In the spring of 1927 a small expedition, consisting of Professors Lake and Blake, Mrs. Blake, and the Reverend A. W. Johnson, went to Mt. Sinai to study the manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine. Some results relating to our more immediate aim will be published later, but the most important outcome was entirely foreign to the original plan.

Beginning with Flinders Petrie scholars have been struck by the similarity between the script of these inscriptions and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As the inscriptions were found in the neighborhood of numerous Egyptian monuments, an attempt was naturally made to read them as in the Egyptian language; but this proved unsuccessful, and it was evident that although the signs show close relationship with hieroglyphs, the language is not Egyptian. On Sinai, it was natural to think of a Semitic language. Further, the Egyptian phonetic value of the signs does not yield Semitic words, so that it appears that not only the language but the phonetic value of the signs is Semitic, not Egyptian.

The use of statistics in textual criticism is always attractive to the student, but is apt to be disappointing in application. It resembles the attempt of Raymond Lull in the thirteenth century to convert the Mohammedans by a mathematical demonstration of the truths of Christianity: in both cases the insights have been chiefly gained through other and more direct processes, and the figures can seldom do more than provide interesting illustration, or the test of an hypothesis; they seldom lead to much new knowledge. Moreover, it is very difficult to make the statistics either complete or perfectly accurate. Nevertheless, in textual criticism something can be learned from statistics both by way of verification and of suggestion; and the following study of the chief versions of the Book of Acts seems to the writers to yield some profitable fruit.

In the catalogue of manuscripts at the Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos by Eustratiades and Arcadios there is a curious error in the description of No. 236. The manuscript contains a variety of patristic treatises, letters, and fragments, four of which are thus described: