The thesis is centred around the belief that cursive 579 which comprises the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is characteristically independent in its testimony to the New Testament text. To investigate these assumptions the study takes the following format: -
The Prolegomenon. This discusses the origin and present location of the manuscript, external and internal characteristics, previous research on the manuscript, and delineation of intent of present research.
The Collations. These form three-quarters of the thesis. Apart from Matthew from which only twelve sample Chapters are collated, Mark, Luke and John are fully collated. The collating base adopted is the Textus Receptus which follows the text of Beza's 1598 edition, the text underlying the 1611 Authorized Version.
Variants in which 579 is alone or almost alone. The intention of this Chapter is to verify those instances of lone and almost lone readings as to whether 579 could be seen to be carrying the right text. More than one hundred instances are discussed using a wide range of criteria such as style of author, atticism and so on.
Allies and Non-Allies of 579. Undoubtedly, the question of who the allies and non-allies of 579 are is investigated taking cognizance of the fact that whereas some manuscripts are extant in a particular book, others are not. Therefore, degrees of support or alignment are computed with this understanding in mind. At the end of the Chapter, the results are compared vis-a-vis Alfred Schmidtke's position with regard to the manuscript as found in his book, Die Evangelien eines altern Unzialcodex (B Aleph).
Agreements and Disagreements with 579 of Majority Text, UBS Text and Textus Receptus. This final Chapter seeks to measure to what extent the Majority text, UBS text and Textus Receptus agree and disagree with 579. This is done chapter by chapter and book by book, followed by a summary conclusion for each book, taking into account the total
number of times each Greek text agrees and disagrees with 579. Total numbers of agreement and disagreement based on the whole manuscript are also computed for each Greek text. The thesis ends with the conclusion that the antecedent of 579 was copied from two main manuscripts going as far back as the fourth century or earlier and represent both the Byzantine and Alexandrian text-types, albeit the influence of the Western text is also prominent. Matthew and John
agree more often than not with the Textus Receptus and, therefore, have fewer variants than Mark and Luke which show an Alexandrian alignment. In all the studies conducted, Aleph ranks highest in terms of alignment with 579.