Early Syriac Versions of the Gospels

       The early history of the Syriac versions of the Gospels is as important as it is tenuous.  Theoretically the Syriac version developed like this:  Syria was evangelized in the first century, and for a while, the Christians there were content to use the Greek text of the Gospels.  In the 170’s, Tatian, who had been a student of Justin Martyr in Rome, produced the Diatessaron, a narrative consisting of the contents of the four Gospels blended into one non-repeating narrative.  The Diatessaron was very popular in Syriac-speaking churches.  Tatian’s doctrine, however, was considered by some church-leaders to be overly ascetic, to the point that he dogmatically opposed marriage and meat-eating.  As the scent of heresy from his teachings was detected – rightly or wrongly – in his Gospel-harmony, a new Syriac translation of the four Gospels was made.  This work exists today primarily in two manuscripts (and also in a lectionary, Syriac Gr.Pat. 1 at the Jerusalem Library of the Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark):  the Curetonian Syriac and the Sinaitic Syriac.

Luke 21:12b-26a in the
Curetonian Syriac manuscript.

                 The texts displayed in the Curetonian Syriac manuscript and in the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript are closely related, but they are far from uniform.  Both manuscripts are heavily damaged, and therefore one cannot compare their contents throughout the Gospels (in the Curetonian manuscript, for example, nothing remains of the Gospel of Mark except Mark 16:17-20).  Where the same passage is extant in both manuscripts, however, it is obvious that they share some readings which are almost or entirely unique to these two witnesses.  The following 14 agreements are samples:
            ● Mt. 1:22 – the prophet’s names is supplied, so as to read, “by the mouth of Isaiah the prophet.”
           ● Mt. 3:10 – “the axe has arrived” rather than “the axe has been laid.”
           ● Mt. 4:17 – The words “Repent” and “for” are absent.
           ● Mt. 13:33 – Both manuscripts have simply “Another parable:” with no additional phrase (such as “He spoke to them” or “He spoke” or “He gave, saying”).
           ● Mt. 15:27 – The Canaanite woman’s response ends with the words, “and live.”
           ● Mt. 20:11 – The verse begins with “And when they saw,” instead of “And when they had received.”
           ● Mt. 20:17 – The text says that Jesus took “his twelve,” without the word “disciples.”
           ● Lk. 2:48 – In the Old Syriac text, Mary’s statement ends, “anxiously and with much grief.”
           ● Lk. 8:24 – The words “and they ceased” are not in either manuscript.
           ● Lk. 20:46 – Instead of stating that the scribes desire to walk around in long robes, both Old Syriac manuscripts say that the scribes desire to walk around “in porches.”  Apparently the text of Luke in both the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts descends from an ancestor-manuscript in which, due to a mistake by either the reader or the writer, the Greek word for “robes” (στολαις) was misconstrued as the similar word for “porches” (στοαις).
           ● Jn. 4:31 – This verse is thoroughly paraphrased:  “And His disciples were insisting that He should eat bread with them.”
           ● Jn. 5:21 – At the end of the verse, instead of stating that the Son gives life to whom He will, the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts say, “to those who believe in Him.”
           ● Jn. 6:47 – Both Old Syriac manuscripts say, “He who believes in God” instead of “in Me” (and instead of “He who believes” with no specific object supplied – the Alexandrian reading).
           ● Jn. 7:21 – Both manuscripts add the phrase, “in your sight.”
            (For many more unusual readings shared by these two manuscripts, see Agnes Smith Lewis’ A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinai Palimpsest , published in 1894.)

Matthew 1:1-17 is on this damaged
page of the Sinaitic Syriac palimpsest,
under the larger and clearer text.

            The distinct agreements between the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts practically compel the conclusion that was reached in the early 1900s by researcher Frederick Burkitt:  “The Sinai palimpsest and Cureton’s manuscript are clearly representatives of one and the same translation.”  This translation, however, seems to have never been very popular among the Syriac-speaking churches; the Old Syriac Gospels never caught up with the Diatessaron’s head start. 

