Provenance
The provenance and early history of the codex is uncertain; Rome (Hort), southern Italy, Alexandria (Kenyon, Burkitt), and Caesarea (T. C. Skeat) have been suggested as the origin. Hort's argument for Rome rests mainly on certain spellings of proper names, such as Ισακ and Ιστραηλ, which show a Western or Latin influence. A second argument is that the chapter division of Acts, similar to that of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, is not found in any other Greek manuscript, but is present in several manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate. Robinson counters the argument by suggesting that this system of chapter divisions was introduced into the Vulgate by Jerome himself, as a result of his studies at Caesarea. According to Hort, it was copied from a manuscript whose line length was 12–14 letters per line, because where the Codex Vaticanus's scribe made large omissions, they were typically 12–14 letters long.
Kenyon suggested that the manuscript originated in Alexandria: "It is noteworthy that the section numeration of the Pauline Epistles in B shows that it was copied from a manuscript in which the Epistle to the Hebrews was placed between Galatians and Ephesians — an arrangement which elsewhere occurs only in the Sahidic version." A connection with Egypt is also indicated, according to Kenyon, by the order of the Pauline epistles and by the fact that, as in the Codex Alexandrinus, the titles of some of the books contain letters of a distinctively Coptic character, particularly the Coptic mu, used not only in titles but frequently at the ends of lines where space has to be economized. According to Metzger, "the similarity of its text in significant portions of both Testaments with the Coptic versions and with Greek papyri, and the style of writing (notably the Coptic forms used in some of the titles) point rather to Egypt and Alexandria".
It has been postulated that at one time the manuscript was in the possession of Cardinal Bessarion because the minuscule supplement has a text similar to one of Bessarion's manuscripts. According to Paul Canart, the decorative initials added to the manuscript in the Middle Ages are reminiscent of Constantinopolitan decoration of the 10th century, but the poor execution gives the impression they were added in the 11th or 12th century, and likely not before the 12th century in light of the way they appear in connection with notes in a minuscule hand at the beginning of the book of Daniel. T. C. Skeat, a paleographer at the British Museum, first argued that Codex Vaticanus was among the 50 Bibles that the Emperor Constantine I ordered Eusebius of Caesarea to produce. The similarity of the text with the papyri and Coptic version (including some letter formation), parallels with Athanasius' canon of 367 suggest an Egyptian or Alexandrian origin.
The manuscript is dated to the first half of the 4th century and is likely slightly older than Codex Sinaiticus, which was also transcribed in the 4th century. One argument to support this, is that Sinaiticus already has the, at that time, very new Eusebian Canon tables, but Vaticanus does not. Another is the slightly more archaic style of Vaticanus, and the complete absence of ornamentation.
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