Second Peter 1:10 - Grace By Faith - Confidence By Works

             A variant in Second Peter 1:10 – one that is undetectable in the SBL-GNT – shows that some scribes were not immune to contributing to the role of human effort in maintaining salvation.  During the Protestant Reformation, the Byzantine Greek text of this chapter was used to show that Peter, like Paul, affirmed that the salvation comes as a gift of God (1:2), and that nothing we do can ever add to what Christ has done, as the Spirit impels each faithful individual to diligently pursue virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love.  But long before Martin Luther was born, a form of verse 10 existed which emphasized that good works contribute to the confidence of this soul.

Papyrus 72

             The Byzantine text of Second Peter and the modern text of NA/UBS read precisely the same.  In the Harklean Group – a small cluster of medieval manuscripts – there is a longer reading.  Before telling you what it is, the significance of the Harklean Group should be understood.  Why are these relative few, relatively late, manuscripts important?  Because they echo, in the General Epistles, a form of text that is virtually as early as our earliest surviving manuscripts of that category of books.  That is, although the manuscripts in the Harklean Group (GA 429 614 1505 1611 2138 2412 and 2495, with core members listed in boldprint) are medieval, they echo an ancient ancestor.  (The term “Harklean” is due to the close agreement between their text and a text used as an exemplar by Thomas of Harkle when he revised the Syriac Peshitta around the year 616 using Greek copies at the Enaton monastery that was near Alexandria, Egypt.)

          

Jude v. 3 in Sinaiticus

            How ancient?  Consider the text of Codex Sinaiticus (ﬡ, 01) in the third verse of the Epistle of Jude:  after the normal mention of the salvation common among believers, it adds “και ζωης” (“and life”).    The inclusion of σωτηρίας is established via its inclusion in P72, 02 (Alexandrinus), 03 (Vaticanus), 018 020 049 056 0142 and the overwhelming majority of minuscules including 1 6 18 69 81 323 630 1739 and the family 35 and Textus Receptus forms of the text.  However the Harklean Group members 1611 2138 1505 2495 uniquely do not include σωτηρίας and have (after κοινης ημων in 1611 2138, and after κοινης υμων in 1505 2495) ζωης.  This evidence implies that prior to the production of Sinaiticus in the mid-300s, a scribe had an exemplar with σωτηρίας and an exemplar with ζωης and, rather than choose between the two, embraced them both and created the longer reading, a conflation, displayed in Sinaiticus.

Second Peter 1:10 in Sinaiticus

          In Second Peter 1:10 the Harklean Group also supports, after σπουδάσατε, the words ἵνα διὰ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων βεβαίαν ὑμῶν τὴν κλῆσιν καὶ ἐκλογὴν ποιεῖσθε.  The words in bold print mean “through good works.”  The form of Second Peter 1:10 is supported by the Vulgate – Codex Amiatinus reads “Quapropter fratres magis agite ut per bona opera certam vestram vocationem et electionem faciatis:  haec enim facientes non peccabitis aliquando.”  Διὰ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων is also read by Sinaiticus and is supported by Lectionary 60 and the Sahidic, Armenian, and the Harklean Syriac versions.  

            Considering the diversity of witnesses for both readings this contest is much closer than the UBS Committee’s “A” rating would suggest.   I regard the shorter reading as original, and the early expansion as an example of the Western tendency to over-emphasize the meaning of the adequately clear original.  But if one were to prefer the longer reading as original – which, as far as I know, only Lachmann and diehard champions of the Vulgate have done – then we are looking at a reading which scribes in more than one transmission-line excised due to a desire to discourage the interpretation the idea that good works are necessary for assurance of salvation.

Aphrahat and the Final Section of the Gospel of Mark

Aphrahat (The Persian Sage)

            Aphrahat the Persian Sage, also known as Aphraates (280-345), was a church leader in Syria who wrote a lengthy series of sermons in acrostic form, called Demonstrations – one composition for each of the 22 letters of the Syriac alphabet. This was completed by A.D. 337,  and was supplemented by a 23rd homily in 345. Aphrahat was a contemporary of Eusebius of Caesarea, and from a distance he heard of the spiritual transition of those in charge of the government of the Roman Empire (from prohibiting Christianity as Diocletian did, to embracing it, as Constantine I ostensibly did).

