The Adulteress in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Church of the
Holy Sepulchre

         The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem has a long and distinguished history.  A church building on its site was built in the days of Constantine, and was destroyed by Persians in 614.  It was soon rebuilt, but it was set on fire in 841, and again in 935, and again in 966; finally it was thoroughly destroyed by Muslims in 1009.  In 1149, fifty years after the First Crusade, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been rebuilt and thoroughly remodeled.  It is essentially this medieval edifice, with various expansions, that can be visited today in Jerusalem.  Many Christian pilgrims and tourists to Jerusalem visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – including President and First Lady Trump, who visited there earlier this year (2017).

            In addition to all its cherished pilgrimage-sites, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is home to a small collection of New Testament manuscripts.  A Gospels-manuscript, GA 1358, is there; this manuscript used to be cited as if it supports the reading of Codex Bezae in Mark 1:41 (where Codex Bezae famously says that Jesus became furious , rather than that He was filled with compassion) – but in 2011, researcher Jeff Cate showed that the text of Mark 1:41 in 1358 has merely been conformed to the parallel account in Matthew, stating neither that Jesus was filled with compassion nor that He was angry.    

            The Library of Congress recently released microfilm page-views of GA 1358 – Naos Anastaseos 15.  This manuscript, about 1000 years old, contains not only the text of the four Gospels but also book-introductions by Cosmas Indicopleustes (a writer of the mid-500’s who is otherwise infamous for his belief that the earth is flat) – not just for Matthew, but also before Luke and before John.

            Here is a basic index of GA 1358:

            Beginning of Matthew.  Beginning of Mark.  Beginning of Luke.  Beginning of John.

            The pericope adulterae (καὶ ἀπῆλθεν, etc.) follows John 7:52.

            After the end of John, this manuscript features a brief summary of apostolic history, and a description of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ recorded in the Gospels. 

            The Naos Anastaseos (Sanctuary of the Resurrection) collection also includes nine Greek Gospels-lectionaries, most of which are very late, having been produced in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s.  Two of them, however – Naos Anastaseos 11 – Evangelion (made in the 1200’s) and Naos Anastaseos 9 (made in 1152) – are much older.

            Naos Anastaseos 9 – GA Lectionary 1033 – has some particularly interesting features which render it the most significant manuscript in the collection.  Its full-page picture of Mary and the Child Jesus is artistically notable, but of far more interest is its treatment of the pericope adulterae, that is, the story of the adulteress which is found in John 7:53-8:11.  This passage, famously absent from the Alexandrian manuscripts that serve as the primary New Testament base-text for most modern English translations (the ESV, NIV, NLT, etc.), is present in about 85% of the extant Greek manuscripts. 

            In one small group of manuscripts known as family-13 (also called the Ferrar group, in honor of William Hugh Ferrar, a researcher in the 1800’s who noted the close relationship of four of the main members of the group, minuscules 13, 69, 124, and 346), the story of the adulteress is not found in the Gospel of John; it is instead inserted in the Gospel of Luke after 21:38 (that is, at the end of chapter 21).  This dislocation of the pericope adulterae has been confidently asserted by many commentators to be evidence that it was a “floating” composition which copyists inserted at different locations.

Highlighted:
the listing for Oct. 8

            Naos Anastaseos 9 may shine some light on this subject.  Let’s look into its pages and see what we find. 

            In most continuous-text manuscripts of the Gospel of John, John 7:53-8:11 follows John 7:52.  Many manuscripts are supplemented by a lectionary-apparatus – rubrics and notes for the lector, explaining what each day’s Scripture-reading was, and where to find it (and, often, a phrase with which to start it).  Typically, in the lectionary-cycle, the annual Scripture-reading, or lection, for Pentecost, a major feast-day, begins at John 7:37, and continues to the end of 7:52, but instead of stopping there, the lector is instructed to jump ahead in the text to 8:12, and read that verse, and then conclude.

