There can be little doubt that the Vatican manuscript goes, if not farther, at least as far back in date as the Council of Nice, and is the oldest and most valuable of extant monuments of sacred antiquity.  It may have been transcribed directly from some Egyptian papyrus, or through the medium of only one intervening prototype.  Perhaps it was a single copy saved from the fate of many surrendered to be burned by the class of Christian renegades called traditores, who averted the martyr’s death in the great Diocletian persecution by giving up the sacred books of their religion to their enemies.  For this pagan emperor endeavoured not only to deprive the Christian Church of its teachers, like his predecessors, but also to destroy the sacred writings upon which the faith of the Church was founded, and whose character and claims were beginning at this time to be generally recognised.  The Alexandrine Codex—­which is placed first on the list of uncial manuscripts, and therefore distinguished by the letter A—­belongs undoubtedly to a more recent time.  It is said by tradition to have been written by a noble Egyptian martyr named Thecla about the beginning of the fifth century, and was sent as a present to Charles I. by Cyrillus Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople, who brought it from Alexandria.  It is now one of the greatest treasures of the British Museum.  The voice of tradition is confirmed by internal evidence, for it has only two columns in a page, while capital letters of different sizes abound, and vermilion is frequently introduced—­all marks of the period indicated.

How or when the Codex Vaticanus was brought to the Vatican Library is a matter that is altogether involved in obscurity.  It probably formed part of the library in the Lateran Palace, which goes nearly as far back as the time of Constantine, and was transferred along with the other contents of that library to the Vatican in 1450 by Pope Nicholas V. We first hear of it distinctly in a letter written to Erasmus in 1533 by Sepulveda; although there is a somewhat obscure reference to it a few years earlier in the correspondence of the Papal librarian Bombasius with Erasmus.  A Roman edition of the Septuagint portion based upon the Vatican MS. appeared in 1587.  After that period to 1780 it was several times collated; among others, by Bartolocci, the Vatican librarian; by Bentley, who employed for the purpose the Abbate Mico and Rulotta; and by Birch of Copenhagen, who travelled under the auspices of the King of Denmark.  Along with many of the best sculptures and most valuable art-treasures of the Vatican, the precious Codex was taken to Paris in 1810 by order of Napoleon Buonaparte, that unscrupulous robber of foreign palaces and churches for the aggrandisement of his own capital; and while there it was carefully examined by the celebrated critic, J.L.  Hug, who was the first to determine, from the nature of its materials and its internal evidence, its very great