Manuscripts Aleph, B, C, D, etc.

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John Burgon was a distinguished scholar and a prominent authority on the ancient manuscripts. He was an unswerving defender of the infallibility of the Scriptures. Here is what he wrote about the supposed "Oldest and Best Manuscripts":

What we are just now insisting upon is only the depraved text of codices A, B, C, D, -- especially of B, D, and Aleph1 . And because this is a matter which lies at root of the whole controversy, and because we cannot afford that there shall exist in our reader's mind the slightest doubt on this part of the subject, we shall be constrained once and again to trouble him with detailed specimens of the contents of B, & C., in proof of the justice of what we have been alleging. We venture to assure him, without a particle of hesitation, that B, D , and Aleph (Sinaiticus), are three of the most scandalously corrupt copies extant: -- exhibit the most shamefully mutilated texts which are anywhere to be met with: -- have become, by whatever process (for their history is wholly unknown), the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders, and intentional perversions of Truth, -- which are discoverable in any known copies of the Word of GOD." (John Burgon, The Revision Revised, London, 1883)
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1 NOTE: The manuscripts Burgon discusses, A, B, and D, are designations for manuscripts called codices (codex, singular). A codex is a manuscript in book form as opposed to scrolls. Codices are made of vellum, which is animal hide. The three manuscrips mentioned are Codex A, which designates Vaticanus, Codex B, designating Sinaiticus, and Codex D, which designates Bezae or Cantabrigiensis. Sinaiticus was found by Constantine Tischdendorf, in 1844, at St. Catherine's Monastry (supposedly in the trash can) at the foot of Mount Sinai, hence the name. Vaticanus was supposedly written in the fifth century and placed on the shelf at the Vatican Library in the mid 15th Century. It had lain, unused, on the shelf for 400 years because the Vatican Library prohibited it from being seen. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Constantine Tischendorf and S. P. Tregelles were allowed to view it for a few hours, but could not copy it. In the late 19th Century, a photographic copy was made and it has become a prominent manuscript of the Rationalists. Bezae was supposedly written in the Fifth Century, and was presented to the library at Cambridge University in 1581 by Theodore Beza, a French scholar and a Calvinist.

Codex C, AKA Ephraemi Rescriptus, because of the similarities to A and B, is considered to have been written in the Fifth Century as well.