John 4:1 - "Jesus" or "The Lord"?

Papyrus 75

           At the beginning of the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John readers of modern Bibles encounter a minor deviation from the usual text:  The Byzantine text reads “When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John.”  Agreeing with the Byzantine text are versions such as the KJV, MEV, NKJV, and RSV.   The Tyndale House GNT, echoing Tregelles, also has “ὁ κύριος,” as did Scholz’s 1836 compilation, Nestle’s Greek New Testament in 1899, and Nestle’s 1948 Novum Testamentum Graece.  The 1881 compilation by Westcott and Hort also read ὁ κύριος.   

          In the Evangelical Heritage Version, the English Standard Version, the Christian Standard Bible, the Contemporary English Version, the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the Legacy Standard Bible, the NET, New International Version, the NRSV, and the New Living Translation, “Jesus” fills the place where “the Lord” appears near the beginning of the verse.

Codex 032 (W supplement)

          Have the ESV, NIV, NRSV, and NLT rejected the reading in the majority of manuscripts in order to conform to the earliest manuscripts?  No! Although Papyrus 66* and Codex Sinaiticus, 05, 038, 039, 086 (a Greek-Coptic fragment that contains  John 1:23-26, 3:5-4:18, 4:23-35, and 4:45-49, assigned to the 500s) and f¹ support Ἰησοῦς, Papyrus 66^c, Papyrus 75, and Vaticanus support ὁ κύριος, as do A C L W^supp 044 083 0141 33 700 892 etc.  You read that right:  the reading in the Byzantine text has earlier manuscript support than its rival.

          Versional evidence is quite divided.  The Vulgate, the Peshitta, the Harklean Syriac, the Bohairic, the Fayummic, and most Old Latin copies support Ἰησοῦς.  The Armenian and Georgian versions diverge:  the Armenian version supports Ἰησοῦς but the Georgian version supports ὁ κύριος.  The Sinaitic Syriac supports ὁ κύριος and the Curetonian Syriac supports Ἰησοῦς – and so does the Sahidic version, the margin of the Harklean Syriac, and one Bohairic copy. 

Codex Regius (L, 019)

          Ἰησους is read by Epiphanius and Chrysostom, whereas Cyril supports ὁ κύριος.  Augustine is inconsistent, supporting Ἰησους in three out of four cases but ὁ κύριος once. 

          The NET has a relatively long note arguing for Ἰησοῦς, but the annotator’s argument is somewhat presumptive:  the “immediate context” is simply asserted to outweigh John’s style, and Ἰησοῦς is simply asserted to be “the harder reading.”  There really is no reason to regard either Ἰησοῦς or ὁ κύριος as the harder reading expect the observation that Ἰησοῦς occurs later in the verse – so the adoption of Ἰησοῦς yields a slightly odd-sounding verse:  “Therefore when Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John.”

          The scribe of Codex 039 (Λ) may have felt that the second occurrence of Ἰησοῦς seemed jarring; he left out the second Ἰησοῦς from the text.  Likewise in modern times only one occurrence of “Jesus” is in John 4:1 in the English versions CSB, CEV, EHV, HCSB, NET, NIV, NLT, although in the Greek base-text of these versions Ἰησοῦς appears twice.  In my opinion this shows the translators’ reluctance to have the word “Jesus” appear twice in close proximity – although that was done in the Rheims version, ESV, LSB, and NRSV.        

          Bruce Terry, in defense of the reading Ἰησοῦς, has offered the theory that “Since “Jesus” occurs twice in the following clauses, copyists were more likely to change “Jesus” to “the Lord” to improve the style than visa versa.”  The UBS committee was divided (favoring Ἰησους with a C grade) but Metzger stated that Ἰησοῦς was preferred on the grounds that “it is unlikely that a scribe would have displaced it [ὁ κύριος] with Ἰησοῦς.”   That is more of an assertion than an argument.  

          A better explanation is that early scribes in the Western transmission-line  anticipated that readers would be confused by the vagueness of “ὁ κύριος” – which could refer to the Father as well as to the Son – and decided to make the text more specific.  This was adopted in part of the Alexandrian transmission-line.  Considering that support for ὁ κύριος comes not only from the vast majority of witnesses but also from multiple transmission-lines and from very early witnesses, and that Ἰησοῦς is supported by early Western witnesses in which exchanges from less specificity to more specificity is typical, the reading Ἰησοῦς should be rejected in favor of the less specific reading.

 

John 5:3b-4: Original or Not?