            Among the implications of this is that neither the Sinaitic Syriac MS, nor the Curetonian Syriac MS, nor the Syriac Peshitta (if its Gospels-text is correctly assigned to the late 300s), constitutes the earliest extant Syriac evidence regarding how the Gospel of Mark concluded, for Aphraates lived before any of those witnesses were produced.  It may be worthwhile to draw attention here to Aphrahat’s testimony regarding the final portion of Mark (which has been utterly ignored by many commentators).

            In the 17th paragraph of Demonstration One: Of Faith, Aphrahat wrote, “And when our Lord gave the sacrament of baptism to His apostles, He said to them, ‘ Whosoever believes and is baptized shall live, and whosoever believes not shall be condemned.’”

            Thus Aphraates used what we know as Mark 16:16 in Syriac in 337.  He expressed no doubts about it whatsoever.  (Non-Syriac-reading English readers may consult, to see the context, John Gwynn’s English translation of Demonstration One, (in Volume 13 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series), which I rely upon for these quotations.)

            At the end of the same paragraph, Aphrahat writes, “He also said thus, ‘This shall be the sign for those who believe; they shall speak with new tongues and shall cast out demons, and they shall place their hands on the sick and they shall be made whole.’”  Although the passage is quoted very imprecisely (notice the absence of any reference to the signs being done “in my name,” and the absence of any reference to serpent-handling and poison-drinking), what Aphrahat quotes here is clearly based on Christ’s words in Mark 16:16-18.

            Aphrahat is regarded as a frequent user of Tatian’s Diatessaron, but his quotation is significantly different from the passage found in the Arabic Diatessaron.  The differences may be very probably attributed to the later conformation of the Arabic Diatessaron to the text of the Syriac Peshitta.  (The Arabic Diatessaron is itself an echo of a Syriac source.)

            Let us accept, for the moment, that Aphrahat was utilizing the Diatessaron when he wrote the 17th paragraph of Demonstration One: Of Faith.  In which case, we have here, embedded in Aphrahat’s writings, a quotation from a source no later than 175 (namely, Tatian’s Diatessaron).  (To put this another way:  Aphrahat quoted from Tatian's Diatessaron, which - if the completion of the Gospel of Mark is correctly assigned to the year 68 - was made by Tatian less than 110 years after the autograph of the Gospel of Mark was written, using copies of the Gospels earlier than any complete copies that have survived to the present day.]

            (Not to detour, but, another neglected author, the Armenian known as Eznik of  Golb (also known as Yesnik Koghbats‘i), also used Mark 16:17-18 in the first half of the 400s, writing in his composition De Deo (a.k.a. “Against the Sects”) 1:25, “And again, ‘Here are signs of believers:  they will dislodge demons, and they will take serpents into their hand, and they will drink a deadly poison and it will not cause harm.’”  This appears to be a citation that Eznik made from memory.  Notice, by the way, Eznik's inclusion of the words "into their hand" in v. 18.)

            Some additional evidence that Aphrahat, writing in Syriac, was using Tatian’s Diatessaron is found in Demonstration 2, paragraph 20, where he states that Jesus “showed the power of his greatness when he was cast down from a high place into a valley, yet was not harmed.”   This statement is not based on anything in the canonical Gospels as we know them; it is based on a quirky rendering of Luke 4:29-30 which recurs when the episode is described by other writers who used the Diatessaron. (It is not in the Arabic Diatessaron; at this point the Arabic Diatessaron’s exemplar has been, again, conformed to the text of the Peshitta).   A few decades after Aphrahat wrote, Ephrem Syrus wrote (I rely on others for the English translation), “When they cast him down from the hill, he flew in the air.”  (More has been written about this interesting detail (by the late William Petersen for instance), but I focus here upon Aphrahat’s testimony.)

            If it is granted that Aphrahat wrote Demonstration 23 in 345 (shortly before he died), then he must have had more than Tatian’s Diatessaron to work with, because (a) it is generally granted that the Diatessaron, as produced by Tatian, did not include Jesus’ genealogies, and (b) in Demonstration 23, paragraph 20, Jesus’ genealogy is quoted as it appears in Matthew 1:13 to 16.

            Whether or not Aphrahat is regarded as the author of Demonstration 23, Aphrahat was definitely the author of Demonstration One: Of Faith and thus, his testimony from 337 (prior to the production of Codex Sinaiticus) provides us with a window on a Syriac text that existed in his lifetime.

