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Codex Vaticanus originally contained a complete copy of the Septuagint and the New Testament, but pages 1519-1536 containing Hebrews 9:14 through Revelation were lost and replaced by a 15th century minuscule supplement (no. 1957).
The manuscript has been housed in the Vatican Library (founded by Pope Nicholas V in 1448) for as long as it has been known, appearing in its earliest catalog of 1475.
Its previous history is unknown, but there has been speculation that it had previously been in the possession of Cardinal Bessarion because the minuscule supplement has a text similar to one of Bessarion's manuscripts. T.C. Skeat , a paleographer at the British Museum, has argued that Codex Vaticanus was among the 50 Bibles that the Emperor Constantine I ordered Eusebius of CaesareaEusebius of Caesarea (~ 275 May 30, 339) (often called Eusebius Pamphili "Eusebius [the friend of] Pamphilus") was a bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and is often referred to as the father of church history because of his work in recording the history of t to produce. However, others have argued that Constantine's manuscripts were ByzantineThe Byzantine text-type (also called Constantinopolitan Syrian ecclesiastical and majority is the largest group of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The Byzantine text-type is the text-type with by far the largest number of manuscripts, especially f, which would rule out that possibility.
Codex Vaticanus is one of the most important manuscripts for Textual criticismTextual criticism is a branch of philology that examines the extant manuscript copies of an ancient or medieval literary work to produce a text that is as close as possible to the original. The original is called the autograph. Before the invention of pri and is a leading member of the Alexandrian text-typeThe Alexandrian text-type (also called Neutral or Egyptian is a group of early manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek. The oldest near-complete manuscripts of the New Testament belong to this text-type, and are known as Codex Vaticanus in. It was heavily used by WestcottBrooke Foss Westcott ( January 12, 1825 July 27, 1901) was an English churchman and theologian, Bishop of Durham from 1890 until his death. He was born in the Birmingham area. His father, Frederick Brooke Westcott, was a botanist. Westcott was educated at and HortFenton John Anthony Hort ( April 23, 1828 November 30, 1892) was an English theologian. He was born in Dublin, the great-grandson of Josiah Hort, Archbishop of Tuam in the 18th century. In 1846 he passed from Rugby School to Trinity College, Cambridge, wh in their edition of the Greek New Testament (1881).
The manuscript contains mysterious double dots (so called "umlauts") in the margin of the New Testament, which seem to indicate positions of textual variants. The date of these is disputed among scholars. See weblink below for details.