United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cobet and other experts fixed the date of the two codices, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Alexandrinus, as not earlier than the fifth or sixth century, the principal reason for assigning to them so late a date being the generally accepted theory that uncials were not in use until vellum had entirely superseded papyrus as the medium for precious manuscripts.
Chad, which anyone may see for nothing in the cathedral of Lichfield, an English town famous for eight or nine different things: as Garrick, Doctor Johnson, and its two opposite inns. Come, read that first paragraph over now and see what you could make of it if it were written out in uncials that is, not only without punctuation, but without any division between the words. Wow!
Only we find, by numerous examples, that the MSS. we should most prize now, those written in capitals or uncials with the words undivided, or in Irish or English scripts which became unfamiliar, were uniformly despised and neglected by the readers of later centuries. We meet with notes of this kind in monastic catalogues: "It cannot be read," "Old and useless," and the like.
Its acquisition by Lord Oxford is chronicled in Wanley's Diary in the year 1720. On the 14th May he wrote: "Yesterday Mr. These characters are all uncials, gilded over with gold, and appear to be formed in very elegant manner. Among them I observe A, G, V, M and E so shaped, which is not commonly seen in the body or text of old MSS., although frequent in the title or Rubrics.
The number of these old manuscripts is large, and the first general division of them is into "uncials" or "cursives," as they are called; the uncial manuscripts being written in capital letters, the cursives in small letters more or less connected, as in our written hand.
The uncials are the oldest, as they are the fewest; there are only one hundred and twenty-seven of them in all; while of the cursives there are about fifteen hundred. Yet most of these manuscripts are fragmentary.
If that were the case and it is the conclusion arrived at by a decided majority of the best editors there would then be no considerable difficulty in regard to the relation between Tertullian and the five great Uncials, for the reading of Mark ix. 7 is of much less importance.
These were Greek Uncials, all capital letters, without any space divisions between the words, and neither accent nor punctuation marks; that from these original manuscripts, down to the invention of printing, all copies were made by hand copying. The oldest existing manuscripts were made in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, and no two of these are exactly alike.
There is a volume at Vienna, from Bobbio, made up of palimpsest leaves from many MSS., Biblical and classical. Two of these, apparently from one book, stand next to each other. They have only recently been deciphered; they are in Latin uncials of the fifth century.
Lyons had a Pentateuch in Latin which was a great rarity, for not only was it in uncials of the fifth century, but it was of the Old Latin version, that made from the Greek before St. Jerome made his version from the Hebrew, which we call the Vulgate. He made this the occasion for increasing a collection of MSS. which he had already begun for his private uses.
Word Of The Day