Codex Vaticanus B

For a history and explanation of the importance of this Codex please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus. The first the modern world knew of this codex was the publication of Tischendorf's typographical facsimile in 1867. He had to work under the most absurd conditions to produce it. He was given 2 weeks to finish the job of transcribing it. His work was brilliant given the time constraints that were imposed upon him by the Vatican. Here is a quote from http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2009727

For a long time, Vatican authorities were reluctant to make the codex available to Bible scholars. Eminent textual scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon related: “In 1843 [Bible scholar Konstantin von] Tischendorf, after waiting for several months, was allowed to see it for six hours. . . . In 1845 the great English scholar Tregelles was allowed indeed to see it but not to copy a word.” Tischendorf applied to see the codex again, but he was denied permission after copying 20 pages. Yet, as Kenyon reported, “renewed entreaty procured him six days’ longer study, making in all fourteen days of three hours each; and by making the very most of his time Tischendorf was able in 1867 to publish the most perfect edition of the manuscript which had yet appeared.” The Vatican later made a better copy of the codex available.

The better copy was the Cozza and Vercelloni edition of 1868.

We performed an OCR on an online copy of Tischendorf's 1867 edition of the Codex from www.archive.org at http://www.archive.org/stream/novumtestamentum00tisc#page/30/mode/2up

We used AABBYY Fine Reader 11 which was pretty accurate save for a few predictable errors. Then we painstakingly corrected the result for OCR errors and for Tischendorf's errors against the 1868 Cozza and Vercelloni text, checking every word which did not agree with the same word in the Westcott and Hort text which is largely based upon the Vatican B. 

Download the entire New Testament of the Codex Vaticanus B as a Word 2000 document in the bwgrkl.ttf font here.

We deabbreviated it in the same way as the codex sinaiticus was deabbreviated. We added missing trailing ns where indicated or appropriate and missing ns in terminations such as ontej. These old uncial (Greek Capital lettered) manuscripts often miss trailing ns and ns before ts in terminations. We also replaced regular sigmas with final sigmas at the end of words.

Here are the amendments to the Tischendorf 1867 edition that we made from correction against the Cozza and Vercelloni text of 1868...

The result is pretty useful but for perfection we need to correct this text against a true fine resolution image of the pages of the Codex itself. We will do this in the near future God willing.