Of the uncial manuscripts of the New Testament, the most ancient and important are the SINAITIC,[80] written in the fourth century, and now deposited in the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg; the VATICAN,[81] also of the fourth century, and preserved in the Vatican Library at Rome; the ALEXANDRINE,[82] of the fifth century, now in the British Museum; the EPHRAEM CODEX,[83] of the fifth century, in the National Library at Paris; BEZA’S CODEX,[84] of the sixth century, in the University Library, Cambridge; and the CLAROMONTANE,[85] also of the sixth century, which formerly belonged to Beza, but is now in the National Library at Paris. As will be seen presently, only two of these most ancient manuscripts were available for the preparation of the text from which the translators of 1611 made their revision. The Alexandrine was not brought to light until 1628, when it was presented to Charles I. by Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople. Although the Ephraem Codex was brought to Europe in the early part of the sixteenth century, it was not known to contain a portion of the New Testament until towards the close of the seventeenth century, and was not collated until the year 1716. The Sinaitic was discovered by Dr. Tischendorf, in the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, so recently as February 4th, 1859. And the Vatican, though deposited in the Library at Rome in the fifteenth century, was, during a long time, so jealously guarded by the Roman authorities, that little use could be made of it. Now, however, all these six important manuscripts have been edited and published, some in the ordinary style of printing, and some in _quasi fac-simile_. At the present time, by the application of the processes of photography, an exact copy of the Alexandrine is in course of preparation, and the New Testament portion has been successfully completed.
In these and other ways, by the laborious efforts of many English and Continental scholars, an immense amount of material for the determination of the sacred text has been gathered together and safely garnered; and knowledge which aforetime could be attained only by slow and wearisome effort, by many long journeys to distant places, and by much personal search amongst the books and papers stored away in national and other libraries, can now be attained with comparative ease by the solitary student in his study. At the time when King James’s translators entered upon their work a small fraction only of this mass of material was available, and even that fraction was but imperfectly used. The means were not then possessed for correctly judging of the relative value of the several documents, nor had experience given the skill to discriminate wisely between varying testimony.