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| Elijah Hixson |
Hixson: Thank you very much for inviting me here. It
is an honor that somebody would take interest in my dissertation. I will
proceed with the caveat that I have submitted my dissertation, but I have not
yet defended it.
Q: Before we get to that, let’s briefly look
into your thesis-paper. You concluded that the scribe of Codex
Alexandrinus “was far more likely to omit than to commit any other type of
error, including substitution,” and that “In general, there was not a tendency
to add to the text.” When we consider this alongside similar observations
made by James Royse, Dirk Jongkind, and Juan Hernández, is it safe to say that
the evidence presently indicates that scribes tended to omit rather than to
insert all the way into the 400s?
Hixson: I am thankful for my time at SBTS and their
allowing me to write a text-critical master’s thesis. However, I know that I
made plenty of mistakes in that thesis, and hopefully I learned from them. I
would do things differently if I had to do it again knowing what I do now. That
being said, I think generally that is probably true, but not without
qualifications.
Q:
What does this say about the canon, “Prefer the shorter reading,” and
about compilations that were produced by compilers who regularly applied that
canon as a decisive factor when making text-critical decisions? Should
all such decisions now be revisited without that assumption in play?
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At the same time, Royse also gave a list of exceptions
when he said to prefer the longer reading, so I worry that his “prefer the
longer reading” rule is also a victim of oversimplification. The weird thing
is that when you factor in the exceptions given by Griesbach and Royse, the two
end up being a lot closer than people might think. Both agree that the longer
reading is preferred if there’s some kind of accidental or minor (likely
unnoticed) omission involved. Both agree
that the shorter reading is preferred if the longer reading comes from a
parallel passage or could be explained as the scribe “improving” the text.
I’m certainly in no place to
pontificate about it, but I do wonder – given how often Royse and Griesbach are
oversimplified – if it might be better to say “You know what? Let’s not worry
too much about longer and shorter readings. Instead, let’s remember that
scribes could omit short things accidentally, they harmonized the text, they
attempted to improve the text, etc.” Let’s first be on the lookout for those
kinds of changes when evaluating variants rather than simply counting how many
words or letters there are and picking the shorter (or longer) reading.
Q: Thanks
for those thoughts. Moving on to your
new work: could you briefly describe the Purple Uncials for our readers,
and what is special about the three manuscripts you have been studying?
Hixson: The purple uncials (or majuscules) of the New
Testament are five luxurious copies of the Gospels: N (022,
Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus), O (023, Codex Sinopensis), Σ (042, Codex
Purpureus Rossanensis), Φ (043,
Codex Beratinus) and 080, dating to the
500s. They are so-named because they are
made of parchment that has been dyed purple and written in silver and gold ink. They are absolutely beautiful. Textually, they have a form of the Byzantine
text. The Alands placed them in Category
V (except 080, which is too fragmentary to classify).
Three of them (Ν, O
and Σ) were all
copied from the same exemplar, presumably around the same time in the same
scriptorium. To my knowledge, these three are currently the earliest extant
examples of sibling-manuscripts made from a common exemplar, though the
exemplar itself is lost. There are other purple biblical
manuscripts as well. Do a Wikipedia search for “purple
parchment” and you should see a list of a few of them.
Hixson: I only
reconstructed the exemplar in Matthew, but I think I succeeded. Codex O is only
extant there. I used a spiral process, in which I started with the places where
all three are extant, looked for instances in which one disagreed with the
other two, took that as the scribe who made an alteration, and then compared
those results. I also took corrections into consideration, to shed light on
what kinds of mistakes each scribe made.
From that it became clear that the scribe of O was the
scribe who changed the text the least, and that the scribe of Σ had a noticeable tendency to harmonize Matthew to
Markan parallels. So for instance, when only Ο and Σ are extant, and they differ, it is more likely that O
preserves the reading of the archetype, especially if the difference could be
explained as a harmonization to Mark by the scribe of Σ.
I also rated my confidence in the reconstruction of the
archetype at those points of variation with A B C and D. The ratings are
entirely subjective, but at least I was honest and gave reasons for why I
adopted the readings I did, and how sure I am of my decisions.
Q: Is it true that the copyists of the Purple
Uncials wrote in silver ink, and used gold ink for contractions of
the sacred names, such as “God” and “Lord”? Which sacred names
received this treatment?
