INTERESTING DISCOVERY.

Patea Mail, 16 December 1880, Page 3

INTERESTING DISCOVERY.

The Edinburgh Scotsman gives a detailed account of a literary discovery recently made which is nothing loss than the finding of a new early manuscript of the whole Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of Mark, with the exception of its last six and a-half verses—the final leaf being, as it is so often, missing. Its appearance, the stylo of the letters in which it is written, and all other criteria by which its ago must be judged, assign it to a date not far from a.d. 500 ; which exalts it to an antiquity exceeded by not more than three or four among surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. The discovery happened in this wise. Two German scholars, Oscar V. Gebhardt and Adolph Harnach, known as having successfully edited an edition of the “ Apostolic Fathers,” went in March last to Southern Italy and Sicily on a search for manuscripts. Hearing of a monastery at Hossano, on the Gulf of Taranto, said to contain important manuscripts, they went thither, to find no traces of such a monastery now existing, but discovering in the palace of the archbishop this venerable copy of nearly the whole of the first two Gospels. Its leaves arc of purple parchment, the writing being in silver, except the first three lines of each Gospel, which are in gold. It contains 188 leaves, is written in uncial characters, two columns to the page, with no space between the words, no breathings or accents, and only the the slightest attempt at punctuation. The finders stale that in general it bears a striking resemblance to the other only known manuscript on purple parchment —four leaves of which are in London, — and that, with some unique readings, it rather goes with the later manuscripts where the Sinaitic and Vatican manuscripts differ from them. Special interest attaches to the manuscript from the fact that it contains a number of painted miniatures illustrative of scenes in the life of Christ, which must be among the very earliest of such works of art extant, and which arc done with fair skill and much animation and expression—some being historically suggestive, as that pourtraying the distibution of bread and wine at the Eucharist,