            Accordingly, in Naos Anastaseos 9, we see, in the lection for Pentecost (beginning on page-view 35), no indication of the existence of John 7:53-8:11 in the Pentecost-reading; John 7:52 is followed immediately by John 8:12; nothing separates the two verses except a normal cross-symbol which routinely serves as a pause-marker.

            When we look in the Menologion-section of Naos Anastaseos 9 for the lection for October 8 – the feast-day of Saint Pelagia, when John 8:3-11 was typically read – we do not find the pericope adulterae there either.  Instead, there is a listing which says that for the reading for St. Pelagia’s Day, seek the lection for April 1.  Turning, then, to the lection for April 1, we find the lection for Saint Mary the Egyptian – and, behold, there is the text of John 8:1-11.

The April 1 lection
(beginning)

            But this is not just any text of John 8:1-11.  It is almost exactly the text of John 8:1-11 that appears in Codex Λ (039), and it is very similar to the form of the pericope adulterae that appears in Luke in the family-13 manuscripts.  Codex Λ (039) is a Gospels-manuscript from the 800’s, containing Luke and John; each Gospel is accompanied by a note – the “Jerusalem Colophon,” which is found in 37 manuscripts – which states that its text has been cross-checked using the ancient manuscripts that are kept on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.  (Codex Λ and minuscule 566 form two parts of one unit, Codex Tischendorfianus III; 566 has the text of Matthew and Mark.)

           

The following readings show this very satisfactorily:

● v. 1 – ὄχλος instead of λαὸς (agreeing with Λ)

● v. 3 – καὶ προσήνεγκαν αὐτῶ instead of ἄγουσιν δὲ (agreeing with family-13)

● v. 3 – does not include πρὸς αὐτον (agreeing with Λ, family-13, et al)

● v. 3 – επί instead of εν (agreeing with Λ, family-13, et al)

● v. 3 – ἐν τῶ instead of just ἐν (agreeing with Λ)

● v. 4 – εἶπον instead of λέγουσιν (agreeing with Λ)

● v. 4 – εἴληπται instead of κατελήφθη (agreeing with Λ and family-13)

● v. 5 – includes περὶ αὐτῆς at the end of the verse (agreeing with Λ and family-13)

The April 1 lection
(continued)

● v. 6 – does not include τῷ δακτύλῳ (agreeing with Λ)

● v. 6 – does not include μὴ προσποιούμενος (agreeing with Λ and family-13)

● v. 7 – ἀναβλέψας instead of ἀνακύψας (agreeing with Λ and family-13, et al)

● v. 7 – λίθον βαλέτω after πρῶτος (agreeing with U, Λ, and family-13)

● v. 7 – εἰς instead of ἐπ (unique to Neos Anastaseos 9)

● v. 9 – και εξῆλθεν at the beginning of the verse (agreeing with Λ) 

● v. 10 – ἀναβλέψας instead of ἀνακύψας (agreeing with Λ and family-13, et al)

● v. 10 – includes ἲδεν αὐτὴν (basically agreeing with U, Λ, and family-13)

● v. 10 – καὶ instead of θεασάμενος πλὴν τῆς γυναικὸς (agreeing with U, Λ, family-13, et al)

● v. 10 – εἰσιν οἱ (no ἑκεῖνοι), agreeing with U, Ω, family-13, et al)

● v. 11 – ὁ δὲ Ἰ[ησοῦ]ς, agreeing with Λ and 124)

● v. 11 – καὶ μηκέτι (agreeing with Byz, Λ, et al)

            The exceptionally close correspondence between Codex Λ and the text of the lection for April 1 in Naos Anastaseos 9 suggests that the ancient manuscripts which are referred to in the Jerusalem Colophon were indeed located at Jerusalem – not Mount Sinai or Mount Athos – and were ancestors of Naos Anastaseos 9. 

GA 1187:  obeli alongside
John 8:3ff., and footnote.

            This evidence also indicates that a note about the pericope adulterae which appears in Codex Λ, in the margin of minuscule 1424, and in minuscules 20, 215, 262, 1118, and 1187 is also referring to manuscripts at Jerusalem when it mentions ancient manuscripts which contain the pericope adulterae.      

