Using a combination of text-critical, church-historical, philological, and digital methods, the present study calls into question traditional assumptions about Codex Bezae's distinctive Greek text of the gospels and Acts -- that it represents an ancient native Greek tradition and source of the Latin version preserving a textual relic of the first century of Christianity -- arguing that this text can be credibly dated to the end of the fourth century, immediately preceding production of the manuscript, and represents the diorthosis of a Greek text to a Latin model distinct from the Latin column found in the manuscript itself. So the better part of this remarkable text derives ultimately from other traditions and, hence, its true significance lies in what it can tell us about the historical circumstances under which the manuscript and its final text were produced at the turn of the fifth century.