            Even the two copies that we possess have barely survived:  the Sinaitic Syriac is a palimpsest; it has survived, not because anyone valued it as a copy of the Gospels, but because a copyist in the year 778 erased its Gospels-text and recycled the pages as material on which to write part of a later composition (a collection of stories about female saints and martyrs).  Its faded Gospels-text was recovered, following its discovery at St. Catherine’s monastery in the 1890’s, by the gentle application of ammonium hydrosulfide to the parchment.  Part of the Curetonian Syriac manuscript, likewise, was recycled as the fly-sheets, or binding-pages, of another Syriac manuscript.  (William Cureton published the main portion in 1858; the additional pages were published by William Wright in 1872, and were described by Henry M. Harman in the Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis in 1885.)   Meanwhile, a dozen Peshitta manuscripts exist that were made in the 400s-600s.
          Although the agreements of the Sinaitic Syriac and Curetonian Syriac imply that they share a common source, these manuscripts also disagree in important ways.  For example, in the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, the text of Mark ends at the end of 16:8; in the Curetonian Syriac, the entire text of Mark has been lost due to damage except Mark 16:17-20 (with “in their hands” in verse 18), implying the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.  And in the Gospel of Luke, the Sinaitic Syriac does not contain Luke 22:43-44 or Luke 23:34a, but the Curetonian Syriac includes both passages.  (Again, Agnes Smith Lewis helpfully identifies their disagreements, as well as their disagreements with the Textus Receptus.) 

Romans 7, in a Peshitta manuscript
which has some unusual readings,
Sinai Syriac MS 3 (Schoyen MS
2530), from the 500s.

            In the early 400s, a different Syriac translation, known as the Peshitta, (a designation first used for it in the Middle Ages, meaning plain, as opposed to the later Harklean Version, which featured many textual notes)  rapidly replaced both the Diatessaron and the Old Syriac.  Theodoret of Cyrrhus (393-457; his bishopric began in 423, more or less) recorded that in more than 200 churches, copies of the Diatessaron – rather than manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – were being used.  He arranged for the removal of these copies of the Diatessaron, and replaced them with copies of the four Gospels.  The textual character of these freshly introduced 200 copies is not known.  If they were copies of the Old Syriac, resembling the Curetonian and Sinaitic Syriac manuscripts, then they must have been like a wave that washed away the Diatessaron only to be washed away itself by a rapid increase in the popularity of the Peshitta. 
            The production-date of the Peshitta is not entirely resolved.  In the late 1700s, Johann David Michaelis made a detailed case for the position that the Peshitta’s text of the Gospels was translated directly from Greek manuscripts in the early 100s.  His main reasons for this view are as follows:
            ● Melito, c. 170, refers to a Syriac version when commenting on Genesis 22:13. 
            ● Manichaeus (or, Mani), the founder of Manichaeism in the mid-200s in Mesopotamia, quoted from the New Testament, without knowledge of Greek.
            ● The Peshitta is used by various Syriac denominations which adhered to diverse Christological schools of thought that emerged in the early-mid 400s; it must have been produced prior to these divisions, inasmuch as the members of one sect would not embrace a version produced by another one.
            ● The text of Hebrews in the Peshitta has some characteristics which indicate that it was translated separately from the other Pauline epistles, as if the other epistles were part of a collection that lacked Hebrews.  This suggests an old line of descent.
            ● The Peshitta does not include the book of Revelation and five of the General Epistles (Second Peter, Second John, Third John, and Jude); this indicates an origin prior to the councils in the 300s which decreed their inclusion.
            ● The Peshitta was quoted by Ephrem Syrus, who wrote in the mid-300s. 

            Inasmuch as the Peshitta and the Byzantine text of the Gospels agree far more often than they disagree, the premise that the Peshitta was made in the 100s was used as a defense of the genuineness of the Byzantine Text in the late 1800s.  In the 1897 Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, one of the advocates of the Westcott-Hort text referred to the Peshitta as the “sheet-anchor” of the pro-Byzantine position, meaning that it was seldom used, and was only a last resort.  In 1904, Frederick Burkitt systematically deconstructed the case for such an early origin for the Peshitta, arguing, first – with the benefit of the prior discoveries of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Syriac manuscripts – that although an early Syriac translation existed, it was not necessarily the Peshitta, and, second, that when compositions which have been falsely attributed to Ephrem Syrus are set aside, there are no clear utilizations of the Peshitta in his genuine works. 

          Burkitt proposed that the Peshitta was a revision undertaken by the Syriac bishop Rabbula (d. 425) in the city of Edessa.  (This individual should not be confused with the identically named copyist who made the Rabbula Gospels, an illustrated copy of the Peshitta Gospels made in 586.)  As evidence of this, Burkitt emphasized a statement found in the biography of Rabbula, which was written later in the 400s:  “He translated by the wisdom of God that was in him the New Testament from Greek into Syriac, because of its variations, exactly as it was.” 