            Metzger’s observation that 5:3b contains two “non-Johannine” words is lightweight, considering that John had few other occasions to use either ἐκδέχεσθαι or κίνησις.

            (I commend to readers both the article written by Zane Hodges in 1979 in Bibliotheca Sacra 136, pp. 25-39, and the article by Gordon Fee which appeared in Evangelical Quarterly 54 (pp. 207-218.)              

            Before reaching a conclusion about John 5:3b, let’s investigate 5:4.  Dr. Bill Mounce addressed this variant briefly, but his treatment is extremely oversimplified.  More is required.  First, we must get an idea of how much textual variation there is within this verse.  In A K L Y Δ Π, κυρίου (ΚΥ) appears after αγγελος γαρ (or, in L, αγγελος δε).  And instead of κατέβεινεν, A K Π Ψ 579 have ἐλούετο.  And A (supported by some Bohairic manuscripts) has ουν between δήποτ’ and κατείχετο.  Instead of δήποτε, K and Π have δ’ αν.  In C^c H M U Y Δ Λ Π 078 and at least 17 lectionaries, instead of ἐτάρασσεν, the text reads ἐταράσσετο.  The Ethiopic version also supports ἐταράσσετο.   Swanson erroneously lists Δ as if it reads ἐταράσσετο and ἐτάρασσεν; a check of the manuscript show that it supports ἐταράσσε το (the το being the το before ὕδωρ).  

            Plus, in S Λ Π 047, and 72 minuscules, the passage is marked with asterisks.  The Harklean Syriac also features the verse marked with asterisks.

             The external evidence mostly aligns with the external evidence for 5:3b – but not quite. D W^supp 33, 2718, and the Armenian and Georgian versions, which include 4:3b, do not imclude 5:4.  5:4 is supported by Tatian’s Diatessaron (as demonstrated by a comment by Ephrem in his commentary ), by Ambrose, by Tertullian, by Chrysostom (who was listed in UBS1 as a witness for both inclusion and non-inclusion), and Cyril.  

            Tertullian, in De Baptismo 5, near the end of the chapter, wrote, “If it seems an unheard-of thing that an angel should interfere with water, there was a precedent for that which was to be. The pool of Bethsaida ‘was stirred’ by the intervention of ‘an angel.’  Those who complained of their health used to watch for him. For anyone who had first descended there ceased to complain after a bath. This picture of bodily cure was prophetic of spiritual cure, according to the practice by which things carnal always precede, being a picture of things spiritual. As, therefore, the grace of God spread among men, greater power was added to the waters and the angel.”

            Tertullian goes on to say, “Those who healed bodily defects now heal the spirit.  Those who worked temporal salvation now restore for us everlasting salvation.  Those who freed one once a year, [this indicates how Tertullian understood κατά καιρόν] now daily save communities, death being destroyed by the washing away of sins.”  Tertullian clearly had no problem reading this verse and applying it to the life of the church.

            Chrysostom commented on 5:3b-4 in detail in his commentary on John, perceiving in the paralytic’s healing a thematic template of baptism and salvation. 

            Tertullian, in Latin, and Chrysostom, in Greek, demonstrate the antiquity of the passage in the text, as early as two papyri from c. 200 and c. 400 would.  Chrysostom also shows that John 5:4 was read in the text of the church in Byzantium during his bishopric.  Amphilochius of Iconium (340-403; bishop after 374) – cousin of Gregory of Nazianzus – does not include 5:4 in the text he used.  Both the non-inclusion and inclusion of 5:4 are very early readings.

            What phenomenon, occurring sometime between 90 (when the Gospel of John was written – unless John Robinson’s redating to pre-70 – in light of (among other things) 5:2 – is adopted) and 200, could elicit one transmission-stream to include John 5:4 (in the case of Tertullian’s text of John), and another transmission-stream to not include John 5:4 (in the case of P75, À, and B)? 

            I am willing to posit that an anomaly in the autograph of the Gospel of John itself elicited different treatments of John 5:3b-4.  Picture John reading chapter 5 to his listeners from the autograph for the very first time – without 5:3b-4.  Inevitably, someone would ask, “John, why were these sick, blind, lame, and paralyzed people waiting near the pool instead of swimming in its water?”  And I can imagine that John added an explanatory note in the margin, “waiting for the moving of the waters.”

