Video Lecture: The Textus Receptus

Lecture 10:  The Textus Receptus

Lecture #10 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is now available to watch at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tb1N4_k1w .

In this 21-minute video, I describe the development of the Textus Receptus, the text that dominated the 1500s, and from which the New Testament was translated in the King James Version.

An extract:

            Today, we are looking into the background of what is known as the Textus Receptus.  In Latin, “Textus receptus” simply means “the received text.”  There are two ways to define the Textus Receptus.

            The simpler way is to say that the Textus Receptus is the base-text of the New Testament in the King James Version, also known as the Authorized Version, which was published in 1611 and subsequently tidied up in 1629 to address printing errors and similar glitches. 

            In 1633, the Elzevir family printers issued an edition of the Greek New Testament that was accompanied by a reassuring statement that its reader had “the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.”   This was the first Greek New Testament that one could say called itself the Received Text.

            But for the most part, the Greek text of 1633 published by the Elzevirs was not drastically different from several earlier editions which had been used by earlier translators, in the 1500s.  A variety of editions of the Greek New Testament were in circulation before 1633, but three editors stand out above the rest:  Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza.

             Desiderius Erasmus, born in 1467, grew up in an environment of scholarly challenges to sacred traditions.  The Latin Vulgate had acquired a de facto status as the authoritative text of the New Testament in western Europe, but in the 1400s, a scholar named Lorenzo Valla, who died ten years before Erasmus was born, had used Greek manuscripts to draw into question a variety of renderings in the text of the Vulgate that was current in his time.  Valla made notes upon the Greek New Testament, and pointed out various discrepancies between the meaning of the Greek text and the meaning of the Vulgate text. 

            Some of Valla’s observations eventually had great significance.  In Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” nailed to the church door at Wittenburg, Germany in 1517, his first three points focused on the meaning of repentance.  In this respect, Luther was echoing a clarification that Valla had already made in the 1450s about the meaning of the Greek text.

             Valla never published his notes about Vulgate readings that needed to be improved to correspond better with the Greek text.  But in 1504, when Erasmus found a manuscript that contained Valla’s Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum – Notes on the New Testament – it inspired him to make the study of the Greek text of the New Testament his life’s work.     Erasmus traveled extensively, studying in Italy, in France, and in England, investigating New Testament manuscripts wherever they could be found, including the unusual minuscule 69.  Erasmus was also very well-acquainted with the works of Jerome, and the patristic writer known as Ambrosiaster.  

            In 1514 and again in 1515, the subject of improving the Vulgate, using the Greek text, came up in conversations he had with his friend Johann Froben, who ran a distinguished printing-house in the city of Basel, Switzerland. 

            In July of 1515, Erasmus began the final stage of making a Greek text of the New Testament, using a small collection of Greek manuscripts at Basel.   The uncial Codex Basiliensis, Codex E, a.k.a. 07, produced in the 700s, was at Basel at this time, but there is no evidence that Erasmus ever used it.  Instead, the manuscripts housed at Basel that Erasmus used were a collection of minuscules:

Codex 1.  This manuscript contains the New Testament except Revelation;    it is an important member of family-1.

Codex 2 contains the Gospels.

Codex 2105 contains the Pauline Epistles. 

Codex 2815 contains Acts and all Epistles (2^ap).  (not from John of Ragusa)

Codex 2816 – containing Acts and all Epistles (4^ap)

Codex 2817 – contains the Pauline Epistles (7^p)

There was no Greek manuscript of Revelation in the library at Basel, so he borrowed a manuscript of Revelation, minuscule 2814, from his colleague Johann Reuchlin, the great-uncle of the influential Reformer Phillip Melanchthon. 

             These were not the only sources used by Erasmus for his first edition, but they were the manuscripts he had on hand at Basel.

            What were Greek New Testament manuscripts doing at Basel?  Most of them had been donated to the Dominican monastery there by Ivan Stojkovic, also known as John of Ragusa, in the 1400s.  Before his death in 1443, he had joined a vigorous effort, led by Basil Bessarion, to re-unite the church.  As a means of showing what the Eastern churches had to offer to churches in the West, he brought some manuscripts to Europe from Constantinople, in the 1430s.    

