The original 126 parchment folios are of Bulgarian provenance, being bound into a larger codex with later additions of the Russian Church Slavonic recension.Afterwards it was moved to the manuscript collection of the Moscow Synodal Printing House, where it was found in 1866 by the Russian Slavist Izmail Sreznevsky, who gave the codex its modern-day appellation and was the first one to publish it in Saint Petersburg in 1868.The first critical edition of the manuscript was published by V. N. Ščepkin (Savvina kniga, Saint Petersburg 1903), photographically reprinted in Graz in 1959.Ščepkin was the first to perform a paleolinguistic analysis of the manuscript (Razsuždenie o jazyke Savvinoj knigy, 1899), and he ascertained that it was copied from a Glagolitic original.His 1903 edition led N. Karinski to propound several new readings and to fix some wrong solutions (Perečenь važnejših netočnostei poslednego izdanija Savvinoj knigi, Izv., XIX, 3, 206-216).
