Quick Post on Mar Saba

From Joseph Patrich's The Sabaite heritage in the Orthodox Church from the fifth century to the present, 2001, p. 10:

Up to 1887 there were 706 codices in the possession of the monastery, when they were removed for their safety to the patriarchate in Jerusalem.  Before 1887, fifty-five manuscripts had been taken from Mar Saba, finding their way to libraries and museums around the world.  The extant Sabaite collection thus amounted to 761 codices, 129 of which were written in the laura by thirty-six calligraphers or scribes over a period of eleven centuries, from the ninth to the nineteenth.  The major part of the collection thus consists of manuscripts that were written elsewhere.

So the presence of a written text in Mar Saba in a hand that was not by a resident of the monastery, is in no way unusual, and indeed is to be expected.  In terms of the physical evidence, it's only the Voss volume in general that's unusual (leaving aside the question of the character of the script, the text, and the context).


Coming soon, I hope (but not too soon...) will be commentary on Tselikas' report to BAR on his search for the manuscript.  In short, there will be much to criticize though I'll keep my comments to a minimum.  I also hope to put up a post I've been slowly building that tries to document the history of the text and efforts to study it in person.