            And then someone asked, “What agitated the pool’s water?”.  And John, realizing that his listeners in Ephesus were oblivious to the background of the pool at Bethesda, added another note – and thus verse 4 came into existence as a second marginal note.  When John died, the autograph was entrusted to the Christian community at Ephesus – and they treated the annotations in three different ways in the next generation:

            In the ancestor of Byzantine manuscripts, the notes were either blended into the main text (as John 21 has been), or else copies just the way they appeared in the autograph, in the margin with symbols to connect them to John 5:3-5.  In the ancestor of Alexandrian manuscripts, receiving the text of the autograph slightly later (being in Egypt, not Ephesus), the notes were assumed to have originated with someone other than John, and were therefore not considered worthy to be included in either the main text or in the margin. 

            Another consideration might have been in play in the mind of the early Alexandrian scribe who decided not to include verse 4:  a desire to protect John from the charge of promoting superstition.  A scribe who thought he knew that water in the pool of Bethesda was agitated by entirely natural forces could easily persuade himself that the marginal note in his exemplar, stating that an angel of the Lord bathed in the pool of Bethesda, could not have been written by an inspired author; in addition, he did not wish to appear to commend Asklepieions.

            The testimony of P and its relatives which have John 5:4 with asterisks commends family P as an excellent representative of the autograph of the text of the Gospels.  The form of verse 4 that appears in Codex P is the form which should be adopted, instead of the readings found in the majority of manuscripts.

            An addition question is sure to be asked:  what should English Bible editors do with John 5:3-4?  I have no objection to the inclusion of 5:3-4 in the main text, or in the margin, with a note stating that the passage appears in the margin, or not at all, in a few early manuscripts.  But to omit it entirely would guarantee that English readers would perpetually ask, as John’s first listeners did, “Why weren’t they all swimming?” or, “Who or what stirred up the waters?”

            Another question may be on the minds of some readers:  Would an inspired author expand on his own narrative in this way, adding marginalia?  I see no reason why not.  Many a Spirit-led preacher reading from a manuscript he wrote has spontaneously clarified himself mid-sermon.  Even Saint Paul, in First Corinthians 1:16, clarified that he had baptized the household of Stephanas (who, according to tradition, was the jailor in Acts 16), right after saying, “I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius.”  I Cor. 1:16 may have originally been a note in the margin added by Paul as he proof-read the letter; no one at Corinth, however, would have doubted its veracity.

 

Glitches in Christ's Genealogy

          The genealogy of Jesus Christ, which appears in Matthew 1:1-17 and the genealogy of Jesus Christ which appears in Luke 3:23-38, may both be skipped by casual Bible-readers, but they are both interesting passages to both the textual critic and the Christian apologist.  Today, let’s look at some of the ways in which copyists treated – and mistreated – parts of these two portions of Scripture.

          Perhaps the most famous variations within the genealogy in Matthew appear at the end of verse 7 and in verse 10.  These were the first two variant-units to be commented upon by the late Bruce Metzger in his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.  The Alexandrian text reads Ἀσάφ instead of the Byzantine Ἀσὰ in verse 7, and it reads Ἀμώς instead of Ἀμών in verse 10.    Neither Asaph the psalmist nor Amos the prophet was ever a king of Judah, so the presence of their names in the genealogy is surprising.  If the canon prefer the more difficult reading is applied, in both cases the Alexandrian reading will be adopted.  This was the course taken by Elijah Hixson in 2019, and it has been for over a century the usual decision.   (Hixson briefly described the main external evidence, so in the interest of brevity I will not review that here.)

          I argued in 2012, and again in 2016, however, in favor of Ἀσὰ and Ἀμών, proposing that lectio difficilior potior has been applied here too mechanically. As I showed in 2016, there was quite a bit of orthographic variety in the spelling of names by early Alexandrian copyists.  And I still propose that these erroneous readings originated as an attempt by an early copyist (one with “Western” proclivities) to “pad the resume” of Jesus, by including prophets in his genealogy. 

          Less famous, but no less interesting, is the treatment of Jesus’ genealogy in Luke in Codex Bezae (D, 05).  (Matthew 1 is not extant in D.)  The text in D omits Luke 3:24-31, and has instead the names of the ancestors listed in Matthew 1:6-16, in reverse order (Zadok’s name is not included), and there are other aberrations, including the names Ασαφ and Αμως) before resuming Luke’s list of Jesus’ ancestors in verse 31b.