             (A good transcript of Aphrahat’s Demonstrations 1-10, produced in 474, exists today as British Museum Add. MS. 17182.  The same MS includes Demonstrations 11-23, written down in 510.)

            Aphrahat has been confused with another Syriac author, Jacob of Nisibis, partly because Aphrahat took the name “Jacob” at his baptism.  (Jacob of Nisibis was among those who attended the Council of Nicea in 325.)  Although John Burgon, in 1871, pointed out that Aphahat’s Demonstrations were wrongly attributed to Jacob of Nisibis (Burgon pointed this out on p. 26 of The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel of Mark, calling Aphrahat “Aphraates”).  Nevertheless Jacob of Nisibis was named in the textual apparatus of the first edition of the UBS Greek New Testament (1966).  This may be an indication of how little attention was paid to John Burgon by the compilers of the Nestle-Aland NTG and the UBS GNT in its first and second editions.

            Rather than replace Jacob of Nisibis’ name with Aphrahat’s name, the textual apparatus for Mark 16:17-18 in the fourth and fifth editions of the UBS GNT features neither.  For those who rely on the textual apparatus of the UBS GNT4 and UBS GNT5, it is as if Aphrahat’s support of Mark 16:16-18 in Demonstration One, instead of being changed from an incorrect identification (as Jacob of Nisibis) to a correct identification (as Aphrahat), has blinked out of existence.   

            No doubt this was merely an editorial oversight; certainly Carlo Martini and Kurt Aland and Bruce Metzger would never have thought of attempting to evade or silence an important voice such as Aphrahat’s.  (I would like to imagine that Aphrahat’s name did not appear in the textual apparatus of NA27 simply because there was not enough room on the page to include it – but, alas, I cannot, because half of the page of NA27 that features Mark 16:17b-20 is entirely blank.  The editors of NA27 found room to include GA 2427 (which has turned out to be a forgery made in the 1800s) in the apparatus for Mark 16:18, and GA 579 (from the 1200s), but somehow they did not find room to include Aphrahat’s name.)  (A novice reader, unfamiliar with the complex nuances of evidence-citation and apparatus-making, could get the impression that the selection of witnesses in the apparatuses of the Nestle-Aland NTG and UBS GNT has been somewhat biased.)  

            The GNT’s current editors are welcome to express their penitence (or serve as proxy-voices for previous editors) by including Aphrahat’s name in the textual apparatus of the yet-to-be-released 6^th edition.  Perhaps someone by then will still dare to rely on such an unreliable source for patristic evidence as the UBS GNT’s textual apparatus has been.

            (A final note about Aphrahat:  he believed strongly that baptism is central in conversion – that is, he did not treat it as an optional afterthought.  In his Demonstration 6, Concerning Monks – in which Aphrahat’s writing seeps with Scripture-references like a dead skunk smells like skunk – he writes, in the 14th paragraph, the following (translated into English from Syriac):  “Remember the warning that the apostle [St. Paul in Ephesians 4:30] gives us:  ‘Grieve not the Holy Spirit whereby ye have been sealed unto the day of redemption.’  For from baptism do we receive the Spirit of Christ.  For in that hour in which the priests invoke the Spirit, the heavens open and it descends and moves upon the waters [cf. Gen. 1:2].  And those that are baptized are clothed in it.  For the Spirit stays aloof from all that are born of the flesh, until they come to the new birth by water, and then they receive the Holy Spirit.  For in the first birth they are born with an animal soul which is created within man and is not thereafter subject to death, as he said, ‘Adam became a living soul.’  [Cf. Gen. 2:7] But in the second birth, that through baptism, they received the Holy Spirit from a particle of the Godhead, and it is not again subject to death.”)

  

  

Video Lecture: Early Versions of the New Testament

Lecture 4:  Early Versions of the NT

The lecture-series Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism continues at YouTube:

Lecture 04: Early Versions of the New Testament

(20 minutes) With captions!

An outline:

Alexander Souter: “The history of the New Testament text cannot be understood without a knowledge of the history of the church.”

          Part of that history is the history of the early translations of the New Testament text.  Today we are taking a closer look at some of the early versions of the New Testament – especially early translations of the Gospels. 

This involves mainly the study of early translations into Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, but there are other important versions of the New Testament too.

The Old Latin, also called the Vetus Latine:

          Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (180) - A transcript of a trial during a persecution in Carthage:  during the trial:

          Saturninus the governor:   “What sort of things do you have in that case of yours?”

          Speratus (Christian):  “Books and letters of Paul, a righteous man.”

“The Old Latin” might be a misleading term.

Different Latin transmission-lines:      African, European, Italian, & Spanish.       

Do they go back to one Latin text?    Or to one Greek text?              

Mark 9:15 – gaudentes, “rejoicing” instead of “running”  

Two Christian writers around the late 300s and early 400s – Jerome and Augustine – said that there were many Latin versions, with a range of quality.

Once-used Greek words – translated the same way?

The earliest Latin Gospels-text tends to be “Western.”    

Text types –

Western:  tweaked to increase clarity in a particular way, like the text of the Gospels and Acts in Codex Bezae.

Byzantine:  agreeing with the text that was in dominant use in the vicinity of Byzantium (Constantinople).

Alexandrian:  agreeing with the text of Codex Vaticanus (and allies).

Caesarean (Gospels):  agreeing with the text of family-1

In witnesses with a Western form of the text, the Gospels often appear in this order:      Mt – Jn – Lk – Mk.

Vulgate:  Gospels:  by Jerome.               

        Gregory the Great (590 to 604):  still the “new” version.          

But it’s not as if we can pick up any Vulgate manuscript and expect to see every reading that Jerome adopted. Some Old Latin readings were mixed into Vulgate texts.

There were later revisions:   Alcuin.  Theodulf. Others.

The representation of Old Latin witnesses: 

Old identification-method: witnesses are represented by lower case letters, by lower case letters with superscripted numerals, and by short abbreviations.

New identification-method: Beuron numbers, so-called because this method was developed by members of the Vetus Latina Institut in Europe.

Gospels manuscripts have numbers 1-49;    Acts/Catholics/Revelation are 50-74;

Pauline Epistles are 75-99.

A lot of Old Latin witnesses are only partly Old Latin, side-by-side with Vulgate texts. 

Production-dates don’t always mean anything.

Coptic:  different transmission-lines in different dialects.

Sahidic:  Barcelona codices. –                

Alexandrian Gospels    

Sahidic version in Acts 27:37 – agrees w/B. 

(Suggests a close relationship.)          

Codex T:  “diglot” – Sahidic and Greek side by side.               

The Western text was also in Egypt:

          G67:  Acts in “Middle Egyptian.”

Middle Egyptian:  basically three manuscripts:

          G67, Codex Schoyen 2650 (Matthew), and the Schiede Codex (Matthew)

Lycopolitan:  the Qua Codex (300s).

Proto-Bohairic:  Papyrus Bodmer III (300s).   Includes the Gospel of John.  Alexandrian. 

          Strange treatment of sacred names in John 1:1 & 1:18.

Bohairic:  Huntington MS 17 (from 1174)

Achmimic: incomplete.  Mt, Lk,  Jn, Romans, Gal., James, Jude.

Fayyumic:  fragmentary

Syriac:  different transmission-lines.

          Tatian’s Diatessaron. In Syria, this appears to have been the dominant Gospels-based text until the Peshitta emerged (late 300s?).  The Diatessaron did not have the

genealogies. But Aphrahat apparently has something else, with genealogies.

Old Syriac:  Sinaitic Syriac.  Curetonian Syriac.  Codex at St. Catherine’s, Syriac 37.

Peshitta:  usually agrees with the Byzantine Text.

         Not included:  Second Peter, Second John, Third John, Jude, and Revelation.

Peshitta MSS of special interest:                 

Codex Phillips 1388               

        B.L. Add MS 14470               

        Rabbula Gospels           

Philoxenian – includes the books not in the Peshitta

Harklean Syriac:    Echoes an ancient Greek text in the General

Epistles.      Extremely literal. Finished in 616 – using ancient MSS near Alexandria.

Has its own limited apparatus in the margin.

Palestinian Aramaic – mainly extant in lectionaries. Has the story of the adulteress at the end of John.

Other Versions:

Gothic:  mid-300s. 

Main witness:  Codex Argenteus.  Wulfilas – an Arian.  Was he an Arian when he did the translation-work?  We don’t know.

Armenian and Georgian

         Armenia:  first Christian nation (early 300s)         

         Mesrop:  made the Armenian alphabet, and translated the Bible.

         Thought to have a basis in a Syriac text.  (Maybe some Diatessaron influence?)

         First edition – finished c. 411.

Revision – 430s.  Based on a Greek codex from Constantinople.

800s and 900s = Old for Armenian.           

Late revisions (esp. in Cilician Armenia) toward the Byz. Text (Nerses of Lambron) and toward the Vulgate (1100/1200s).

There are different kinds of script used for writing Armenian:

          erkat’agir = iron letters (because of the ink?) – has a better chance of not

being a medieval revision.
          bolorgir = rounder and smaller

          notrgir = cursive (later)

         shghagir = modern slanted cursive

The older an Armenian Gospels MS is, the more likely it appears to be based on a text that was like the text of f¹.             

The same is true of Old Georgian Gospels-MSS’ textual character.

Georgian:  translated from Armenian. But some Georgian witnesses are older than most  Armenian witnesses.

         Oldest substantial Gospels-MS: Adysh MS:  897 A.D.

         The Old Georgian is an echo of an echo, but the voice is old.

         The Old Georgian also goes back to the 400s.

         George of Athos:  early 1000s – revision of the Gospels in     Georgian.  His revision made the Georgian text more Byzantine.

         Revelation may have a different kind of base-text than the rest.

Armenian and Georgian copyists went all over the place – Egypt, Jerusalem, etc.

Some quirk-readings may have been acquired from a particular locale.

Ethiopic (Ge’ez)

                   Christianity in Ethiopia:          

                   Beta Samati site – church in the early 300s.

                   Chrysostom (380s) – mentioned that the Gospel of John had been translated into Ethiopic.

                   Consistently translated from Greek.

Garima Gospels:  produced in the 500s.  And it’s fancy.

Most Ethiopic MSS:  1300s or later.           

          Tends to match up with the Peshitta – mainly Byzantine.         

          Does not have the PA.

          There are over 500 Ethiopic NT MSS.

          John seems less Byzantine.

Arabic

          First layer:  600s or even earlier.

         Najran, in southern Arabia:  a Christian center in the 400s.

Base-texts of Arabic versions echo families of texts.

Some families echo the Peshitta, but at least two echo Greek texts.

0136/0137 – Greek-Arabic diglot (frag., Mt)

Sinai Arabic MSS 8 and 28 = Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus (CSA)

Families A and C echo Greek texts (more than 70% Byzantine).

Family B in Lk. 16:19:  the rich man's name:  Nineveh (comp. Sahidic and P75)

Old Church Slavonic - 800s. 

Glagolithic alphabet, and Cyrillic alphabet.

Nubian - A Christmastime lectionary and assorted inscriptions.         

Caucasian Albanian - New Finds (1975) at Saint Catherine’s Monastery

Takeaway #1:       

Early versions can be extremely valuable to track the scope of readings and groups of readings. 

Q:  What was the early range of rival readings?

Takeaway #2:

Early versions shouldn’t be asked to do things that they can’t do.  Sometimes, articles are not transferable.  Sometimes word-order cannot be expected to reflect the Greek word-order.  Some languages don’t have exact parallels for the nuances of Greek.

Takeaway #3:

Early versions should be considered with an awareness of stages in their histories. 

Early versions’ testimonies should generally be boiled down to reflect the history of the text of the version, keeping in mind when and where the versional text was revised, in cases where this can be observed.

Takeaway #4:

Instead of thinking of the versions uniformly as “Versions “of the New Testament,”      early versions should generally be separated into Gospels, Acts, Pauline Epistles, General Epistles, and Revelation.

 

 

Codex Batboy

            Remember BatBoy?  BatBoy was not an assistant at baseball games; he was an imaginary part-human, part-bat creature featured in the tabloid Weekly World News.  From time to time (and especially around Christmastime and Eastertime), stories circulate online about a manuscript which has as much credibility as BatBoy.  I call this manuscript Codex Batboy.  Since 2009, it has occasionally been presented as if it shakes the foundations of Christianity, worries the Pope, vindicates Islam, etc., etc.  Here are a few samples of the sensationalistic headlines of stories mentioning this manuscript:

            “1,500 year-old Syriac Bible found in Ankara, Turkey:  Vatican in shock!”

            “Secret £14million Bible in which ‘Jesus predicts coming of Prophet Muhammad’ unearthed in Turkey”

            “Jesus Foresaw Prophet Mohammad’s Arrival in Old Bible Found in Turkey.”

             What’s this all about? Islamic writers are attempting to publicize a late medieval text known as the Gospel of Barnabas in order to promote their belief (based on Quran 4:157-158) that Jesus was not crucified.  (Those wishing to learn more about the so-called Gospel of Barnabas – not to be confused with the second-century composition known as the Epistle of Barnabas – can read about it at Muslim Hope, Arabic Bible Outreach Ministry, Amina Inloes’ article at Academia.edu, and UnchangingWord.  It is certainly a late medieval forgery.

            The manuscript in the photographs that accompany these stories has not been shown to have any connection to the Gospel of Barnabas, and the Islamic propaganda-writers do not show that the Gospel of Barnabas is contained in the manuscript.  They mention that there is a text called the Gospel of Barnabas, and then they mention that Barnabas was one of the associates of the apostles Paul, apparently hoping that when readers see these statements side by side, they will assume that the historical person known as Barnabas had something to do with the composition of the composition called the Gospel of Barnabas.  The writers must also hope that readers will assume that the manuscript contains the text that they say it contains.
            Only one or two pages of the manuscript are pictured, and then the writers move on to describe the contents of the Gospel of Barnabas; along the way the writers introduce all kinds of ridiculous claims, prefaced with empty phrases such as “It has been reported,” (indeed it has been reported by liars) and “It is believed” (indeed it has been believed by the gullible) and “It is thought” (indeed it is so thought by the uninformed).   

            A report which appeared in the British publication Daily Mail in 2016 spread the claim that the manuscript featured in such reports is a “1,500-year-old book.”  The article went on to include the same Islamic propaganda found in earlier reports, such as the sentence, “It rejects the ideas of the Holy Trinity and the Crucifixion and reveals that Jesus predicted the coming of the Prophet Muhammad.”  Setting aside the propaganda, is there anything to the claim that the manuscript in question, whatever it may contain, is 1,500 years old?

            Back in February of 2012, Peter BetBasoo and Ashur Giwargis made some relevant observations about this in an article for the Assyrian International News Agency (also at the PaleoJudaica blog and at OrthoChristian.org).  BetBasoo and Giwargis noted that the inscription in one of the photographs says, b-shimmit maran paish kteewa aha ktawa al idateh d-rabbaneh d-dera illaya b-ninweh b'sheeta d-alpa w-khamshamma d-maran – that is, “In the name of our Lord, this book is written on the hands of the monks of the high monastery in Nineveh, in the 1,500th year of our Lord.”  Instead of supporting the idea that this manuscript is 1,500 years old, it contains a colophon which dates its production to the year 1500.  

            BetBasoo and Ashur Giwargis also observed that the colophon uses a word to describe the manuscript that traditionally is not used to describe Biblical texts:  “The bottom sentence uses the word ktawa (“book”) to refer to the book, but in Assyrian the Bible is never referred to as a “book.”  One says awreta (Old Testament), khdatta (New Testament), or ktawa qaddeesha (holy book). Given this, since no one has seen the inside of this “Bible,” we cannot be sure if it is in fact a Bible.”

            The Islamic propaganda masquerading as news-articles about this manuscript, calling it a “1,500-year-old Bible,” is incorrect:  if the colophon is accurate and the manuscript is not a forgery of some kind, the manuscript is only about 500 years old.  

            Also, Syriac specialist Dr. Peter Williams briefly chimed in on this subject at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog in 2012.  Williams expressed his suspicion that the manuscript is a forgery; he also observed that above the colophon there is text from the closing verses of Matthew as they appear in the ordinary Syriac text of the Peshitta translation.  So there is at least a little basis for suspecting that instead of containing the Gospel of Barnabas, this manuscript – if it is not a forged or tampered document – is a damaged copy of the Syriac text of the Gospel of Matthew.

            Codex Batboy is not the only item to recently receive sensationalistic claims.  An entirely different manuscript was reported to have been confiscated by police in Turkey in 2015.  It too, received sensationalistic headlines.  I advise that if you encounter online stories about manuscripts found in Turkey with text written in gold letters, with an abundance of claims but a paucity of evidence, set your belief-o-meter to “Extreme Skepticism.”