The Beza Cantabrigiensis Code or Code C
This code owes its name to the fact that it belonged to the reformer Teodoro di Beza. Born in Geneva on 24-6-1519, Calvinist, Calvin's favorite disciple, director of’ Geneva Theological Academy, he made a gift of it, in 1581, at the English University of Cambridge (where it is currently kept). Hence the name Cantabrigiensis (” of Cambridge” ). Beza wrote, in the cover letter to the code, that it was stolen by the Huguenots, to the monastery of Sant’Ireneo in Lyon, during the war of 1562. Beza believed, Furthermore, that the manuscript was kept unused for a long time in the monastery, to cover themselves with dust. It seems, Unlike, that the code was used in the 1546 at the Council of Trent, due to a Latin lesson of Giovanni 21 endorsed only by the Greek text of the code. Probably, then, the code was in Italy around the middle of the sixteenth century. Michele Serveto also came from Lyon (Michela Servetus), burned at the stake in the Calvinist Geneva of those years. Beza wrote in defense of this execution.
According to K. e B. Aland the codex would have been copied in Egypt or North Africa by a copyist whose mother tongue was Latin. The corrections, which interest the Greek text more than the Latin one, they mainly concern Luke and Acts and seem to be the fruit of the work of an expert theologian. Currently the codex tends to be dated to the fifth century. The text is bilingual, Greek and Latin. The Greek text is on the “side of honor”, the left one. The Latin text depends on the Greek one, and it differs from all the other texts of the Latin textual tradition of the NT. The manuscript is in parchment, and account 415 sheets of 26×21,5 cm. The text is on one column per page, with lines of different lengths, corresponding to units of meaning, in order to make reading easier during the worship service. The Code today contains only the four Gospels (in the following order: Matteo, Giovanni, Luca, Marco), the Acts of the Apostles and a few Latin verses of the 3 John (vv. 11-15).
