The Codex consists of upwards of one thousand five hundred pages, of which two hundred and eighty-four are assigned to the New Testament.  Originally it contained the whole Bible, and also the Apocrypha and the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians; which last was so much esteemed by the early Christians that it was regularly read in the churches, and bound up with the Scriptures—­to which circumstance, indeed, we are indebted for its preservation to our own time.  At present the greater part of Genesis and a part of the Psalms are missing from the old Testament; while, in the New Testament, the Epistle to Philemon, the three Pastoral Epistles, the latter part of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse, in the original handwriting, are lost; their place having been supplied, it is said, in the fifteenth century, from a manuscript belonging to Cardinal Bessarion.  From the evidence of its materials—­arrangement and style of writing—­the very high antiquity of this Codex may be inferred.  It is generally supposed to have been written in the beginning of the fourth century.  Vercellone, who edited Cardinal Mai’s version of it, argues, from the remarkable correspondence of its text with that used by Cyril of Alexandria in his Commentary on St. John, that it must have been written at Alexandria, where there was a band of remarkably skilful caligraphists.  He believes that it was one of the fifty manuscript copies of the Holy Scriptures which Eusebius, by order of the emperor Constantine the Great, got prepared in the year 332 for the use of the Christian Church in the newly-formed capital of Constantinople.  And a circumstance that seems to corroborate this opinion is, that the Vatican Codex does not contain, as has already been mentioned, the last twelve verses of St. Mark’s Gospel, a peculiarity which Eusebius says belongs to the best manuscripts of the Gospels.  On this supposition, the Vatican Codex would be the very first edition of the Bible that had the seal of a sovereign authority.

But it may be of even older date than the time of Constantine, for its marginal references do not correspond with the Eusebian canons; and this fact would seem to imply that it belonged to the third century.  Its only rival in point of antiquity is the famous Sinaitic Codex, known by the Hebrew letter [Hebrew:  alef], discovered in a most romantic way by Tischendorf in the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai.  Tischendorf has pronounced a decided opinion, not only that this manuscript is of the same age as the Vatican one, but that the Vatican manuscript was written by one of the four writers who, he infers from internal evidence, must have been employed upon the Sinaitic Codex.  This opinion, however, has been disputed by other scholars; and it seems improbable, for the Sinaitic Codex has four columns to the page, whereas the Vatican Codex has only three.  Its uncial letters are also much larger and plainer than those of the Vatican manuscript; and it has the Ammonian sections and Eusebian canons written in all probability by the original hand.