The Complutensis presents the following peculiar features: it lacks breath marks, the one-syllable words are accentless and the only accent on the rest of the words is merely a sign resembling the Greek acute accent, constituting what we refer to as the single-accent (monotonic) system which is used today in Greece. Nevertheless, a 12-page booklet is interposed in between the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the Romans (N.B. Acts of the Apostles is placed after the Epistle to the Hebrews) and contains The Demise of Saint Paul, the Apostle, Deacon Euthalius’s On The Time of Saint Paul’s Sermons And On His Death Through Martyrdom, as well as Hypotheseis on the Epistles, all written in Greek. This booklet is printed in the same type of letters as in the rest of the edition, but with accents and breath marks along with a commentary “To those concerned”, where the Cardinal explains that the single-accent system is reserved only for the ancient text out of deference to it since the ancient text lacked accents and breath marks.
The first scholar who really included lectionaries—apart from the other manuscripts—for his critical edition of the Greek New Testament was the English critic from Oxford, John Mill (in 1707), who had worked 30 years on its preparation. Lectionaries (Eclogadia), as is well known, is the name given to the manuscripts which contain the Gospel or Apostolic passages which are read during the liturgical year. Western scholars usually refer to them as “lectionaries” (from the Latin word lectio = reading), while in the East (apart from using the imported Western terms “lectionaries” and “ευαγγελιστάρια”[evangelistaria]) the Byzantine term εκλογάδια (eklogadia) is also used. Eight lectionaries from the Gospels and two from the Apostolic readings are counted among the manuscripts upon which John Mill based his edition. Later follow the editions of J. A. Bengel (1734), J. Wettstein (1751), J. Griesbach (1774 – 1811) and C. F. Matthaei (1782-1788) during the 18th and 19th centuries. F. Scrivener provides interesting information and a description of a large number of lectionaries in his book, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament (1883).
In mid 19th century when critical editions started to replace the Byzantine Text which has been dominant up to that time, no use of lectionaries is found. The fact that K. Tischendorf (1894) did not use any lectionaries in his editions is paradoxical since he had discovered many lectionaries among the other manuscripts that he had discovered in various libraries and monasteries. Westcott and Hort (1881), the two English editors, also made little use of them. The fact that the German scholar Hermann von Soden, whose research focused on the Byzantine text of the New Testament, did not take the Byzantine lectionaries into consideration in his famous four-volume edition “Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt hergestellt auf Grund ihrer Textgeschichte’’ (1902-1913) was regarded as an “inexplicable riddle”.
