We now come to the crucial question: are Vaticanus or Sinaiticus, or both (since they were undoubtedly written at Caesarea in the middle of the fourth century) to be connected with the order of Constantine? Whenever this suggestion is made, it is immediately countered by the fact that Sinaiticus at least was certainly still in Caesarea two centuries later. This is true, but overlooks one crucial fact: Sinaiticus was never completed, and therefore could not in any case have been sent to Constantinople. Proof that it was not completed, and possible reasons for this, will be considered in the next section.
IV. The Abandonment of Sinaiticus and the Reduction in Format
The crucial fact in the history of Sinaiticus is that, when virtually complete, work on it was suddenly abandoned. The uncompleted manuscript could not therefore be bound up, and must have remained, a pile of loose leaves, in the scriptorium at Caesarea.
Of the fact itself there is no possible doubt. As was pointed out in Scribes and Correctors (pp. 7-9), the original quire numeration allows for a whole quire between the Old Testament and the New. The Old Testament concludes with Job, ending with the last leaf of quire 72. In the earlier part of the New Testament the original quire numbers have in many cases been shorn off in the course of binding, but from quire 83 onwards they are mostly intact, though often partly erased by the writer of the later, continuous numeration. Enough remains, however, to make it quite certain that the first quire of the New Testament was numbered οδ (=74), and indeed, as we noted, traces of this can still be seen on the top edge of the first leaf of the quire in exactly the position where it would have been expected. The quires on either side of this point are in perfect condition, and it is thus impossible that quire 73 could have simply dropped out of the manuscript.
