Membra disjecta sinaitica III

The tenth-century, Georgian manuscript geo. 49 preserved at the monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai is not a regular codex. What distinguishes this manuscript is that the Georgian scribe Iovane Zosime made use of a large number of reused parchment material that originally belonged to other manuscripts copied in a variety of languages. Some of these manuscripts, in turn, were made from the folios of other manuscripts that had been similarly reused before. As it is often the case with Sinai manuscripts, the codex Sin. geo. 49 is not complete and many of its leaves are missing. This article examines four Syriac undertexts in two previously unexplored membra disjecta—Vat. iber. 4 and HMML Ms. Frag. 32—and demonstrates that the recycled manuscript copies are rare and unique witnesses for the texts they originally contained.