Luke 14:16ff. in a Peshitta MS (c. 600).
Goodspeed Manuscript Collection,
Univ. of Chicago (MS 716-Image 3)

           Burkitt’s theory became very popular very quickly, and it accelerated the general acceptance of the Westcott-Hort revision by removing what had previously been a major objection against it.  However, Burkitt’s theory was not the last word on the production-date of the Peshitta.  At least one other scenario is feasible:  that the Curetonian and Sinatic manuscripts are the remains of the translation undertaken by Rabbula and that this revision was popularized, temporarily, by Theodoret.  In support of this theory, it may be observed that title of Matthew in the Curetonian Syriac appears to call it the distinct (“Mepharreshe”) Gospel of Matthew (as opposed to the blended Gospel, the Diatessaron).  Following the end of the Gospel of John, a colophon in the Sinaitic Syriac begins, “Here ends the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, four books.”  This is the same term that was used by Rabbula in a decree:  “Let the elders and deacons diligently ensure that ever church shall possess and use a copy of the distinct Gospels.” 

            A Syriac writer named Bar-Bahlul, writing in the 900s, made the following pertinent comment on the text of Matthew 27:16;17, referring to the name of the criminal who was released at Jesus’ trial:  “His name was Jesus, for so it is written in the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe.”  The Peshitta does not have this reading, but the Sinaitic Syriac does.   (Matthew 27 is not extant in the Curetonian Syriac.) 
            It is also possible that Rabbula inherited not only the Syriac Diatessaron and a form of the Old Syriac Gospels represented by the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts, but also the Peshitta Gospels, and he used whichever he preferred.  It would be strange for the creator and advocate of the Peshitta to utilize the text of its rivals – but when one examines Rabbula’s Syriac translation of De Recta Fide, a composition by his contemporary Cyril of Alexandria, that is exactly what he does when rendering a quotation of John 3:34:  Rabbula, instead of reproducing Cyril’s quotation, or replacing it with the Peshitta’s rendering, replaces it with the rendering that appears in the Curetonian Syriac, verbatim.
            The scholar Matthew Black has proposed that this phenomenon is best accounted for by the theory that although Rabbula was largely responsible for the Peshitta (in roughly the same way that William Tyndale was responsible for the English New Testament), it continued to undergo tweaking in the 400s, and John 3:34 was one passage in which such tweaking occurred.  Against this theory, the erudite Estonian researcher Arthur Vööbus argued that in addition to the Curetonian/Sinaitic Syriac text, there was a third Syriac transmission-stream which may be considered a “Pre-Peshitta” (in which case Rabbula’s work may be more comparable to that of Coverdale, rather than Tyndale).   
            The evidence pertaining to the early Syriac text of the Gospels has complex implications.  Mixture is everywhere.  The textual character of the text of the Sinaitic Syriac is somewhat Western, resembling the text of Codex D, but it often disagrees with D and aligns with B – sometimes almost uniquely, as in Luke 9:2 (where both witnesses do not have the words “the sick” at the end of the verse).  Similarly, the text of the Peshitta is mainly Byzantine, but far from fully Byzantine.  (Among the most significant disagreements between the Peshitta and the Byzantine Text is the Peshitta’s non-inclusion of John 7:53-8:11; none of the early Syriac versions have this passage.)
            Because of the complexity of the evidence, it is difficult to conclusively posit a simple chain of events in which the Peshitta is the offspring of the Old Syriac.  For example:  in John 16:21, the Peshitta and the Sinaitic Syriac (the Curetonian Syriac is not extant here) both refer to “the day of her deliverance,” rather than the hour.  It would be easy to conclude that the Peshitta inherited this reading from the Old Syriac, and that it is the result of loose translation-work.  However, this is also the reading found in John 16:21 in Codex Bezae and in Papyrus 66, the earliest Greek manuscript of this verse; nothing precludes the idea that it entered the Peshitta from a Greek exemplar. 

Text from Mark 15 in Vatican Syriac MS 12,
a Peshitta Gospels-manuscript
produced in 548.

