Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Pauline Epistles

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript contains the <i>Pauline Epistles, transcribed from the Codex Boernerianus</i>, a 9th-century bilingual manuscript. That manuscript is believed to have been written by an Irish monk working at the Monastery of St Gall in Switzerland. Its Greek text is provided with a Latin gloss in a script of Anglo-Saxon type. The transcription preserved in Trinity College, MS B.17.2 was produced around 1719 for the scholar Richard Bentley, who was then planning a new edition of the Greek New Testament and gathering materials for the purpose. This copy closely imitates the script and layout of the original, observing the same page and line breaks.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>In the Codex Boernerianus the text of the Epistles is followed by a heading for the apocryphal Letter to the Laodikeans, a text which circulated in Latin in association with the Vulgate translation of the New Testament. However, the text which follows the heading is actually part of a Latin commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. In this transcript, only the first few lines of this text have been reproduced, presumably because the copyist realised that its content was not relevant to the copy's purpose. Another portion of this commentary, on folios which precede the text of the Epistles in the Codex Boernerianus, had also been omitted. However, the transcript does reproduce, on <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(1);return false;'>f. 23r</a>, a short poem in Old Irish disparaging the practice of pilgrimage to Rome, which had been added in the margin of the exemplar.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Christopher Wright</p>