          In Codex W (032), the genealogy in Luke is missing.  After Joseph’s name in Luke 3:23, the text of 032 simply jumps to chapter 4.  Perhaps this reflects a scribe’s awareness that the genealogies were absent in Tatian’s Diatessaron, or it could conceivably be a deletion by a recklessly bold scribe who did not want to transcribe anything that could be construed as a contradiction of the genealogy in Matthew 1.
         

          A small cluster of manuscripts (including M U Θ 1 1582 33, and over 150 minuscules) reflects a reading that was known to Epiphanius (in the late 300s):  somebody inserted, between Josiah and Jeconiah, a reference to Jehoiakim (Ἰωακείμ).  This is a harmonization to First Chronicles 3:15.  Some copyists, it appears, were not averse to attempting to correct their exemplars, even if it meant disrupting the total in one of Matthew’s groups of fourteen generations.  (Matthew probably intended foe this 14x structure to bring to his readers’ minds the memory of the numerical value of David’s name).

          Other glitch-readings occur in other manuscripts.  A notable error by the scribe of GA 109 was mentioned by Metzger (Text of the New Testament, p. 195):  the copyist mechanically copied the text of his exemplar, in which the individuals in the genealogy in Luke were formatted in two columns, as if they were one continuous piece, thus making a garbled mess of things.  A detailed analysis of how this occurred can be found near the entry of an entry at CSNTM’s “From the Library” blog from 2018.  

The beginning of the genealogy in Luke in GA 1273.

           The copyist of GA 1273 (the George Grey Gospels) also was discombobulated when formatting the genealogy in Luke.  Putting the names of Jesus’ ancestors in three columns, he mixed up the whole series of names, concluding with “of Adam, of Serug, of God.”  A little detective work (which Daniel Buck has done) can reveal the format of the genealogy in Luke in the exemplar used by the scribe of GA 1273.  It might be interesting to compare the format in 1273’s reconstructed exemplar with the three-names-per-line format in GA 2. 

The end of the genealogy in Luke in 1273.

          Other treatments of Luke’s genealogy have been identified by Daniel Buck; he has noticed that glitchy treatments in Luke’s genealogy seem to arise especially in verse 33, and that GA 1305, 1424, 2563, 2658, 2661, 2756, and 2882 all have glitches of one kind or another.  GA 28 also has some unusual readings, such as the insertion of τοῦ Ἀρὰμ in verse 33.

          Quite a few scribes, when listing the names in Luke’s genealogy, gave each name a single line.  These include the copyist of Sinaiticus (À) and Codex Vaticanus (B, 03) – mostly.  In B, near the end of the last column on a page, the copyist wrote Ιωσηφ του Ηλει (“Joseph, of Heli”) on one line, as long as his normal lines, with a space between “Ιωσηφ” and “του Ηλει”, but on the next line (the last line on the page), του Ματθατ gets a line all its own, and on the next page, each ancestor’s name, preceded by του, gets its own line.

          One glitch that has received special attention is the omission of τοῦ Καϊναν (or τοῦ Καϊναμ) at the beginning of Luke 3:36 in P75^vid and Codex Bezae (D, 05).  Kainan’s name is not in Genesis 10:24 in the Masoretic Text, or in the Samaritan Pentateuch.  It may be that due to its absence in Genesis in these witnesses, a scribe deliberately removed it from the Western text as it appears in D.  A question arises:  the texts of P75 (early Alexandrian) and D (Western) are so different from each other, how could they share this reading if it is not original?

          But do they?  In 2019, Henry B Smith Jr. and Kris J. Udd published a 46-page essay in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, On the Authenticity of Kainan, Son of Arpachshad, in which this variant-unit was minutely examined.  A reconstruction of the relevant part of P75 (the MS is extremely fragmentary in this portion) was made by Smith and Udd in which “The inclusion of -Α TOΥ KAINAN at the beginning of line 5 would only increase its line length to 26 letters, fitting the context well.”  This reconstruction helps clear up some inaccurate records of P75’s text in Luke 3:36.  It also demonstrates that P75 never lacked Καϊναμ, though the question is open as to whether P75 read Καϊναμ or Καϊναν. 

          Thus the only manuscript that omits Kainan’s name in Luke 3:36 is Codex D.  Finding Kainan’s name absent in the early Alexandrian text and in a relatively early Western manuscript such as Codex D would have been remarkable.  But finding Kainan’s name omitted only in in the Western text of Luke attested by D is like finding a hamburger at McDonald’s; it is not remarkable at all, considering the other liberties that have been taken in Luke’s genealogy in D.