            Let’s take a closer look at this note in 1187.  In 1187, the pericope adulterae is given its own rubric at the top of the page, and each line of John 8:3-11 (but not 7:53-8:2) is accompanied by an obelus.  The note says:   “The obelized portion is not in certain copies, and it was not in those used by Apollinaris.  In the old ones, it is all there.  And this pericope is referred to by the apostles, affirming that it is for the edification of the church.” 

            Τα ὀβελισμένα ἔν τισιν ἀντιγράφοις ού κεῖται· ουδε ἀ-

            πολιναρίου· εν δε τοις ἀρχαιος ὅλα κεῖται· μνημονευου-

            σιν της περικοπης ταυτης και οι αποστολοι πάντες

            ἐν αισ εζέθεντο διατάζεσιν ἐις οἰκοδομεῖν τῆς ἐκκλησίας: –

 (The claim  that the apostles refer to the pericope adulterae reflects the annotator’s awareness of the composition known as the Apostolic Constitutions (particularly Book 2, chapter 24) (from c. 380) which, in turn, is largely based on the earlier Didascalia (from the 200’s; see pages 39-40 of Gibson’s English translation of the Didascalia).

Highlighted:  the note about the pericope adulterae in GA 1187, at St. Catherine’s Monastery.

             Out of the 37 Greek manuscripts that have the Jerusalem Colophon, at least five of them – 039, 262, 899, 1187, and 1555 – also consistently share some otherwise rare readings, essentially rendering them a distinct textual family.  In addition, 039, 20, 262, 1118, and 1187 have the annotation about the pericope adulterae which mentions the absence of the PA in the copies of Apollinaris and the presence of the PA in ancient copies and the use of the PA in Apostolic Constitutions.  Thus, in 039, 262, and 1187, both features are present.  This suggests that these three witnesses are the best witnesses – along with Naos Anastaseos 9 – to the earliest strata of a small but distinct transmission-line (Wisse’s “Group Λ”).

[Explore the embedded links in this post for more information and resources on this subject.]

Ten Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made By Simonides

          Today, we shall explore reasons why Codex Sinaiticus was not made in 1839-1841.  I intend to provide twenty such reasons; today I will settle for ten.  

          In the previous post, we saw that there is some question about the manner in which Codex Sinaiticus, or at least the main portion of it, was obtained by Constantine Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s Monastery – 43 parchment sheets in 1844, and a much larger portion in 1859, which included every book of the New Testament.  Although the exact manner in which it was brought to the attention of European scholars is disputed, there is no question among paleographers – researchers who specialize in the study of ancient handwriting and writing-materials – that the manuscript is genuinely ancient. 

          In 1862, however, after the text of Codex Sinaiticus was published by Tischendorf, a scholar named Constantine Simonides claimed that this manuscript was not ancient at all.  In a letter that appeared in the newspaper called The Guardian on September 3, Simonides claimed that the manuscript that Tischendorf heralded as the pearl of all his researches was actually something that Simonides himself had made.  “About the end of 1839,” Simonides wrote, his uncle Benedict, who oversaw a monastery on Mount Athos, wished to present a gift to the Russian Czar, Nicholas I.  After Benedict consulted with some colleagues, it was decided that a complete Greek manuscript of the Bible, combined with works of the sub-apostolic age (Barnabas, Hermas, Clement of Rome, etc.), written in ancient lettering on parchment, would be a suitable gift – along with a gold cover.  The chief calligrapher of the monastery was very reluctant to begin such an intimidating task, and so Simonides, then 19 years old, began the project, after studying the handwriting in manuscripts at Mount Athos.  His uncle Benedict, he claimed, made a sort of exemplar by using a printed Greek Bible (printed by Zosima with the support of the Moscow Bible Society), comparing it with ancient copies at Mount Athos. 

