Bruce Codex

The Scottish traveler James Bruce purchased the codex around 1769 while in Upper Egypt, near Medinet Habu.

In 1848, both Woide's transcript of the text as well as the original codex were acquired by the Bodleian Library and classified as "Bruce 96".

Building on Woide and Schwartze's work (and largely ignoring Amélineau's), Schmidt made a new edition, as well as proposed an ordering of the pages.

Charlotte A. Baynes published a different English translation in 1933 based directly on Coptic, skipping an intervening step through French or German; she also differed from Schmidt's proposed ordering of the pages of the codex, and placed Schmidt's final five leaves at the beginning instead.

The Bodleian bound the loose leaves together in 1886, but haphazardly and by someone who did not speak Coptic: pages were in a random order and sometimes upside-down.

[1] Due to lack of modern knowledge and care on proper preservation of papyrus, the condition of the manuscript, already poor to begin with (considering a number of transcription errors Woide made), deteriorated further over the course of the 19th century.