Detailed studies of the nomina sacra are ready to hand, and the scope of this chapter need be no more extensive than to describe the practices found in Codex Bezae and to evaluate their significance for this particular manuscript tradition. Although a few words will be devoted to their wider implications, the reader will easily be able to set them within the context of the conclusions of Traube, Paap, and others.

It has seemed worthwhile to check through every occurrence of the words which are candidates to be nomina sacra. This has revealed the care taken by the scribe in his copying. In wider terms of the explanations of readings often made from alleged misrecognition of nomina sacra as something else, note that occasionally the line above the letters is omitted (half a dozen times in the Greek and a couple in the Latin) and that none of the transcriptional errors we find could mislead a subsequent copyist