          While some readers might be taken aback by how some scribes messed up the genealogy of Jesus Christ, one should remember that the bulk of manuscripts in different transmission-streams maintain the original text of the genealogies very well.  A blizzard of scribal errors does not make the sun stop shining.
          

 

 

(Thanks to Kris Udd and Daniel Buck for their help obtaining some of the data in this post.)

 

Video Lecture 06: Some Important Manuscripts

Now at YouTube:

Lecture 06 - Some Important Manuscripts - in the series Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism. (24 minutes, but viewers are expected to explore the links and thus take longer)

Subtitles provide a basic outline and links to supplemental materials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SqzPnVlvWY

An excerpt:

            We are about to meet some manuscripts.  Some of these, you might encounter very often in the apparatus of the Greek New Testament.  Others are relatively small, but they are among the earliest witnesses to the readings they support.  

            In the course of this lecture, I will mention links to supplemental materials as we go. I hope that you will pause this video when a link appears, explore each resource, and then return to the lecture.   These resources include images of manuscripts that can be viewed in fine detail.

            Today I am going to refer to the Alexandrian Text, the Western Text, and the Byzantine Text.  Hopefully in a future lecture I will go into more detail about these terms.  For now, you can generally picture them as three forms of the text:  the Alexandrian Text was used in Egypt, and influenced the Sahidic version there.  The Western Text was used mainly but not exclusively in the Western part of the Roman Empire, and influenced the Old Latin text.  The Byzantine Text  was used in the vicinity of Constantinople, and is generally supported by the majority of Greek manuscripts.

 ● We begin with Papyrus 52.  This is perhaps the oldest manuscript that contains text from the New Testament.  It is small, about the size of a playing card.  It contains text from John 18:31-33 on one side, and on the other side it contains text from John 18:37-38.  Which is not a lot of text.  It was brought to light by Colin H. Roberts in 1935.  

The importance of Papyrus 52, which is at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, is its age:  it is probably from about the first half of the 100s.   There is a nice description of Papyrus 52 (and other papyri fragments) by Robert Waltz at the Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism. In addition, Dirk Jongkind has a brief video about P52 on YouTube. 

● Papyrus 104 is another early papyrus fragment that is a top contender for the title “earliest New Testament manuscript.”  It was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt, and was brought to light in 1997 by J. D. Thomas.  If Papyrus 52 is the earliest manuscript of John, Papyrus 104 is the earliest manuscript of Matthew.  The handwriting used for P104 was executed in a fancier style than what is seen in most other manuscripts; similar handwriting appears in some non-Biblical manuscripts excavated at Oxyrhynchus, including one in which a specific date, from the year 204 or 211, has survived. 

            Papyrus 104 contains text from Matthew 21:34-37 on one side.  The text on the other side is very extremely badly damaged.  But the surviving damaged text there probably contains text from Matthew 21:43 and 45.  This would mean that Papyrus 104 is both the earliest manuscript of Matthew 21 and also the earliest witness for the non-inclusion of Matthew 21:44. 

            Greg Lanier’s detailed analysis of Papyrus 104 can be found online in Volume 21 of the TC-Journal, for 2016.

● Papyrus 23 is a fragment of the Epistle of James, probably made in the early 200s.  It contains text from part of James chapter 1. 

            You can get a very good look at Papyrus 23 by visiting the website of its present home, the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, Illinois.

 ● Papyrus 137 received some fame, before its official publication, by being heralded as if it was from the first century; it was called “First Century Mark.”  It turned out to be not from the first century.  However, this manuscript – a very small fragment containing text from Mark 1:7-9 and Mark 1:16-18 – is the oldest copy of the text it preserves.  Like several other early fragments, it has made no impact on the compilation of the text of the New Testament.

● Papyrus 45 is much more substantial – but it is still very fragmentary.  When it was made in the first half of the 200s, Papyrus 45 contained the four Gospels and Acts.  The order of books, when the manuscript was made, is unknown.  Its surviving pages at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin contain text from Matthew 20 and 21,  Mark 4-9, Mark 11-12, Luke 6-7, Luke 9-14, John 4-5, John 10-11, and Acts 4-17.  A leaf in Vienna contains text from Matthew 25-26.  This is the earliest known manuscript that contains text from all four Gospels.

