The Eusebian Canon Tables as a Corpus- Organizing Paratext within the Multiple- Text Manuscript of the Fourfold Gospel

: One of the most common multiple-text manuscripts (MTMs) in the Late Antique period was the codex containing the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which originally circulated separately but were collected and bound together as a single manuscript sometime in the third century. Within a generation of the creation of this MTM, it had given rise to the first numerically based cross-referencing system in the ancient world, the so-called Eusebian Canon Tables apparatus. This paratext extended the organizing function of the MTM by ordering the textual content contained within the manuscript, effectively providing the reader with a map by which to navigate the dialectic of sameness and difference among these four texts. Latin 2 Gospels, 3 4 four-gospel codices in Syriac have Sinaitic and Curetonian 5 ),