            Likewise consider the rival Syriac readings in Luke 4:29:  the Sinaitic Syriac says that the citizens of Nazareth intended to hang Jesus, but the Peshitta states that they intended to throw Jesus over the cliff.  This reading in the Peshitta could be the result of a fresh consultation of Greek manuscripts in the early 400s in which such errors were weeded out of the Syriac text, but it could just as easily descend from a Syriac transmission-line that existed side-by-side with that of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Syriac texts – a transmission-line in which the Syriac text was not improved, but was simply better than its rivals.  There is some evidence that such a text (alongside the Diatessaron) was used by Aphrahat in the 330’s – about the same time when Codex Vaticanus was made – but this idea awaits new research to be confirmed or dissolved. 
            The question of the origin of the Peshitta is more complicated today than it was when Burkitt wrote.  Burkitt treated the Peshitta as one monolithic revision, whereas subsequent studies of early Peshitta manuscripts, as well as analyses of Syriac writers (such as Rabbula) have shown that its development was more complex.  In 1897 at the Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, A. C. Headlam proposed that the uniformity of the text of Peshitta-manuscripts from the 400s-600s “shows almost conclusively that the texts must have been derived from one source, which could not have been very remote.”  In 1904, Burkitt, likewise, submitted that “a long and complicated history” of the Old Syriac version “is proved by the extensive variation” between the Sinaitic and Curetonian manuscripts. 
            The study of manuscripts such as Codex Phillips 11388, Dawkins 3 (see the meticulous work of Andreas Juckel for details), and Vatican Syriac MS 12 (made in 548) proves that extensive variations exist in some of the earliest copies of the Peshitta – and thus, if disagreements validly indicate “a long and complicated history” for the Syriac transmission-stream represented by the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts, then the same is true for the Peshitta.  If tight agreements among manuscripts show that their source “could not have been very remote,” then disagreements in Peshitta-manuscripts (such as Sinai Syriac MS #3, which contains part of the Epistles of Paul) show the opposite.     
            All things considered, Burkitt’s theory that the Peshitta was produced by Rabbula in the early 400s – a theory which was treated as fact for over 50 years, in the service of the mainly Alexandrian compilations of Westcott-Hort, Nestle, et al – should be rejected.  Although the Gospels-text of the Peshitta was not altogether standardized until later, it was essentially extant in the mid-300s (and possibly even in the early 300s), the same period in which Codex Sinaiticus was made.     

Nomina Sacra: Their Origin and Usefulness

Today we will explore a subject that has a bearing on the following twelve questions:

            ● Matthew 27:17:  did Pilate describe Barabbas as if Barabbas was also called Jesus?

            ● Mark 1:1:  did Mark describe Jesus as the Son of God, or not?

            ● Luke 23:42:  Did the dying repentant thief call Jesus “Lord,” or not?

            ● John 1:18:  does the author refer to the only-begotten Son, or to the only-begotten God? 

            ● John 9:35:  did Jesus ask the no-longer-blind man if he believed on the Son of God, or on the Son of Man? 

            ● Acts 20:28:  did Paul refer to the church of God, or to the church of the Lord, or to the church of the Lord, even God? 

            ● Romans 14:10:  Did Paul mention the judgment seat of Christ, or the judgment seat of God?

            ● First Corinthians 10:9:  Did Paul say that the Israelites in the days of Moses tempted Christ, or that they tempted the Lord, or that they tempted God?

            ● Philippians 4:13:  Did Paul specify, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” or should the final phrase be, “through the one who strengthens me”?

            ● First Timothy 3:16:  did the original text refer to “God manifest in the flesh,” or not?  

            ● First Peter 3:15:  who should we sanctify as Lord in our hearts:  Christ, or God?

            ● Jude 1:5:  did Jude state that the Lord saved a people out of Egypt, or that Jesus had done so? 

           

            It is not my intention to resolve any of these textual contests today.  Instead I want to explore a scribal mechanism which may have been involved in their creation:  the reverential use of contractions to write sacred names.  These contractions, which appear in almost all New Testament Greek manuscripts, are called nomina sacra (singular:  nomen sacrum), sacred names.

            Other contractions can be found in Greek manuscripts.  The words και (and) and περι (about) are often abbreviated; in chapter-lists which precede each Gospel in many manuscripts, περι is typically shortened to its first two letters, written vertically, as the first word of chapter-titles.  And very frequently, when the letter νυ is at the end of a line of text, it is represented by an overline instead of being written.  The nomina sacra, however, form a special class of contractions; they were not made in order to conserve time or materials, but as expressions of reverence.

             Even before any New Testament books were composed, copyists of books of the Old Testament already treated the name of God with special reverence.  In Hebrew, this name consists of four Hebrew letters, and for this reason is known as the Sacred Tetragrammaton.  In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, when the Sacred Tetragrammaton appears, it is written in its own distinct script; the copyists used ordinary lettering elsewhere but for the name of God, paleo-Hebrew letters were used.  11Q Psalms, a scroll of Psalms, has many examples of this.  

The Sacred Tetragrammaton

            The ancient custom of acknowledging the presence of the name of God without audibly pronouncing it persists in English Bibles to this day in translations in which the word “Lord” appears in small capital letters to represent the presence of the Sacred Tetragrammaton in the base-text.  “Lord” in ordinary letters usually represents Adonai, a different Hebrew word.  

            In intertestamental times, the Old Testament was translated into Greek; the most popular Greek translation was known as the Septuagint.  In the first half of the 200s, the patristic writer Origen, in his Homily on Psalm 2, as he commented about the second verse, made this observation about some copies of the Septuagint:  “In the most accurate manuscripts, the name [i.e., the name of God] occurs in Hebrew characters – not in modern-day Hebrew, but in the very ancient lettering.”

