadelphia Gabriel Severos in the Sinai Metochi in Cairo"), Thesaurismata 34 (2004): 473-81.
29 Transcriptions from Elia and Piccione, "Rediscovered Library," 60.
30 See Elia and Piccione, "Rediscovered Library," 62-64.
31 A sixteenth-century note written upside down in the lower margin of 81v mentions Crete, a location visited by Severos in 1581-1582 and 1586-1587, although the connection remains uncertain. Jean Duplacy assumes that these folios of Codex H also derived at some point from the Megisti Lavra ("Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament émigrés de la Grande Laure de l'Athos," in Studia Codicologica, ed. Kurt Treu, TUGAL 124 [Akademie-Verlag, 1977], 159-78, here 175), but he apparently did not have access to the folios or their transcription to observe the post-production annotations.
32 Giuseppe Pasini, Codices Manuscripti Bibliothecae Regii Taurinensis Athenaei (Ex Typographia Regia, 1749), 70. Elia and Piccione suggest that B. I. 05 and B. I. 23 were rebound after the fire in 1904, resulting in the separation of these notes ("Rediscovered Library," 60-61).
33 See Archimandrite Vladimir, Systematic Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Synod in Moscow (Moscow, 1894), preface (Russian), cited in Aubrey Dillard, "The Manuscripts of Pausanias," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 88 (1957): 169-88, here 182; Lora Gerd, "Russian Research Work in the Archives of Mount Athos," in Lire les Archives de l'Athos: Actes du colloque réuni à Athènes du 18 au 20 novembre 2015 à l'occasion des 70 ans de la collection refondé par Paul Lemerle, ed. Olivier Delouis and Kostis Smyrlis (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2019), 527-51, here 528.
34 See Kurt Treu, Die griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments in der UDSSR: Eine systematische Auswertung der Texthandschriften in Leningrad, Moskau, Kiev, Odessa, Tblisi und Everan, TUGAL 91 (Akademie-Verlag, 1966), 31; Elina Dobrynina, "Colophons and Running Titles: On New Terminology in Describing Greek Manuscripts of the Ninth-Tenth Centuries," in Greek Manuscript Cataloguing: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Paola Degni, Paolo Eleuteri, and Marilena Maniaci, Bibliologia 48 (Brepols, 2018), 239-51. The scribe is identified as ... (287v).
35 See Devreesse, Le Fonds Coislin, 2-9; and Omont, Missions archéologiques, 20-21.
36 For the Greek text and translation, see Agoritsas, "Western Travellers," 122-23.
37 Agoritsas, "Western Travellers," 123-24.
38 Duplacy, "Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament," 164-65; Treu, Handschriften, 31.
39 See Gerd, "Russian Research Work," 530-34.
40 Treu, Die griechischen Handschriften, 31.
41 Louis Duchesne and Charles Bayet, "Mission au Mont Athos," Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires 3/3 (1876): 201-444, here 420. On Uspensky's thefts from Athos, see also Emmanuel Amand de Mendieta, Mount Athos: The Garden of the Panaghia (De Gruyter, 2022), 249; Duplacy, "Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament," 165.
42 Gerd, "Russian Research Work," 533-34.
43 Gerd, "Russian Research Work," 534.
44 Quoted in Gerd, "Russian Research Work," 534.
45 Jennifer Wright Knust, "Papyrology as an Art of Destruction," in Allen et al., Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety, 97-106, here 103.
46 Casper René Gregory notes that Uspensky had "cut, snatched, and stolen" (schnitt, riss, und stahl) many valuable manuscripts from large eastern libraries (Einleitung in das Neue Testament [Hinrichs, 1909], 490-91). Treu disagrees with the characterization, suggesting that a man ofsuchhighstandingasUspenskymusthavehadapprovalofmonasterysuperiors(Diegriechischen Handschriften, 16).
47 See Duplacy, "Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament," 164; B. L. Fonkič, "Un 'Barlaam et Joasaph' grec date 1021," AnBoll 91 (1973): 13-20.
48 On Kapoustin's rather extensive writing career, as well as his broader travels, see Lucien J. Frary, "Russian Missions to the Orthodox East: Antonin Kapustin (1817-1894) and His World," Russian History 40 (2013): 141-49.
49 See Duplacy, "Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament," 164.
50 See Duplacy, "Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament," 165-66.
51 On Sevastyanov's trips to Athos and the numerous photographs he took there, see Lora Gerd, "Petr Sevast'anov and His Expeditions to Mount Athos (1850s): Two Cartons from the French Photographic Society," Scrinium 16 (2020): 105-23, here 110-11.
52 Gerd, "Petr Sevast'anov and His Expeditions," 113. On the political interconnectedness of science and colonial aspirations, see Gerd, "Russian Research Work," 535-38.
53 On his biography, see Emmanuel Miller, Le Mont Athos, Vatopédi, l'Ile de Thasos (Leroux, 1889), III-XXIV.
54 Omont discusses the Codex H fragments in the context of the fragments in Supplement grec 1155 (Catalogue des manuscrits grecs, latins, français et espagnols et des portulans recueillis par feu Emmanuel Miller [Leroux, 1897], 2). On Miller's travels, see Emmanuel Miller, "Missions scientifique de E. Miller, de l'Institut, en Orient (1er et 2e rapports)," Nouvelles annales des voyages 188/4 (1865): 193-217, 285-307.
55 Omont, Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec, 6.
56 See Omont, Notice sur un très ancient manuscrit grec, 6. See also Charles Astruc and Marie-Louise Concasty, Bibliothèque nationale: Département des manuscrits; Catalogue des manuscrits grecs, vol. 3: Nos. 901-1371 (Bibliothèque nationale, 1960), 169.
57 Duchesne and Bayet, "Mission au Mont Athos," 420-29.
58 Astruc and Concasty, Catalogue des manuscrits grecs, 3:169.
59 Emmanuel Miller, "Souvenirs du Mont Athos," Correspondant 67 (1866): 982-1023, here 1011. Tellingly, he reports that he was not allowed to take manuscripts to his room at Vatopedi (1012).
60 Miller, "Souvenirs du Mont Athos," 1014, 1017.
61 Miller, "Mission au Mont Athos," 200; see also 207, where he asserts that monks tried to surreptitiously sell manuscripts.
62 Noted in Marie-Louise Concasty, "Le fonds 'Supplement grec' de Département des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris," Byzantion 20 (1950): 21-26, here 23.
63 Lake, Facsimiles of the Athos Fragments.
64 See Litsas, "Palaeographical Researches," 220-21.
65 Katerina Seraïdari, "Imaginaries autour des bibliothèques du mont Athos (19e-débout du 20e siècle)," La revue de la BNU 28 (2023): 8-17.
66 Knust, "Papyrology as an Art of Destruction," 97-106.
67 Based on our images and the processing of lost transfer pages, we have refoliated the manuscript to correspond to what we suspect exists if we were able to image the Ukrainian and Russian folios. T = folios reconstructed from ink transfer; [] = hypothetical transfer pages not yet confirmed through our own imaging.
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