Hixson: It is partially true. The scribe of N did it,
and I believe the scribe of Φ did it for a
few chapters but abandoned the effort later in the codex. O
and 080 are entirely in gold, and Σ only
used gold for the titles and first three lines of each Gospel. The scribe of N
used gold for “Jesus,” “God,” “Lord,” “Christ,” and sometimes for “Father,” “Son”
and “Spirit.” The scribe of N also wrote
the marginal chapter headings in gold.
Q:
Does it look like the copyists used two pens, switching inks as they went, or
did they write the main text in silver first and then add the sacred names’
abbreviations in gold afterwards?
Hixson: There are a few mistakes here and there that
suggest that the exemplar did not use a different ink for any nomina
sacra, and that the scribe of N would leave a blank space for them and
come back to write them in later in gold. Whether that was after he finished a
page, or a quire, or at the end of the work-day, is
anybody’s guess. I don’t get the impression that the scribe used a different
pen for gold.
Q:
Did they ever write the wrong name? What happened in Codex N at
Matthew 13:51?
Hixson: In Matthew 13:51, the scribe wrote κ in silver but left a space and went back to
write ε and the supralinear line in gold. And yes, the scribe did write the wrong name a time or two. Matthew 11:27 is
a great example of that. The reading in N is clearly a blunder on the part of
the scribe and not from the archetype (so maybe N shouldn’t be cited there in
the UBS/NA apparatuses!).
Q:
Parts of Codex
Sinaiticus are scattered among four institutions. But Codex N is even
more scattered. Can you tell us about that, and how it got that
way? Could some of its missing pages still be out there somewhere?
Hixson: We don’t know exactly how it happened, but portions
of Codex N are presently in eight or nine locations
that we know of. It is usually assumed that the Crusaders had something to do with its
dispersal, and I would guess that’s probably right. We know that most of what’s
missing in N went missing centuries ago because of the palaeography of some
cursive Greek notes in the margins that indicate that the manuscript was
grouped into bundles of 50 folios. I say eight or nine locations because
one leaf of John was formerly in an Italian private collection – it was
published and microfilmed – but it appears to have been sold around 15 years
ago. We don’t know where it is currently.
However, we do know that at least four folios were taken
from N in the 1800’s, because of two modern systems of page numbers. There are
four places where one system continues unbroken but the other one has a gap. This means that one folio in each of those
four places was there when the first system was added, but was removed by the
time the second system was added. Now, three of those four folios have since
resurfaced, and sure enough, they each have the pagination from the first
system but nothing from the second; these are the folios in Thessaloniki ,
Athens and New York
There is some slight hope that bits of Codex O might also
still be out there. Forty-three of its leaves are in the Bibliothèque nationale
de France (BnF), but O also bears an older foliation system that suggests it
had at least 50-some-odd leaves at some point in its modern history before the
BnF acquired it in 1899. Only one of those missing leaves ever resurfaced,
though, and to my knowledge, nobody has seen it since before 1962. It was in Ukraine
Q:
There’s the deluxe Tyrian purple, and there’s the cheaper purple-ish
purple. Similarly, there’s real gold, and there’s gold-like
pigment. Are the purple and gold of the Purple Uncials the real deal?
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Hixson: There have been some scientific tests on a
couple of them. The purple is not Tyrian purple, but the gold
and silver are the real deal. Oxidation is a great way to see the quality of
the gold and silver—gold is extremely resistant to oxidation, but silver
tarnishes fairly easily. In the London leaves of N, the dye has faded away almost
completely and the silver has tarnished to black, but you can still see the
gold of the nomina sacra looking just as fine as ever. At
first glance, it doesn’t look like one of the purple codices.
Q:
The Purple Uncials are sometimes dated to the late 400s or 500s. Is
that correct? And, what date would you assign to their archetype?
Hixson: I think the 500s is a good date for them. The
palaeography seems to support it, and that’s
true of two different types of handwriting in Σ (biblical
majuscule for the main text, and upright pointed majuscule for other things). Other considerations lead me to suspect that they are probably mid-500s. I don’t think the archetype was much older
than its copies.
We do have references to earlier
purple codices. Jerome mentions purple
manuscripts in a letter he wrote in 384 [Epistle
22, To Eustochium, in paragraph 32].
Q:
Which one of the Purple Uncials do you think is the oldest, and does it matter?
Hixson: I don’t think it matters all that much. The
scribe of O was the most ideal scribe of the three. N and Σ were probably produced at the same time, and I
think they are the products of a master (Σ)
and his or her apprentice (N). Codex O has a lot of features that suggest that
it was made – for lack of a better word – ‘differently’ than N and Σ. It’s single-column; they are double-column. It has
6-sheet quires; they have 5-sheet quires. It has illuminations accompanying the
text; they do not. Whether it was made earlier, later, or while the scribes of
N and Σ worked – that’s anybody’s guess.
