[New Testament Gospels].

Forms part of the Kenneth Willis Clark Collection of Greek Manuscripts (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)

Format: Manuscript codex.

Title supplied by cataloger.

Supplied title page: Ta tessara theia kai iera Eyangelia ētoun ta tēs kainēs diathēkēs ta apanta, Smyrnē 1773. [The date "1854" is written above the original date].

Supplied title page: Τὰ τέσσαρα θεία καί 'ιερὰ Ευαγγέλια ητουν τὰ τη̃ς καινη̃ς διαθήκης τα απαντα, Σμυρνη̨̃ 1773. [The date "1854" is written above the original date].

Layout: Written in 1 column of 24 lines; ruled for 24 lines with a very fine dry point on the hair side of one column.

Script: An expansive running late thirteenth-century hand, pendant, in black brown ink for the text and gilt kephalaia and numbers in the upper and lower margins with a reddish brown ink for the Eusebian numbers in the margins. Canon tables in red. The hand in the text is very legible, written with facility and with a hardly perceptible slant. The hand contains an even mixture of neatly formed uncial and flowing minuscule cursive characters. The text has been frequently erased and re-written apparently to bring it into conformity with the Koinē. The erasures are beyond retrieval because the surface of the parchment has been so thoroughly erased--scraped away--that the original is no longer visible. A later hand has added in a now very faded red ink liturgical equipment both in the margins and within the text itself.

Decoration: Kephalaia appear in the upper and lower margins in the scribal hand in red; Eusebian sections and canon numbers are in red in the fore edge margins from a later hand. There are also red initials in the margins that do not necessarily correspond with section divisions of the text. Each gospel has been provided with an ornamental headpiece and decorated initial.

Title cataloged from existing description.

Origin: Of provincial origin, probably not produced in Constantinople or under immediate Constantinopolitan influence, but in an outlying region such as the vicinity of Trebizond, Palestine, or perhaps the northern Balkans. If the presence of the manuscript at Smyrna 1773-1854 is an indication, the first two hypotheses are perhaps to be favored.

Binding: A western style binding, sewn on double cords with raised endbands, covered with red velvet lined with paper over oak boards, beveled on the inside at the head, fore edge and tail only; spine strip detached at the upper cover and all but a small fragment hold it in place at head. Endsheets wanting; pastedowns of eighteenth-century block-printed paper decorated with patterns of a single apple on a stem, columbines, apple blossoms, small apples and leaves. Endbands worked over a multifilament core with alternating green and yellow silk with a head bead and a bead at the base of the endband, laid down in the boards in a groove in a modified version of the Byzantine style, i.e., the endband does not extend beyond the edge of the boards. No evidence of the volume ever having had clasps. Originally all edges of the textblock were gilt.