A replica of the Tetragrammaton in one of the
Dead Sea Scrolls.  See the photo by Shai Halevi 
at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls 
Digital Library - Image B-371124.
The Habbakuk Commentary
has other examples.

             Jerome, in about 390, as he wrote his preface to the books of Kings – the Prologus Galeatus, or “Helmeted Prologue” – said something similar:  “And the name of the Lord, the Tetragrammaton, we find in certain Greek volumes written, up to now, in ancient lettering.”

            In Greek manuscripts of Old Testament books produced by Christian copyists, the name of God was replaced with the Greek word Κυριος, or with the contraction ΚΣ, accompanied by a line above the letters.  Other copyists, however, continued to give the name of God special treatment.  For example, in P. Oxy 3522 (a fragment with text from Job 42:11-12, produced in the first century A.D.) and Papyrus Fouad 266 (a fragment with text from portions of Genesis and Deuteronomy, produced in the first century B.C.), the name of God is repeatedly written in paleo-Hebrew letters, even though the main text is Greek.  The Nahal Hever Scroll of the Minor Prophets also clearly displays the use of paleo-Hebrew (or paleo-Aramaic) letters reserved for the Tetragrammaton.

            In a Greek fragment of Leviticus among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q120), the Sacred Name is treated differently:  the copyist wrote neither the Hebrew Tetragrammaton nor the contraction for Κυριος; instead he wrote ΙΑΩ, a series of Greek vowels which could be used to vocalize the Tetragrammaton; these letters served as a proxy for the Tetragrammaton itself.  (The IAW-vocalization is also found on some charm-talismans.)

P. Oxy 3522 (See the detail
at the Oxyrhynchus Online website)

            Other copyists, either due to unfamiliarity with paleo-Hebrew, or to deliberately avoid using the Tetragrammaton itself while conveying that it was to be understood as present, but not to be pronounced, wrote the Greek letters ΠΙΠΙ instead of the Hebrew letters, due to the similarity between these Greek letters and the Hebrew letters in the Tetragrammaton.  This indicates that when the books of the New Testament were composed, a degree of fluctuation regarding the treatment of God's name already existed among Greek-writing copyists.

            Even later, in the 400s-500s, some copyists of Greek manuscripts still gave the Tetragrammaton special treatment.  This is seen in a fragmentary palimpsest of portions of Aquila's Translation of First & Second Kings found at the Cairo Genizah in the 1800s and published by F. C. Burkitt in 1897.  (It was found with some other palimpsests.)  In the lower writing, which consists of text from First & Second Kings (or, Third & Fourth Kings, using the Septuagint’s titles), the Tetragrammaton, written in Hebrew letters, is repeatedly embedded in the Greek text.  

Enough of this page of Aquila's translation has
survived to show that when it was intact, it
featured the Tetragrammaton in II Kings 23:16.
(Transcription and Plate from F. C. Burkitt.)

            Burkitt, on page 16 of his introductory description of the Cairo palimpsest, made an interesting comment about its text of Fourth Kings (i.e., Second Kings) 23:24:  “The Tetragrammaton in our MS was undoubtedly intended to be pronounced κύριος.  Not only does Origen distinctly say παρα . . . Έλληνι τη  ΚΥΡΙΟΣ εκφωνειται, but a palaeographical accident has put a piece of direct evidence before us.  Contractions are extremely infrequent in our MS, and when they occur they are always at the end of lines.  The scribe, in fact, used contractions only to avoid dividing words.  Now at the end of 4 Kings xxiii 24 (fol. 2v, col. a, line 15) there was no room to write the Tetragrammaton in full, so instead of οικω + the Sacred Tetragrammaton [Burkitt printed it in paleo-Hebrew], we find οικω κυ [with κυ overlined].  The Greek Synagogue, therefore, read the Name κύριος, just as is indicated by Origen.”

            Unfortunately, the lines containing Second Kings 23:24 are not readable in the photograph provided in Burkitt’s book.  Assuming that Burkitt’s transcript is correct, and noticing that the lines of Greek in the manuscript are not justified on the right side, this raises a new question:  why wasn’t there room for the Tetragrammaton to be added?  Or to put it another way:  why didn’t the copyist simply start the Tetragrammaton on the next line?