            Equipped with a familiarity of various manuscripts in various scholarly centers in Britain and continental Europe, and equipped with the manuscripts at Basel, Erasmus hammered out the first edition of the Greek New Testament, confirming his Latin translation alongside it, with explanatory notes after it.  On March 1, 1516, Novum Instrumentum became the first Greek New Testament available for purchase from Froben.

            Another Greek New Testament had already been printed:  the Greek New Testament was part of the Complutensian Polyglot, a text of the entire Bible, printed in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, prepared under the supervision of Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, with help from Lopez de Stunica.  “Complutensian” means that it was made in Complutum, another name for the city of Alcala, near Madrid, Spain.  “Polyglot” means that its text appeared in several languages.  The New Testament portion of the Complutensian Polyglot was printed in 1514, but it was not formally approved for ecclesiastical publication until 1522.

             The first edition of Novum Instrumentum encountered some resistance.  Some readers saw Erasmus’ Latin translation not as a corrective supplement to the Vulgate, but as a rival.  Others asked, why settle for the echo in Latin when you can hear the voice in Greek?  Why drink from a dirty stream when you can drink from the fountain?  Erasmus made a second edition, Novum Testamentum, in 1519, correcting many of the printing errors that had marred the first edition, and improving his Latin translation. 

            Some critics accused Erasmus of displaying negligence by failing to include a reference to the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit in First John 5:7, a reading in the Vulgate text that was very common in the early 1500s.  Erasmus replied that he had no basis for such a Greek text, because he had found no Greek manuscript that had those words at that place:  if he had possessed a Greek manuscript with that passage, he wrote, then he would have included them, but since he had no such thing, no one could fairly charge him with negligence for paying attention to his manuscripts.

                In 1522, Erasmus released a third edition, refining the Greek compilation, his Latin translation, and the annotations.  He acquired a little more manuscript-evidence at the library of St. Donatian’s College at Bruges, and he was given access to the Golden Gospels of Henry III, an ornate Vulgate Gospels codex produced around the year 1000. 

            By this time, he had been informed of the existence of a manuscript in Britain – now known as minuscule 61, Codex Montfortianus – that contained the passage known as the Comma Johanneum in First John 5:7, and so he included the phrase in the third edition.  In 1521, Erasmus was also informed by Paul Bombasius, who oversaw the Vatican Library at that time, about the existence of Codex Vaticanus, and about Vaticanus’ testimony against the Comma Johanneum.  Erasmus had not explicitly promised to include the passage, but he did so anyway.  To not include it, now that it had been shown that at least one Greek manuscript supported it, would have put him in a position that would have been difficult to defend. 

            A fourth edition was issued in 1527.  By this time, Erasmus had become acquainted with the Complutensian Polyglot, and he made some changes to the Greek text as a result, especially in Revelation. 

             Also, Erasmus was informed a little more about the text of Codex Vaticanus, thanks to some correspondence with Juan Sepulveda, who was at Rome at that time.  But despite Sepulveda’s praise of the manuscript, Erasmus casually dismissed its testimony, supposing that it was one of a group of Greek manuscripts that were adjusted to agree with a Latin text.

            Finally, a fifth edition was issued in 1535, one year before the death of Erasmus. 

            All this time, Erasmus took all comers in defense of his compilation, vigorously responding to criticisms from friend and foe, including Stunica, who had worked on the Complutensian Polyglot.  Erasmus found it convenient to repeat the gist of the answer that Lorenzo Valla had prepared against those whom he had anticipated would accuse him of tampering with established tradition:  Valla had written, “If I am correcting anything, I am not correcting Sacred Scripture, but rather its translation.  In doing so I am not being insolent toward Scripture, but rather pious, and I am doing nothing more than translating better than the earlier translator.  Therefore, if my translation is correct, that is what ought to be called Sacred Scripture, not his.”

            Erasmus also explained his predicament by telling a story about a priest who somehow had gotten used to saying “mumpsimus,” which is not a real word, in the Latin Mass.  When another clergyman informed him that the correct word is “sumpsimus,” he replied, “You can keep your new-fangled sumpsimus; I want good old mumpsimus.”  This was Erasmus’ way of explaining that the fundamental question is not, “What are you used to?”, but, “What is original?”.

            Erasmus and Froben had been very much aware that thanks to the potential of the new technology of the printing press, their publication of the printed Greek New Testament had the potential to culminate in the ordinary person having the New Testament in his own language. In Paracelsis, the preface to his New Testament, Erasmus wrote that it was his desire that men and woman would know the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul in their own languages – that they would be known not only to the clergy but to farmers and fabric-makers, and that they would be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens.