          And from where did he get the parchment?  Simonides stated that at Mount Athos, he conveniently found a bulky codex consisting almost entirely of blank pages, “prepared apparently many centuries ago.”  Simonides filled these pages, he claimed, with the Old Testament and the New Testament, and proceeded to write compositions from the sub-apostolic age (Barnabas and Hermas) until he ran out of parchment.  By the time he had gotten that far, his uncle had died, and so instead of presenting it to the czar, he went to Constantinople and consulted two patriarchs, Anthimus and Constantius, who recommended that he donate it to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, where Constantius had previously served as bishop.  Simonides agreed to this course of action.

          Shortly thereafter – according to Simonides – he took the codex to the island of Antigonus, intending to deliver it to Constantius, whose residence was there.  Constantius was, however, away from home, and so Simonides left it there in a packet, with a letter.  Later, Simonides claimed, he received a letter from Constantius, written in August of 1841, assuring him that the codex would be donated to Saint Catherine’s Monastery as he had intended.

          Simonides then said that in 1852, he had visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery and had seen the manuscript there, and examined it, “and found it much altered, having an older appearance than it ought to have.”  Simonides also noted that the preface, in which the manuscript was dedicated to Czar Nicholas I, had been removed.   Later, Simonides continued, he had been shown a sample-page of the manuscript that Tischendorf was publishing, and “at once recognized” his own work.

          Now that we have an idea of what Simonides’ claims were, let’s look at the reasons why they do not survive close scrutiny.

(1)  Bits of Codex Sinaiticus Were Discarded or Recycled.  Fragments from Codex Sinaiticus were used to reinforce the bindings of other manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s Monastery.  While part of Codex Sinaiticus (the part taken by Tischendorf in 1844) resides at Leipzig, and a larger portion resides at the British Library, a few pages and fragments are at the National Library of Russia.  These portions were obtained by the researcher Porphyry Uspensky when he visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery, no later than 1846.  Simonides’ claims would thus require that the monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, after receiving a pristine Greek manuscript of the entire Bible in 1841, recycled several of its pages as binding-material in the next few years. 

(2)  Codex Sinaiticus Is Huge.  Simonides claimed to have made the manuscript in a relatively small amount of time, beginning “About the end of the year 1839” and finishing some time before August of 1841.  Those who have seen the manuscript, or facsimiles of it, can testify what a massive project this would be for one person to undertake:  when in pristine condition, the codex consisted of over 740 leaves (i.e, 1,480 pages).  To complete that amount of space with uncial lettering would be a massive undertaking:  reckoning that each page had approximately 2,500 letters, the writing of over 3,700,000 letters would be required to complete the codex. 

(3)  Codex Sinaiticus Has a Note About An Ancient Manuscript Made at Caesarea.  After the book of Esther, a note in Codex Sinaiticus states, “Checked for accuracy using a very old copy corrected by the hand of the martyr Pamphilus.  At the end of this ancient book, which begins with the First Book of Kings [i.e., First Samuel], and ends with Esther, is the handwriting of Pamphilus himself; it says:  ‘Copied and corrected against the Hexapla of Origen as corrected [or, made accurate] by him.  Antoninus the confessor cross-checked it; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison, by the great grace and ability from God.  And if it is not an overstatement, it would not be easy to find a manuscript like this one.”  A similar note appears at the end of the book of Second Esdras.  Had Simonides made the manuscript as a straightforward transcript of the Greek Bible, with no intent to deceive, he would have no motivation to create this feature, or the 160 corrections added by the “Pamphilian Corrector” in Second Esdras and Esther.

(4)  Codex Sinaiticus Has Arabic Notes.  As David Parker observes in his book on Codex Sinaiticus, Arabic notes appear in Codex Sinaiticus at Isaiah 1:10, and at Zechariah 14:8, and in parts of Revelation.  The scenario described by Simonides provides no motive for the creation of this feature (nor is there evidence that Simonides knew Arabic when he was 19 or 20 years old.) 

            One of the Arabic notes, as David Parker has pointed out, probably refers to the approach of seven thousand years of earth’s existence, as calculated via the Byzantine Anno Mundi calendar, which reckoned that the universe was created in 5,509 B.C.  The completion of 7,000 years was thus expected to come in the late 1400’s, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 probably caused the Arabic-writing annotator to interpret part of Revelation chapter 8 (by which the note appears in the margin) as a prophecy about Islamic conquests – the star in 8:10 being called, in the note, a star “of the Arabs” – after which he expected persecution to begin.   