P. Berlin 17213, at the Papyrus Databank
of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin

 

            Before tackling that question, let’s look at a feature in Papyrus Berlin 17213.  This fragment, which contains text from Genesis 19:11-13 and 19:17-19, has been assigned to the 200s.  In verse 18 (on the recto), after the word δεομαι, there is a small blank space.  Normally there would be a nomen sacrum here.  In Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (published by E. J. Brill), Emmanuel Tov proposed that this blank space “denotes a closed paragraph after Gen. 19:18,” but he grants (in a table on page 266) that it is “possibly space left for divine name,” that is, we may see here a blank space reserved for the nomen sacrum ΚΕ (or the Tetragrammaton) that was never filled in.

            Similarly, as Tov reported on page 226, in the Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4QpIsa^e, “A space was left open in 6 4 where MT (32:6) has a Tetragrammaton.  This space may have been left for a Tetragrammaton, to be filled in possibly by a different scribe (or was the Tetragrammaton omitted intentionally, indicated by a space in the middle of the line?).”  

Pages 226-229 of the 

Kacmarcik Codex, produced in 1344, 

contain a guide to writing 

the nomina sacra.

            Tov also observed that in the Dead Sea Scroll 11QPs^a, “It appears that the scribe left irregular spaces, and that at a later stage someone, possibly the original scribe himself, penned in the Tetragrammata, sometimes squeezing them in between the surrounding words.”  Tov also noticed the extra space surrounding the occurrences of the Tetragrammaton in P. Fouad 266b.  He concluded:  “The above evidence shows that at least in some Qumran texts, the Tetragrammaton was filled in after the writing of the main text, and this was also the case in one manuscript of the LXX.” [Bold print added.]  (This explains why the copyist of Papyrus Berlin 17213 did not simply move along to the next line:  the next line had already been written.)           

            The practice of leaving blank spaces, to be filled in later with the Tetragrammaton, developed as an improvement of the scribal custom of reserving one pen exclusively for writing the Tetragrammaton.  As an alternative to putting down the primary pen, picking up the reserved pen, testing it, and writing the Tetragrammaton with it, putting it down, and picking up the primary pen again, over and over, efficiency was greatly increased by leaving blank spaces, and then, when the text was proof-read, inserting all the occurrences of the Tetragrammaton with the specially reserved pen.

            Did this phenomenon have something to do with the origin of nomina sacra in New Testament manuscripts?  I believe that it did, to a limited extent.  As I describe the effects of this phenomenon, keep in mind that we can’t interview the ancient copyists; some things have been deduced and some of the deductions are calculated guesses.

            Very early in the transmission-history of the Gospels, Christian copyists developed four names to be treated in a manner congruent to the Judaic treatment of the Tetragrammaton; the first four Christian nomina sacra probably appeared as a group:  ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, and ΧΣ.  It was at this early stage that some Christian copyists (probably copyists who were already engaged in the production of copies of the Septuagint), modifying the practice of leaving space for the Tetragrammaton and adding it in a second copying-stage, left overlined space for these four words in the first copying-stage, and they were added during the proof-reading stage.  Occasionally the proof-reader worked from memory and interchanged the names, or failed to insert a contraction in the space reserved for it.   

            The next words to become nomina sacra were Πατηρ, Υιος, and Πνευμα.  Following this, the group of contracted words was expanded to include words that were components of titles of Christ – the Son of Man, the Son of David – or which were paralleled in the Gospels by a sacred name (as, frequently, Matthew refers to the kingdom of heaven where Mark refers to the kingdom of God).  The contraction of Σωτηρ probably began at the same time, in the same way; it was considered a title of God and/or Christ. 

            The contractions of “Jerusalem” and “Israel” may have originated as ordinary abbreviations of names which obtained the same format as the nomina sacra to keep format-variations to a minimum.  (The presence of the letters ι and η in these two nomina sacra may have had something to do with their adoption, too.)  The contraction of μητηρ was a result of increased devotion to the Virgin Mary.  This leaves the origin of one nomen sacrum unaccounted for:  why would σταυρος be considered a word worth venerating?

            The answer might have something to do with Greek numerals.  The Greek numerals from 1-999 were written as combinations of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, combined with three obsolete letters to make the system work.  Thus, as shown in the accompanying chart, each letter had a numerical value.  This was no secret code; it was the normal way to write numerals.   

              In the second-century composition The Epistle of Barnabas, 9:7, the author mentions an allegorical, Christ-centered interpretation of Genesis 14:14; the author interpreted the unusual term “dedicated” (or “trained”) to mean that they were circumcised.  The number 318, he says, illustrates a pattern of salvation; the idea is that just as Abraham’s servants rescued Lot from captivity, Jesus on the cross rescues souls held captive by sin, and this is shown by considering the component-parts of the quanitity of 318:  “300” is the cross-shaped letter tau (300) and the letters iota and eta are the first two letters in the name Ιησους (that is, “Jesus” in Greek).

