Montfort Manuscript

(CODEX MONTFORTIANUS, known as MS. 61 of the Gospels, 34 of the Acts, 40 of the Pauline Epistles, and 92 of Revelation), so named from a Cambridge divine of the 17th century, who gave it to archbishop Usher, by whom it was presented to Trinity College, Dublin, in the library of which it still remains (there designated as G. 97); an octavo cursive Greek MS. of the entire N.T., written in the 15th or 16th century, on 455 paper leaves, and famous as containing the text of "the three heavenly witnesses" (1Jo 5:7, that leaf being glazed to preserve it from injury). An earlier owner was William Clap, once a fellow of Cambridge, who derived it from Thomas Clement, and originally it belonged to one Froy, a Franciscan friar. It is apparently the work of three or four successive scribes, perhaps in part at first independent of each other; and the Apocalypse bears marks of having been copied from the Codex Leicestrensis. It is doubtless the "Codex Britannicus" referred to by Erasmus as his sole authority for inserting the above disputed text in his edition of 1522, in accordance with a promise he had made to his detractors that if a single Greek MS. could be found containing it he would add it. SEE WITNESSES, THE THREE HEAVENLY. It has the Ammonian sections, and the number of verses noted at the end of the MS., with the Latin division of chapters. There are many corrections by a more recent hand, erasures of the pen, etc. An imperfect collation of it, while in Usher's hands, was printed in Walton's Polyglot. Dr. Banet collated the remainder for his edition of the Dublin palimpsest Z, and more recently Dr. Dobbin has published a complete collation (The Codex Montfortianus, etc., Lond. 1854). See Tregelles, in Horne's Introd. 4:218 sq.; Scrivener, Introd. to N.T. page 149. SEE MANUSCRIPTS, BIBLICAL.