            Papyrus 45 has several readings that are especially interesting due to the impact they have on Hort’s Theory of the Lucianic Recension.  Hopefully we will take a closer look at this in a future lecture, but for now, we can just sum it up as the theory that the Byzantine Text – the text in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts – originated as the result of an editorial effort by someone in the late 200s – possibly Lucian of Antioch – who was combining readings from two earlier forms of the text:  the Alexandrian Text, and the Western Text.  Based on this theory, Hort rejected readings in the Byzantine Text that were neither Alexandrian nor Western, reckoning that they did not exist before the Byzantine Text was made.

But in Papyrus 45, which is assigned to the early 200s, there are some readings that are not supported by the flagship manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text or the Western Text.  Readings in Mark 7:35, Acts 15:40, and many other passages show that it is hazardous to assume that non-Alexandrian, non-Western readings should be rejected.

             The text of Papyrus 45 does not agree particularly strongly with Codex Vaticanus, and it does not agree particularly strongly with Codex Bezae either.  In the parts of Mark where Papyrus 45 is extant, its closest textual relative is Codex W – but Codex W’s text in those parts of Mark is not particularly Alexandrian or Western either.

            When Papyrus 45 was first studied, after it was brought to light in the 1930s, there was a tendency to call its text Caesarean, like the text of family-1.  But the late Larry Hurtado showed that whatever Papyrus 45’s text is, it is not closely related to the Caesarean Text.  And while it repeatedly agrees with the Byzantine Text, it is not consistently Byzantine either.

● Papyrus 46 is the earliest substantial copy of most of the Epistles of Paul, basically arranged in order according to their length, with Hebrews between Romans and First Corinthians.  There is some uncertainty about how many epistles the copyist intended to include in the codex.  Part of this manuscript is at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and part of it is at the University of Michigan.  Its most likely production-date is around 200, give or take 50 years.  The text of Papyrus 46 tends to agree with Codex Vaticanus, but not as strictly as one might expect. For example, in Ephesians 5:9, Papyrus 46 agrees with the Byzantine Text, reading “the fruit of the Spirit” instead of “the fruit of the light.”

● Papyrus 66 contains most of the Gospel of John, with some gaps due to incidental damage.  It was found in Egypt in the early 1950s, and was published in 1956.  Its production-date was initially assigned to around 200, but a wider range is possible.  The copyist who wrote the text in Papyrus 66 made over 400 corrections of what he had initially written. 

● Papyrus 75 is also assigned to around 200.  It is a damaged but substantial codex that contains text from Luke and John.  Its surviving text of Luke begins in chapter 3; its surviving text of John ends in chapter 15.  The text of Papyrus 75 is close to the text found in Codex Vaticanus, but the two manuscripts are not related in a grandfather-and-grandson kind of relationship.  Page-views of Papyrus 75 can be found online at the website of the Vatican Library.

Each of the next three manuscripts was designed as a pandect, that is, a large one-volume collection of the entire Bible.  We tend to assume that it is not unusual to have a single volume that contains all of the books of both the Old Testament and the New Testament.  But that is because we are part of a post-printing-press generation.   In the world of manuscripts, Greek pandects of the Bible are rare.

● Codex Vaticanus is a very important manuscript of the Bible, housed, along with many other manuscripts, at the Vatican Library in Rome.  Its New Testament portion was not the subject of scholarly study until the early 1800s, and since then its reputation has grown.  Today it is generally regarded as the most important manuscript of the New Testament.

 Textually, Codex Vaticanus is the paramount representative of the Alexandrian Text.

Vaticanus was produced in the early 300s.  Its text, in the New Testament, is formatted in three columns per page.  This is usually its format in the Old Testament books too, although in the books of poetry the format is two columns per page.  Codex Vaticanus does not contain the entire New Testament; it has no text from First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, or the book of Revelation; a text of Revelation is in the codex, written in minuscule lettering, but it is not really the same codex. 

Vaticanus also does not contain the text of the book of Hebrews after Hebrews 9:14.     

            The lettering in Codex Vaticanus has been extensively reinforced; that is, someone, long after the codex was made, traced over the lettering, except where, rightly or wrongly, he thought that the text was inaccurate.  The exact date when this was done is a matter of debate.  I suspect that Codex Vaticanus, before it ended up at the Vatican Library, was previously in the hands of an important character in the 1400s named Bessarion, and scribes working for Bessarion may have been responsible for sprucing it up a bit.  This did not materially affect its text.

The entire manuscript can be viewed page by page at the website of the Vatican Library.

● Codex Sinaiticus is the wingman of Codex Vaticanus.  Its text is not as good, but it is more complete.  The New Testament text of Codex Sinaiticus has survived in more or less the same form in which it left its scriptorium in the mid-300s.  “More or less,” that is, because a few centuries after its production, someone attempted to adjust many of its readings, but those attempts can be detected.  In addition to containing the text of every book of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus also contains the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas.

