ff.IV + 88 + II; 262 210mm; text size 210 x 160mm; 15 vertical lines on azure paper, bound in paper covers in oriental style.
This manuscript (and BFBS MS 267) was translated by B. J. Bettelheim, a Hungarian Jew converted to Christianity who was sent as a missionary to the Luchu Islands in 1846 by the ‘Naval Mission’, an English Society, chiefly of naval men interested in the evangelisation of that archipelago. In 1855 St. Luke, St. John, Acts and Romans in the Luchu dialect were published privately at Hong Kong by the Bishop of Victoria at the instance of the SPCK. (See DM 5799-5803). This translation proved to be useless on the Japanese mainland but before his death Bettelheim had revised the Gospels and Acts at Chicago, and with the help of some of the Japanese community rendered them into pure Japanese. After his death his widow offered the MSS to the BFBS, together with $400 towards an experimental printing of St. John.
In 1978 a limited facsimile of St. Matthew and St. Mark was published in Japan.