* “Probably,” says Sir Edward Maunde Thomson, “Athanasius, the Melchite Patriarch, who was still living in 1308.”  Description of Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum.

Before his translation to Constantinople, Cyril Lucar had been Patriarch of Alexandria, and possibly he himself risked the threatened curse and excommunication in taking the Bible away with him, though his deacon asserted that he had obtained it from Mount Athos.

But besides the above-mentioned note there is another also in Arabic, with a Latin translation at the back of the table of books.  This note says:  “Remember that this book was written by the hand of Tecla the martyr.”  The tradition is recalled by Cyril Lucar at the beginning of the manuscript.  He states that the name of Tecla was originally to be found inscribed at the end of the volume, but that when Christianity practically became extinct in Egypt, the few remaining Christians and their books were doomed, and for this reason the name was erased, Tecla’s memory and the legend being perpetuated notwithstanding.

Tregelles accounts for the tradition that St. Tecla was the writer of the Ms. by the supposition that the Arabic note was ignorantly added by some scribe who had observed the name of Tecla written in the now mutilated margin of the first leaf of the New Testament, which contains the lesson appointed by the Greek Church for the feast of St. Tecla.  Sir Edward Thompson points out, however, that this would infer that in the fourteenth century the Gospel of St. Matthew was in its present mutilated state, and that then as now, the New Testament formed a separate volume apart from the Old; and he shows that the Arabic numeration of the leaves, which is of about the same age as the inscription, is carried continuously through both Testaments, and by a calculation of the numbers which have not been cut away in trimming the edges, it appears that the twenty-five leaves which contained the greater portion of St. Matthew were lost at a later period, the last leaf of the Old Testament bearing the number 641, and the present first leaf of the New Testament 667.

Cobet and other experts fixed the date of the two codices, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Alexandrinus, as not earlier than the fifth or sixth century, the principal reason for assigning to them so late a date being the generally accepted theory that uncials were not in use until vellum had entirely superseded papyrus as the medium for precious manuscripts.  But the latest authority in this department, Mr. F. G. Kenyon, has thrown light on the whole question of early Christian Greek MSS., by the discovery of a large uncial round hand on a papyrus dated Anno Domini 88.* Thus it is quite possible, palaeographically, that the Codex Vaticanus, which has been hitherto supposed to date from the fourth century, may be much older, and there is now no conclusive evidence to prove that the Alexandrinus was not written by St. Tecla, whatever the probabilities may be to the contrary.