Appendix VII. The Last Twelve Verses Of St. Mark's Gospel.
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It would be a manifest defect, if a book upon Textual Criticism passing under the name of Dean Burgon were to go forth without some reference to the present state of the controversy on the subject, which first made him famous as a Textual critic. His argument has been strengthened since he wrote in the following ways:— 1. It will be remembered that the omission of the verses has been rested mainly upon their being left out by B and , of which circumstance the error is mutely confessed in B by the occurrence of a blank space, amply sufficient to contain the verses, the column in question being the only vacant one in the whole manuscript. It has been generally taken for granted, that there is nothing in to denote any consciousness on the part of the scribe that something was omitted. But a closer examination of the facts will shew that the contrary is the truth. For— i. The page of on which St. Mark ends is the recto of leaf 29, being the second of a pair of leaves (28 and 29), forming a single sheet (containing St. Mark xiv. 54-xvi. 8, St. Luke i. 1-56), which Tischendorf has shewn to have been written not by the scribe of the body of the New Testament in this MS., but by one of his colleagues who wrote part of the Old Testament and acted as diorthota or corrector of the New Testament—and who is further identified by the same great authority as the scribe of B. This person appears to have cancelled the sheet originally written by the scribe of , and to have substituted for it the sheet as we now have it, written by himself. A correction so extensive and laborious can only have been made for the purpose