            In addition to the idea that Jesus and the cross, together, had a spiritual significance, the numerical value of the word σταυρος may have had something to do with its adoption as a nomen sacrum.  Using the normal list of numerical values, the total value of the letters in σταυρος is 1,270.  But if the first two letters are combined as the obsolete letter stau, or stigma, then the numerical value of ϛ+α+υ+ρ+ο+ς = 6+1+400+100+70+200 = 777, which, to copyists in the 100s, might be seen as a sufficient reason to place it alongside Jesus’ name (the numeric value of which is 888) among the nomina sacra.

Four Peripheral Subjects:

(1)  Three-letter Forms

            The main nomina sacra (ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, ΧΣ) do not always appear as two overlined letters.  The copyist of Papyrus 45 switched between two-letter and three-letter forms.  In Papyrus 66, two-letter forms are used.  In Papyrus 46, three-letter forms (such as ΚΡΣ , ΙΗΣ, ΧΡΣ usually consisting of the first two letters plus its last letter) are used.    This might be explained in a number of ways:  (1)  The three-letter forms might be the original forms of the nomina sacra, or (2) Copyists slightly expanded some nomina sacra to make them a little easier to read, or (3) In a location where Greek and Latin were both spoken and written developed, some of the Latin nomina sacra were expanded to lower the risk that one would be confused with another, and a sense of tidiness motivated scribes to similarly expand their Greek counterparts.

             

(2)  The Copyist of Codex Vaticanus and the Nomen Sacrum for Πνευμα

           

           

The copyist of Papyrus 66 probably did not read
the contraction for PNEUMA in his exemplar. 

The contraction of Πνευμα was introduced very early; it is a nomen sacrum in Papyrus 4.  The copyist of Papyrus 46 may have been using an exemplar in which the word Πνευμα was not contracted; sometimes he contracted it, and sometimes he wrote the entire word, suggesting that the copyist of P46 was introducing the contraction for Πνευμα as he wrote.  The copyist of Papyrus 66 may have been doing the same thing, or at least he felt free to use his own judgment about when the word should or should not be contracted.  By the early 300s, the contraction of Πνευμα was normal; in Codex Sinaiticus it is contracted almost every time it appears.  So why, in the New Testament text of Codex Vaticanus, is this word hardly ever contracted? 

            We don’t know.  Perhaps the copyist held what Larry Hurtado has called a “binitarian” approach to devotional expression, and was not quite willing to express the same level of devotion to the Holy Spirit that he gave to the Father and the Son.  Or, perhaps the copyist felt that the status of Πνευμα as a nomen sacrum caused too many interpretive difficulties, because the word often refers to unclean spirits and to the human spirit (but he could have chosen to not contract the word in those passages, like some other copyists).  Likewise he may have felt that references to ordinary men, fathers, and sons were best left uncontracted, and to avoid making case-by-case decisions according to context, he decided not to contract any of them. 

            Or, possibly, the copyist of Vaticanus carefully followed exemplars which had been made in an era when only ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, and ΧΣ were contracted – exemplars so early that they sometimes exhibited signs of the very first stage of the usage of nomina sacra in copies of New Testament books, when copyists left blank spaces for the nomina sacra, to be added during proof-reading.  Several variants in Vaticanus may support this idea; its reading in James 5:14 (where Vaticanus does not have the words του Κυ) is particularly interesting.

(3)  Unusual Treatments of Nomina Sacra

            Ludwig Traube, on page 22 of his groundbreaking 1907 book Nomina Sacra (written in German), mentioned the unusual treatment given to some of the nomina sacra in Codex N (022), a deluxe Gospels-manuscript probably produced in the mid-500s.  Its text, written on purple-dyed parchment, is mostly written in silver ink, but the nomina sacra Κς, Θς, Ις, Χς, Πηρ, Υς, and Πνα are written in gold.  The production of such manuscripts, in such a format, must have involved two stages of production – the first using silver, and the second using gold.  (The use of gold and silver ink, besides being a display of imperial wealth, may have been inspired by a statement in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, Book 12, chapter 2 (which in turn seems to be dependent upon The Letter of Aristeas, part 176), stating that when a group of men from Eleazar the high priest visited Ptolemy in Egypt, they brought with them parchment copies of the Law, written in golden letters.) 

