THE 4 GREAT CODICES.

The 4 great codices that have survived to the present day and contain the entire text of the Greek Scripture (Old and New Testament) are: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. Although discovered at different times and places, they share many similarities.
The Codices are written in a certain style of calligraphy using capital letters without regular gaps between words. All these manuscripts were made at great expense of material and labor, written on prepared animal skin (calf skin), with leaves arranged in quarto form, by professional scribes. They seem to have been based on the most accurate texts in their time.
Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible, containing the majority of the Septuagint and the New Testament, was the first of the greater manuscripts to be accessible to scholars.
Vaticanus became known to Western scholars as a result of correspondence between Erasmus, a Dutch theologian, and the prefects of the Vatican Library. In the 19th century the translation of the full Codex were completed. It was at that point that scholars realized the text differed significantly from the Textus Receptus, the translation-base for the original German Luther Bible, the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version, the Spanish Reina-Valera translation, the Russian Synodal Bible, and the most Reformation-era New Testament translations.
Most current scholars consider the Vaticanus to be one of the best Greek texts of the New Testament, with the Sinaiticus as its only competitor. It was extensively used by Wescot and Hort in their edition of the New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881.
Until the discovery of the Sinaiticus text by Tischendorf during his visit at Sinai, the Vaticanus was unrivaled. The text of the codex was published in 1862.
It has been speculated that Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus were part of a project ordered by Emperor Constantine the Great to produce 50 copies of the Scripture.
Codex Vaticanus uses the oldest system of textual division in the Gospels. Codex Alexandrinus and Ephraemi Rescriptus use also a division according to the larger sections (chapters). Codex Vaticanus has more archaic style of writing than the other manuscripts, and has no introduction to the Book of Psalms, which became a standard after 325 CE, whereas Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus do. They also have different order of books.