Most of the text of Codex Sinaiticus is Alexandrian.  However, in the first eight chapters of John, more or less, its text tends to be more like the Western Text.  It is as if the copyists were working from an exemplar of the Gospels that was Alexandrian, but in these opening chapters of John, their main exemplar was damaged, and so they used a drastically different exemplar as their back-up.

That would be consistent with a historical scenario that is mentioned by Jerome, who states that Acacius and Euzoius, at Caesarea in the mid-300s, labored to replace texts written on decaying papyrus in the library there with more durable parchment copies.  Whereas Codex Vaticanus does not have the Eusebian Section-numbers in its margins in the Gospels, Codex Sinaiticus does – but in a somewhat mangled form. 

            This indicates that Eusebius of Caesarea was not involved in the production of Codex Sinaiticus, because it is extremely unlikely that he would have allowed his own cross-reference system to be presented so carelessly.  At the same time, as the place where Eusebius was bishop until his death, Caesarea was one of the first places where the Eusebian Canons were used.

In addition, there are several clues embedded in the text of Codex Sinaiticus that suggest that it was made at Caesarea, during the time when Acacius, an Arian, was bishop there.  I think it is very probable that this is when and where it was made.

Details about the origin of Codex Sinaiticus, and the quality of its text, have tended to be overshadowed by stories about its discovery in the 1800s by Constantine Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.  In this lecture I will not go into detail about all that, except to say, first, that the most generous interpretation of Tischendorf’s account of his first encounter with pages from Codex Sinaiticus is that he did not understand what he was being shown and what he was being told, and, second, all of the pages that Tischendorf took should be returned to the monastery from which they came.   

Codex Sinaiticus has a secondary set of section-numbers in its margin in Acts that is, for the most part, shared by Codex Vaticanus.  This indicates that when these numbers were added, probably in the 600s, these two manuscripts were at the same place.

Codex Sinaiticus has its own website, CodexSinaiticus.org , and there one can find not only good photographs of the manuscript but also some interesting information about its background and how it was made.

● Next is Codex Alexandrinus.  This codex, from the early 400s, has undergone significant damage:  it is missing the first 24 chapters of Matthew.  The surviving Gospels-text of Alexandrinus is particularly important because it tends to support the Byzantine Text, unlike Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  In Acts and the Epistles, its text agrees much more often with the two flagship Alexandrian codices, but this is a tendency, definitely not a two-peas-in-a-pod level of agreement.  For Revelation, Codex A is the best manuscript we have. The entire New Testament portion of Codex Alexandrinus can be viewed page by page at the British Library’s website.     

● The worst Greek manuscript we have is Codex Bezae, a diglot manuscript, with alternating pages in Latin, which was produced in the 400s.  It has undergone some damage, but it still contains most of the four Gospels, in the order Matthew – John – Luke – Mark, part of Third John in Latin, and most of the book of Acts.

More important than its production-date is the date of the readings that it supports:  many of them are supported by Old Latin witnesses, and by early patristic writers who used what is called the Western Text. 

 The high level of textual corruption in Codex Bezae makes the text found in relatively young manuscripts look excellent in comparison.  Codex D’s text demonstrates that what really matters is not the age of a manuscript, as much as how well the copyists in the transmission-line of a manuscript did their job. 

Once one comes to terms with the awful quality of Codex Bezae’s text, though, many of its readings are awfully interesting.  It echoes a time in the text’s history when copyists prioritized conveying the meaning of the text – or what they thought was its meaning – above the form of the text found in their exemplars.

 Codex Bezae can be viewed online page by page at the University of Cambridge’s Digital Library.

● Also from the 400s, and probably earlier than Codex Bezae, is Codex Washingtonianus.  Codex W was acquired by the American businessman Charles Freer in 1906.  It is the most important Greek Gospels-manuscript in the United States.  Part of what makes Codex W important is not only its age, but its attestation to different forms of the text collected in a single volume:  its text in Matthew is strongly Byzantine.  Its text in Mark 1:1 to Mark 1-5 is similar to Western Text.  Its text in the rest of Mark tends to agree with the surviving text of Papyrus 45, at least in the parts where P45 is extant.   In Luke, up to chapter 8, its text is Alexandrian, but the rest of Luke tends to agree with the Byzantine Text.  In the first four chapters of John, Codex W has supplemental pages, copied from a different exemplar than the rest.  In the rest of John, it tends to agree with the Alexandrian Text.

