Rossanian Manuscript

(Codex Rossanensis) is an uncial manuscript designated by the Greek letter I, and is so called from Rossano, in Calabria, where it was found. In the spring of 1879 two German scholars, Dr. Oscar von Gebhardt, of Gottingen, and, Dr. Adolf Harnack, of Giessen, made a joint expedition into Italy in search of old manuscripts. In his Hippolyti altae Feruntur Omnzia, page 216, Lagarde called attention to a notice from the 16th century, according to which manuscripts of Cyril of Jerusalem, Dionysius Alexandrinus, and of Hippolytus are said to be in the monastery of Santa Maria de lo Patire, near Rossano. This notice induced the two German scholars to search for these writings, of which, however, they could hear nothing, the monastery having long since perished. But they were informed that there was a very old Biblical book in the archiepiscopal palace. They begged to be allowed to look at this. Ushered into the presence of the archbishop, monsignor Pietro Cilento, they beheld, to their astonishment and delight, a quarto volume of the gospels, written in silver, on purple parchment, in old Greek uncial letters, unaccented, the words unseparated, and at the beginning a number of admirably drawn and colored miniatures and historical pictures. It consists of one hundred and eighty-eight leaves of parchment of two columns of twenty lines each. Mnore than half of the original manuscript seems to have perished. What survives contains the whole of Matthew and Mark as far as the middle of the fourteenth verse of the last chapter. The discoverers assign it to the 6th century; the text attaches itself closely to the chief representatives of the amended text of A, Δ, Π, over against the most ancient codices א and B; but where one of these (Δ for example) accords with the older text, Σ also usually follows it, and. shows a remarkable agreement with the scattered purple codex of the gospels N. Independent of the new Greek text (a specimen of which is given by Schaff in A Companion to the Greek Testament, N.Y. 1883, page 132), the pictures in the manuscript are believed to be of great value for the early history of painting. While Latin manuscripts with pictures are relatively numerous, only a very few Greek manuscripts prior to the 7th century are thus adorned. Chief among them .is the Vienna purple manuscript of Genesis. The newly discovered pictures give a very favorable impression of the art of the 6th century. They are described as, being wonderful in distinctness of outline and freshness of coloring. The manuscript is the property of the chapter of the cathedral church of Rossano. See Gebhardt and Harnack, Evangeliorum Codex Graecus Purpureus Rossanensis, etc. (Leipsic, 1880); Schuer, in the Theol. Liter Liturzeituung, 1880, No. 19. (B.P.)