            Relatively few such ornate copies of the Scriptures in Greek have survived to the present day.   Purple Codices (which, besides the Greek manuscripts N, O, Σ, and Φ, also include the Gothic Codex Argenteus, Old Latin i, Codex Vindobonensis 1235, and others) were being made not only in the mid-500s but also earlier, in Jerome’s lifetime, for he complains about them in his Preface to Job, with words to this effect:  “Whoever wants to keep the old books, let him keep them, whether written on purple skins with gold and silver, or in uncial letters, as they are called, with plenty of lettering but not a lot of letters.  Let them leave to me and mine our modest little pages which are not so beautiful, but are carefully proof-read.”  Perhaps Jerome realized that the copyists of the deluxe purple codices who added the nomina sacra (in Old Testament volumes, such as the Psalterium Turicense, as well as in New Testament books) were thus distracted from the task of proof-reading. 

             

(4)  Were the nomina sacra in P46 added during the proof-reading stage? 

In P46, the nomina sacra frequently are
accompanied by extra space, which may indicate
that they were added in a secondary copying-stage.

            Although the custom of skipping sacred names in the initial copying-stage and adding them in the proof-reading stage was probably limited to only a few generations in a few locations, it may have endured long enough to be maintained by the copyist of Papyrus 46 (sometime in the late 100s), one of the most important early manuscripts of the Epistles of Paul.

            Repeatedly, unnecessarily large space surrounds a nomen sacra in P46, and this is accounted for by the theory that the copyist initially left an overlined blank space at this point, and filled in the blank spaces in a secondary copying-stage.  Some examples, from pages of P46 at the University of Michigan, are shown here.  This phenomenon also explains the occasional insertion of the wrong nomina sacra, as seen in Hebrews 12:24.      

Concluding Remarks

            The nomina sacra are a significant part of a manuscript’s meta-text.  In descriptions of a manuscript’s format and secondary features (such as chapter-titles, section-numbers, lectionary apparatus, decorations, etc.), its copyists’ treatment of the nomina sacra should also be noted.  Unusual treatments of the nomina sacra shared by manuscripts may indicate a link between them. 

Nomina sacra were used not only in Scriptures,
but also in inscriptions such as this one, from
a mosaic in Megiddo which was part of
the floor of a building used for
Christian gatherings in the late 200s:
“Akeptous, she who loves God,
has offered the table to God Jesus Christ
as a memorial.”

            In addition, if the theory that some early copyists added the nomina sacra at a secondary copying-stage can be maintained, then some special considerations should come into play in the evaluation of variant-units that involve nomina sacra: 

            (1)  Even a text that is otherwise excellent may not be reliable where nomina sacra are involved; during the proof-reading stage of an ancestor-manuscript, when the nomina sacra were added, the proof-reader might have relied on his memory to a greater degree than the copyist relied on his exemplar.  (For example, Codices B and À, in the hands of their initial copyists, both read Ις Χς in Matthew 16:21.)

            (2)  Evidence of secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production of an extant manuscript or in the production of a manuscript’s ancestor, might be detected via the detection of nomina sacra which are uniquely out-of-place.  (For example, ΚΩ where the text should be ΚΥ in Matthew 21:42 in À, and ΠΝΚΟΣ in First Corinthians 15:47 and ΧΡΥ in Ephesians 5:17 in P46.)

            (3)  Evidence of secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production of an extant manuscript or in the production of a manuscript’s ancestor, might also be detected via the detection of the loss of otherwise secure nomina sacra; the explanation being that a copyist, in the secondary copying-stage, simply failed to notice the overlined blank space.  (See, for example, the loss and subsequent insertion of Κε in À in John 13:6 and 13:9.)

            (4)  The text, as read with nomina sacra, must be considered when evaluating rival variants.  Sometimes a nomen sacrum could elicit a parableptic error which would not be elicited without the contraction.  For this reason, publishers of Greek texts for textual critics ought to consider printing the nomina sacra in the text and in the apparatus.

            (5)  In a close contest between ancient rival variants which both (or all) consist of nomina sacra, when a form of Κυ is one of the readings, it should be preferred, on the grounds that it is the less specific reading.

            (6)  Inconsistencies in a copyist’s contraction or non-contraction of nomina sacra are sometimes opaquely arbitrary; something, though, they may indicate how the copyist, or the copyist of his exemplar or ancestor-copy, interpreted the text.  Similarly, anomalous treatments of nomina sacra may alert researchers to other anomalies.  (The non-contraction of Ιησουν in Mark 16:6 in À, for example, is part of the copyist’s attempt to stretch the text into the following column.) 

            (7)  In passages where several nomina sacra occur in close proximity, a contraction could be lost if the overlines were not neatly separated, as the proof-reader, encountering what appeared to be one overline, casually assumed that one overline implied that one name should be inserted.     

            (8)  If an overline and blank space were longer than necessary, the proof-reader might assume that two nomina sacra were called for.  This, rather than a natural tendency for embellishment, may have contributed to expansions from one name to two names.