Codex H of the Pauline Epistles (GA 015)

Codex H is a partially preserved and disassembled manuscript, held in eight collections, in seven institutions, in five countries. It is likely the earliest witness to the Euthalian tradition to the New Testament and has a complex post-production life: its entire text was re-inked, it was disbound and reused as flyleaves in multiple manuscripts, and each page preserves the imprint of the text from facing pages. Scholars have been interested in Codex H because of its connection to the Euthalian tradition and its colophon that mentions Pamphilus and the Library of Caesarea. To advance research on this important manuscript, we produced new multispectral images of most of its pages, a process that recovered twenty new pages of text that have never been transcribed and that improved transcriptions of the twenty-two other previously known transfer pages. This recovery of new text allows us to reconstruct Codex H to the best of our ability as it existed before it was disbound. It also provides new evidence for the material structure, paleography, text, date, and history of the manuscript, shedding new light on the New Testament in the sixth century, on Byzantine book networks, and the history of European manuscript collections.