textual writer Arthur Charles Barrett in 1867 says antiquity due to lack of Eusebian and Ammonian sections in original

Steven Avery

Administrator
Companion to the Greek Testament (1867)
By Arthur Charles Barrett
https://books.google.com/books?id=yLgCAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR19

The original ms. is written in the earliest uncial characters, without accents, points, or initial letters, and has neither the Eusebian canons, nor the Ammonian sections.
The inscriptions and subscriptions of the different books are more concise than those in any other ms. now extant. In some parts there are four columns on a page, but only two in the poetical books.

The ms. has been touched at different times by numerous
correctors. One of these has added a few points, and another
has inserted the Eusebian Canons and Ammonian sections.
An edition of this ms. has been published by Tischendorf.

What do Tischendorf and Scrivener say?
Uspensky - no mention, only Euthalian style
what is said today?

A Tischendorf add-on?
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
Brent Nongbri
The terminus post quem mentioned by Roberts (the presence of the Eusebian canon and section numbers) is not controversial. The Eusebian apparatus as it appears in Sinaiticus has some anomalous features, but it seems almost certain that the Eusebian numbers were a part of the original production of the codex and not a later addition.23

The surviving evidence suggests that the Eusebian numbers were added after an early correction of the manuscript by scribe D but before the insertion of a replacement bifolium (again by scribe D) in the second quire of Matthew.24

The use of the canon and section numbers cannot predate their creation by Eusebius. The exact date that Eusebius developed and disseminated the system of canon and section numbers is not precisely known, but the terminus post quem of 300–340 offered by Roberts is reasonable.25

23
The strange features include (1) the fact that no Eusebian canon tables survive in Sinaiticus, either at the mutilated beginning of the codex or at the start of the New Testament, (2) the section numbers are only partially present (they are missing for sections 107–242 in Luke), and (3) the first 52 sections in Matthew are more elaborately executed than the rest of the sections. Milne and Skeat have explained this situation by noting that, according to one sequence of quire signatures, there is a full quire missing between the last quire of the Old Testament and the first quire of the New Testament. They hypothesize that a quire containing a set of tables was planned for but never completed because the effort to add the section numbers was abandoned before it was finished, thus also explaining the abandonment of the extra decorations after section 53 in Matthew and the complete lack of Eusebian numbers in much of Luke (Scribes and Correctors, pp. 7–9 and 36–7). In the absence of other data, this solution seems the least implausible alternative (if the canon tables had been completed and contained in the codex, it is hard to explain why the missing section numbers in Luke were not added by any later users of the codex).

24
A correction in the lower margin at Matt. 10:39 carries a section number in identical red ink and made in sequence with the section numbers used in the main text, quire 74 (=New Testament quire 1), folio 6r, column 3. The bifolium consisting of New Testament folios 10 and 15 is part of a quire copied by scribe A, but this single bifolium is copied by scribe D and lacks the Eusebian numbers (the surrounding leaves copied by scribe A all have the Eusebian numbers). See the discussion in Milne and Skeat, Scribes and Correctors, p. 36.

25
Compare the phrasing of Kirsopp Lake: ‘It is unfortunate that we do not know the exact date when Eusebius made his apparatus, but it is at least plain that the first quarter of the fourth century is the earliest date which has any reasonable probability’ (Codex Sinaiticus, pp. ix–x). See further Matthew R. Crawford, The Eusebian Canon Tables: Ordering Textual Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 79–80, especially n. 73.
 
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