This has led some researchers to suspect that although most of Codex W appears to have been made in the 400s, it may be a copy of an earlier codex that was based on exemplars that had been partly destroyed in the Diocletian persecution, in the very early 300s, just before Codex Vaticanus was made.  Page-views of Codex W can be accessed at the website of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

● Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, also known as Codex C, is a palimpsest.  Its surviving pages contain text from almost every book of the New Testament, as well as pages from some of the books of Poetry in the Old Testament, and two apocryphal books.  It was made some time in the 400s.  Its text is somewhat Alexandrian, with significant Byzantine mixture.  It is one of the few Greek manuscripts that support the reading “six hundred and sixteen” as the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18.

The parchment of Codex C was recycled to provide material on which some of the works of Ephraem the Syrian were written; this accounts for the name of the manuscript.  Its Biblical text was established in the 1840s, after much effort, by Constantine Tischendorf, the same individual who brought Codex Sinaiticus to the attention of European scholars.   The text has undergone extensive correction.

● 0176 is a fragment, probably produced in the 400s, that contains text from Galatians 3:16-24.  This manuscript was excavated from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, which is somewhat intriguing, because the text of this fragment is thoroughly Byzantine, not Alexandrian.

● The Purple Triplets is my pet name for three uncial manuscripts from the mid-500s:  Codex N, Codex O, and Codex Σ.      Codex N is also known as 022, Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus.  Codex O is also known as 023, Codex Sinopensis.  It contains text from the Gospel of Matthew.  And Codex Σ is also known as 042, Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, or the Rossano Gospels.  It contains text from Matthew and Mark.

            These are not the only Greek uncial manuscripts written on purple parchment.  What is especially interesting about these three is that they are related to each other like siblings, copies of the same master-copy.  Codex Σ is known not only for its mainly Byzantine text, but also for its illustrations, which can be viewed at http://www.codexrossanensis.it .

● Codex Regius, also known as Codex L, contains most of the text of the four Gospels.  It was probably made in the 700s, probably by an Egyptian copyist.  Codex L is one of six Greek manuscripts that attest to both the Shorter Ending and the Longer Ending of Mark.  Codex L also has a large distinct blank space in the Gospel of John where most manuscripts have John 7:53-8:11, the story of the adulteress.    

● Codex Pi, also known as Codex Petropolitanus, is a Gospels-manuscript assigned to the 800s.  Its text is a very early form of the Byzantine Text.

● Codex K, also known as Codex Cyprius, is another Gospels-manuscript that was also probably produced in the 800s.  In the first 20 verses of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, compared to the text in Codex Sinaiticus, the text of Codex Cyprius is much closer to the original text.

● Minuscule 2474, the Elfleda Bond Goodspeed Gospels, from the 900s, contains an example of the text of the Gospels that dominated Greek manuscript-production in the Byzantine Empire.  This manuscript can be viewed page by page at the website of the Goodspeed Manuscript Library of the University of Chicago.

            There are also several clusters, or groups, of manuscripts, that share readings that indicate that they share the same general line of descent: 

            In the Gospels, the text of some members of a group of manuscripts that display a note called the Jerusalem Colophon is above average importance.

            Readings shared by the main members of Family 1 in the Gospels, best represented by minuscule manuscripts 1, 1582, and 2193, probably echo an ancestor-manuscript from the 400s.

            Members of Family 13 in the Gospels tend to echo an ancestor-manuscript with many reading that diverge from the Byzantine standard.

            Also, in the General Epistles, members of the Harklean Group echo a form of the text that has some unusual readings that are earlier than Codex Sinaiticus.

            Some other minuscules, such as minuscules 6, 157, 700, 892, and 1739, are as important as some of the uncials.  Their existence should remind us that when we ask how much weight ought to be given to a particular manuscript, the primary consideration should not be “How old is it”, but “How well did the copyists in its transmission-stream do their job?”. 

            No manuscript sprang into being out of nothing, and any manuscript, early or late, if it is independent from another known manuscript, has the potential to contribute something to a reconstruction of the text of the New Testament.

             To get some idea of the appearance of New Testament manuscripts, I encourage you to explore the online presentations of manuscripts at the following institutions:

            Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, the Vatican Library, the British Library, the National Library of France, the Walters Art Museum, the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection at the University of Chicago, the Kenneth W. Clark Collection at Duke University, and the  Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.