Q:
Tell us about the unusual patches in Codex N. Did later owners of the
manuscript use parchment from severely damaged pages to repair
not-so-badly-damaged pages?
Hixson: Different institutions have used different
methods to repair the manuscript, but at some point, somebody used a bit of the
folio containing the kephalaia [chapters] list to Luke, and bits of
another folio (which originally contained part of Matthew 6) to patch other
places in the manuscript. Maybe those folios were already damaged. We can hope
so at least; that’s better than the thought of someone tearing up good pages
intentionally!
Q: Cronin [a
researcher in the late 1800s/early 1900s] thought that Codex N might have
omitted Matthew 12:47, based on space
considerations. What do you think?
Hixson: Cronin was incredibly insightful and helpful
overall, but I think he was wrong there. N had Matthew 12:47. There are only two folios missing in the gap, and Σ is extant there. Σ has
it (and adding it in a large section like that isn’t the sort of thing the
scribe of Σ would do, nor is the scribe of N
likely to omit something large like that), and furthermore, N and Σ have nearly identical line-lengths. If you count
lines in Σ where N breaks off until it comes
back in to folios later, you arrive at nearly the exact number of lines you
would expect in N. That tells us that whatever N had on those lost pages, it
occupied the same space as what Σ has
in that text. I would be comfortable citing Nvid for the longer
reading there.
Q:
Is there a possibility that any of the Purple Uncials contained the pericope
adulterae after John 21, like in the family-1 manuscript-cluster?
Hixson: I doubt it. In N, the very last page of John
is missing, but from John 16:15 until that
last page, every folio survives. The manuscript has original quire markers, and
at the end of each Gospel, the scribe reduced the number of sheets he/she used
per quire so as to finish at the end of a quire and start a new book on the
first sheet of a new one. Kephalaia lists would have been at the end of
these ‘short’ quires so that the next Gospel would still begin on the first
page of a new quire – that is to say, the extra material between the Gospels
was gathered with the Gospel that was ending, not with the one that was
beginning. We know that the final quire of John had three sheets, and the last
folio of the outer sheet is the only one missing. The text cuts off in
John 21:20. I didn’t reconstruct it, but at a
glance, what’s left in John 21:20-25 looks like
about how much the scribe normally got on a single folio.
All of that is to say that if the PA was added after John
21, it would have to have been added as a new quire on its own, after the scribe
deliberately planned to end John at 21:25 and
reduced the number of sheets per quire in order to do so. The codex certainly
seems planned to end at John 21:25.
Q:
Were these manuscripts made for the Byzantine emperor and his family?
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| Justinian I, Byzantine Emperor (r. 527-565) |
Hixson: The best way I know how to put it is that
they certainly smell like Justinian I. I’ve not found any contemporary
historians mentioning purple codices, but they do describe
Justinian’s church-building programs, and the purple codices are definitely
consistent with the type of things he did. There is no proof that Justinian had
anything to do with them, but I’ll go back to what I said before: they certainly do smell like him.
Q: Did
the exemplar of N, O, and Σ have illustrations?
Also, could you take a minute to explain the “testimonials” in the
illustrations, where Old Testament characters comment on events in the
Gospels?
Hixson: I doubt the illustrations were in the
archetype. There are too many differences between the illustrations in O
and Σ, and none from N survive.
The testimonials are interesting. I
wrote an article on that for The Journal of
Theological Studies. I came to the conclusion that they were more likely
copied from continuous-text manuscripts than from existing testimonia
collections, and in a number of places, they seem to be showing how passages
from the Old Testament are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Q:
Now that you’ve completed this project, what’s next?
Hixson: I’m teaching Romans and John’s Gospel at
Edinburgh Bible College this spring, so I’ll be busy preparing lectures for
that. Writing-wise, I’m co-editing a book on textual criticism and apologetics
with Peter Gurry, which will be published by IVP – hopefully in a year or two.
I’ve got a few articles in the works that have spun out of my dissertation as
well. I do have a couple of monograph-length ideas, but my ability to pursue
those depends on whether or not I have gainful employment a year from now, and
if so, where and for how long. At the end of the day, I am an evangelical
Christian, so I want to work out my faith in Jesus Christ by careful and
responsible scholarship, and I want to use whatever knowledge I gain there in
some way for the Church.
Thank you again for taking interest
in my research!
Snapp: Thank you for taking the time to discuss it! We look forward to more of your work.
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