It contains copies of a number of early Christian texts including the only complete edition of the Didache.
It was discovered in 1873 by Philotheos Bryennios, the metropolitan of Nicomedia, in the collection of the Jerusalem Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople.
He published the texts of the two familiar Epistles of Clement in 1875, overlooking the Didache, which he found when he returned to the manuscript.
The Codex's list of books of the Hebrew Bible has often been taken for the first written Canon of the Old Testament, dating from the early second century.
However, Luke J Stevens argues that the list has notable parallels in spelling of the books and in its section title to the eighth-century Doctrina Patrum, which is itself dependent on Eusebius.