Codex Coislinianus

Reflection

Codex Coislinianus — designated Hp in the New Testament apparatus, catalogued as Paris Coislin 202 — is a sixth-century uncial of the Pauline epistles surviving only in scattered fragments across seven European libraries: Paris, the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, and Turin. Forty-one folios remain of what was originally a complete Pauline codex written in a large, formal Alexandrian uncial. The manuscript carries the Euthalian apparatus — chapter divisions, summary headings, and Old Testament citations — alongside a remarkable scribal colophon attributing the correction of the text to Euthalius of Sulca and identifying the exemplar as a copy of the edition prepared by Pamphilus of Caesarea in the early fourth century. If the colophon is reliable, Coislinianus preserves a fragmentary witness to the Pauline text as it stood in the great library at Caesarea — the same library that produced Codex Sinaiticus and that anchored the textual scholarship of Origen and his successors. Kurt and Barbara Aland classed Coislinianus as a Category III witness with strong Alexandrian affinities. The dispersed condition of the manuscript reflects a long Eastern Mediterranean afterlife: a codex written perhaps at Caesarea, broken apart sometime in the medieval period, with leaves traveling to Mount Athos and from there into the Slavic and French collections of the early modern era.

Sources: Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Eerdmans, rev. 1995); Vemund Blomkvist, Euthalian Traditions (de Gruyter, 2012); David C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge, 2008).