            Earlier in the 1400s, before Erasmus was even born, another scholar, named Giannozzo Manetti, had compiled a Greek base-text and translated it into Latin – but no one had used it.  The text of Erasmus’ second edition, however, was obtained by Martin Luther, and when an opportunity came, Luther definitely used it:  before the end of September 1522, Luther had translated the Greek New Testament into German.    

            William Tyndale, an English scholar, gained access to a copy of Luther’s German New Testament, and then he acquired a copy of the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament.  Tyndale finished translating this into English before the end of 1525.  It was reprinted in 1526. 

            Newly produced unauthorized English Bibles were highly illegal in England at the time, and most copies of Tyndale’s English New Testament were burned whenever they were found.  William Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and was eventually captured.  In 1536, he was executed.  His last recorded words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

            By 1539, the Great Bible, which tended to echo Tyndale’s English New Testament, was being openly distributed in England.

             Jacques Lefèvre, known as Stapulensis, oversaw the translation of the Vulgate New Testament into French, in stages, consulting Erasmus’ work as a secondary source.  His printed French New Testament was published in 1523.  He was extremely influential in the Protestant Reformation in other respects, although, like Erasmus, he never officially left the Roman Catholic Church.  Stapulensis’ translation of the New Testament was adjusted in a more Greek-dependent direction by Robert Olivetan, a cousin of John Calvin, and it was later revised again by Theodore Beza.

            With French, German, and English New Testaments already in print, the next generation of textual critics was led by Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus.  Stephanus’ skill in printing and typography was at least as good as his expertise in textual criticism, and after publishing Greek New Testaments in 1546 and 1549, he outdid himself in the edition of 1550, his third edition, also called the Editio Regia, or “Royal Edition.” 

            In this publication, Stephanus included a textual apparatus, providing alternate readings from the Complutensian Polyglot and from an assortment of 15 Greek manuscripts, including several manuscripts in the royal library, which included the Gospels-Codex L, 019, and minuscule 6.  Codex Bezae, now usually assigned to the 400s, was also cited.

            Codex Bezae was called Codex Bezae because it was the property of Theodore Beza.  Born in 1519, Beza became an influential ally of John Calvin during the Reformation.  From the 1550s up to 1598, Beza issued multiple editions of the Greek New Testament.  He utilized not only Codex Bezae, but also the uncial Codex Claromontanus.  Nevertheless, his compilation did not drastically veer away from the standard set by Erasmus and Stephanus.  Beza’s 1598 edition is probably the closest thing there is to a pre-KJV base-text of the KJV New Testament.

            While Protestants were producing translations in several European languages, based on several editions of the Greek New Testament, Roman Catholic scholars tended to emphasize the Latin Vulgate.  In the mid-1500s, Nicholas Zegers attempted to filter mistakes out of the Vulgate text, on the basis of Greek readings.  But when the Rheims New Testament was published, in 1582, based on the Vulgate, it was prefaced by an explanation of why the Vulgate was being translated instead of the Greek text. 

            The Preface to the Rheims New Testament called the Protestants’ Greek text hopelessly corrupt.  Some of its readings had been invented by the editors, and the compilations did not always agree with each other; examples of inconsistency were cited from Mark 7:3, Luke 3:36, Second Timothy 2:14, James 5:12, Revelation 11:2, and Romans 12:11,  where Stephanus’ text meant, “serving the time,” and Erasmus’ text meant, “serving the Lord.”   

            Erasmus was indeed guilty of putting some conjectures into his text.  In Acts 9:5-6, he made a harmonization in the Greek text, so as to make it resemble the parallel-passage in Acts 26.  And in James 4:2, instead of saying “you kill,” the second edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament read, “you are jealous.”  Erasmus believed that the Greek manuscripts he used contained a corruption at this point, and that their copyists had written a Greek word that means “you kill,” where James had written a similar Greek word that means “you are jealous.”

            Perhaps the most famous example of hypothetical reconstruction of the text without Greek manuscript support involved the last six verses of the book of Revelation.  The manuscript that Erasmus had borrowed from Johann Reuchlin, 2814, was damaged, and did not have this part of the the book, or the commentary that accompanied it.  Erasmus, in order to finish the first edition of his compilation, used Valla’s notes and a Latin Vulgate text to reconstruct the Greek text of verses 16-21.  He acknowledged in his annotations that he had done this.

            Erasmus reckoned that any shortcomings in his retro-translation could be corrected by using the Aldine Bible, an edition of the Greek Bible that was released in 1518 in Venice, Italy.  What Erasmus did not realize was that the New Testament in the Aldine Bible was dependent to a large extent upon his own compilation.

            Greek copies of Revelation were so rare, and Erasmus’ compilation was so widely accepted, that his retro-translation of Revelation 22:16-21 continued to be reprinted in one edition after another, including the reference to the “book” of life, instead of the tree of life, in the second half of verse 19.

            It was these editions, and the earlier English translations based upon them, that were consulted by the translators of the King James Version in 1604 to 1611.   There were some readings that were very poorly attested, such as the reading koinōnia in Ephesians 3:9, and there were some readings that had no Greek manuscript support at all, especially in Revelation.

            But for the most part, the Textus Receptus – whether one defines it as the base-text of the KJV, or as the multiple printed editions of the Greek New Testament prepared from 1516 to 1633 – is a good representative of the Byzantine Text of Matthew-Jude – and most of its readings can be found in manuscript evidence much older than the minuscule manuscripts upon which it was based.   In the Gospels, there is very little difference between the meaning of the text printed in the Textus Receptus, based on no more than 25 copies, and the meaning of the Byzantine Text found in 1,500 copies.  

             So, even though the Textus Receptus was initially compiled on the basis of relatively few manuscripts, and even though it has some readings that are only supported by a small minority of Greek manuscripts, and a few readings that are not supported by any Greek manuscripts at all, if you compare the Textus Receptus and the Nestle-Aland compilation at any given point in Matthew-Jude, it is the reading in the Textus Receptus, not the reading in Nestle-Aland, that will usually be supported by at least 85% of the relevant Greek manuscripts known today.

             Fast-forward to April of 1853. At Cambridge University, a young professor wrote about a text-critical project he intended to undertaken with another professor:  “Our object is to supply clergymen generally, schools, etc., with a portable Greek Testament, which shall not be disfigured with Byzantine corruptions.”  His name was Fenton John Anthony Hort.  God willing, his approach to the New Testament text, and his involvement in the Revised Version, will be the subject of our next lecture.

             In closing, to read more about the Greek text compiled in the 1500s, read pages 1-36 of Samuel Tregelles’ 1844 book An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament.

             Thank you.

 

 

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.

    

Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism - Lecture 1

At YouTube - NTTC Lecture 1

Some time ago, I pictured a series of lectures on New Testament textual criticism.  The first lecture in that series is now online:  Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism - Lecture 1.

Other titles in the planned series:

2.  What is a New Testament Witness?

3.  How to Make a Codex

4.  Major Patristic Writers and Early Versions

5.  25 Important Witnesses

6.  25 Weird Witnesses

7.  What Is a Lectionary?

8.  The Diatessaron

9.  The Stuff in the Margin

10.  Text-types:  Why Numbers Do Not Matter Much

11.  The Textus Receptus

12.  Textual Criticism Before Westcott & Hort (Part 1)

13.  Textual Criticism Before Westcott & Hort (Part 2)        

14.  Hort’s Theory of the Lucianic Recension

15.  The Revised Version:  Breaking the Rules

16.  Grenfell & Hunt Accidentally Eviscerate Hort’s Theory

17.  “What About Killing a Man?”

18.  Will English Bible Wars Solve Everything?    

19.  Misinformation Is Everywhere

20.  The Ending of Mark

21.  The Story of the Adulteress

22.  The Angel in the Garden

23.  (Students Pick Variant-Units to Examine)

24.  Close Contests (and Conjectural Emendation)

25.  Revisiting the Byzantine Text

This might take a while!

Here is an outline of Lecture 1:

1.  New Testament Textual Criticism:  What and Why?

 What is textual criticism?

The attempt to reconstruct the original contents of an ancient text.

This is a specialized field, with specialized terminology – jargon.

Some things that are just mentioned today will be covered in more detail in future lectures.

“Lower criticism” = focused on events which occurred after the production of the original document that contained the text.

"Higher criticism” = focused on events which occurred before the production of the original document that contained the text.

 “Criticism” = careful analysis.  

 Steps in the New Testament text-critical enterprise:

First, collect witnesses to the text:

Manuscripts:  New Testaments, Gospels, Praxapostolos – Acts + Epistles, Revelation

fragments

wpapyrus

wuncials/majuscules (big letters)

wminuscules (small letters),

Versions:  Coptic, Old Latin, Syriac, etc.

Patristic writings:  quotations, allusions

Lectionaries:  text arranged in segments for reading one segment at a time in church-services, throughout the year

Synaxarion:  church year, beginning on Easter, movable dates

Menologion, immovable, fixed dates (like, July 4^th).

 Talismans and inscriptions (amulets, grave-stones, etc.)

 Second, compare the witnesses.

          Shared error often indicates shared origin. 

          (Shared rare readings often indicate shared origin)

          Witnesses with shared errors can be collected into groups.

 Third, compare groups of witnesses, to do two things:

          Reconstruct the ancestor of all groups (and of all witnesses)

          An ancestor of a single group is a sub-archetype.

          Identify general scribal tendencies of each group.

          What are the predominant characteristics of each group’s text?

          Reconstruct a history of readings.  (When and where does a specific reading first appear in the extant evidence?)

 The ancestor of all witnesses in all groups is the archetype.

           Up to this point, textual criticism is a “soft science.”  It is not the kind of science that does not involve probabilities.  Textual criticism deals with observations – but because these are observations about the activities of copyists in past generations, these observations can only convey degrees of probability about the causes of what is observed in the evidence.  Up to this point textual criticism is nevertheless a science, not an art, because art involves construction, or creation, whereas on the path to the archetype, the textual critic who reaches the correct conclusions is engaged in reconstruction; he is not creating something that was not found in the evidence.

Fourth, make all necessary conjectural emendations to the archetype.   A conjectural emendation is a reading that is not found in the physical evidence, but which seems warranted by internal evidence.

Kirsopp Lake:  in New Testament textual criticism, “the work of conjectural emendation is very light, rarely necessary, and scarcely ever possible.”

Rarely necessary – or:  some would say that it is never necessary to introduce a conjectural emendation into the New Testament text.  This is not something assumed on the way toward the evidence; it is something observed on the way from the evidence.  There are some rare passages where there are understandable differences in the degree of confidence with which this idea is, or isn’t, maintained.

After all four stages are completed, as far as the evidence warrants, the result is the reconstructed autographic text, the text of the autograph:  the text as it appeared in the original documents.

If we aim for the archetype, then the text-critical enterprise will initially and mainly involve a study of scribal errors, and their causes, contrasted with rival readings, which are either the original reading, or else other scribal errors. 

All non-original readings fall into two categories:

Thoughtful/Intentional changes: 

Motivated by:

● A desire to augment/clarify the meaning of the original text.

         Rare vocabulary.  Rare è Easy

         Potential doctrinal complexity èSimplicity

                   Non-specific/vague è specific

                  ● Awareness of a different meaning in a version.

                  ● Gospels:  Awareness of a different meaning in a Harmony.

                             Justin Martyr:  three-gospel harmony.

                             Tatian:  the Diatessaron.

                  ● Liturgical clarity.

                              Who is speaking to whom?

                              Adaptations of passages used on special occasions

                 ● A desire to obscure the meaning of the original text.

                             The bad guys:  Marcion – M-a-r-c-i-o-n.  Adoptionists.     

                              

          Thoughtless/Careless/Accidental changes.

                   Spelling - Orthography.

                   Word-division.  The original Greek text was written in continuous uncial script, for the most part there were no spaces between words.

                   Dittography – writing twice what should be written once.

                   Haplography – writing once what should be written twice.

                   Periblepsis – skipping material because of homoeoarcton        (same beginnings) or homoeoteleuton (same endings) –  could involve a word, a phrase, a sentence, or even a small segment of text. 

                   Metathesis – reversals of letters

                   Confusion – mistaking similarly shaped letters. (Λ-Α-Δ, Γ-Π)

 

 Reading assignment: 

Æ Kirsopp Lake, The Text of the New Testament, chapter 1.  The Object and Method of Textual Criticism.

Æ Glossary of New Testament Textual Criticism (All three parts)