            If Codex Sinaiticus was extant in the second half of the 1400’s, as the existence of this note implies, then it cannot be the work of Simonides in the 1800’s.

(5)  Codex Sinaiticus Has Clear Demonstrations of Teamwork Among Scribes.  Whereas Simonides claimed to have written the codex from beginning to end, the manuscript shows that three or four copyists produced the manuscript itself, and that other copyists introduced later corrections (or attempted corrections) at much later times.  The evidence for this includes the following:

            ● Different orthography, i.e., spelling.  Among three copyists – known as Scribe A, Scribe B, and Scribe D (Scribe C was withdrawn from Tischendorf’s initial appraisal that there were four copyists, but some researchers posit that Scribe B’s work was really the work of two copyists) – Scribe D had reasonably good spelling; Scribe A had bad spelling, and Scribe B’s spelling was atrocious; as Milne & Skeat stated in Scribes & Correctors of Codex Sinaiticus in 1938, “The habits of B [i.e., Scribe B] are difficult to describe in moderate language; still more difficult is it to understand how a scribe so careless and illiterate came to be chosen for such a manuscript.  He seems to have had no firm visual impression of Greek, so barbarous and grotesque are the forms which his misspellings can present to the eye, and with such utter inconsistency does he sway from correct to incorrect.  His aberrations extend over the whole field.”

            The worth – or rather, worthlessness – of Simonides’ story can be obtained by considering that he had no motive to use accurate spelling in one part of the manuscript (those parts made by Scribe D, including six cancel-sheets) and very inaccurate spelling in other parts.  Who can believe that with a printed Greek Bible as one of his sources, anyone making a handwritten replica would introduce quirks such as writing κε in place of και (“and”) in Isaiah 22:24, Jeremiah 7:25, and twice in Hermas?    

            ● Scribe D, besides having handwriting and orthography discernibly superior to that of the other two copyists, often lined up the right margin of the columns of text that he wrote by adding small “>” symbols to the ends of lines that did not quite extend to the right margin.  This symbol is never used by Scribe A.

            ● The copyists used different decorative designs at the ends of the books they copied.  Milne & Skeat, referring to such a decorative design as a “coronis,” observed that “The coronis, in fact, amounts to his signature, so distinctive is the design (or designs) adopted by each and so restricted by the range of individual variation.” 

            ● A gap was left between two sections written by different copyists.  Codex Sinaiticus was not produced by starting at one end of the text of the Bible and finishing at the other end.  Instead, one copyist was assigned one portion, and another copyist was assigned a different portion, and they worked simultaneously, with the intention that the separate sections would, after being proof-read, be bound together.  This meant that the copyists had to estimate how much space each assigned portion of text would occupy – and they didn’t always get it right.  They expected that the books of Tobit and of Judith would take up a little more space than they actually did in Scribe D’s handwriting.  This is why Scribe A, when he began writing First Maccabees, began in the second column, expecting that Scribe D would place the last bit of the text of Judith in the first column, when he did the proof-reading.  Meanwhile, what reason would any copyist working alone have to skip a column in this way, at the beginning of a page?   

                       

(6)  The Eusebian Sections in Codex Sinaiticus Are a Mess.  In many Gospels-manuscripts, numbers appear in the margins.  These are part of a cross-reference system devised by Eusebius of Caesarea, in which a chart – the Canon Tables – listed parallel-passages (first, passages found in all four Gospels, followed by passages found in different combinations of Gospels, such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and concluding with the tenth canon-table, which listed passages found exclusively in one Gospel) and each passage was given a number, along with the number of the table in which its number was found. 

            In Codex Sinaiticus, we do not have the Canon Tables, and in the margins, the section-numbers are frequently mismatched, and are incomplete:  the section-numbers for Matthew were begun but no more was initially written beyond section 52; another copyist continued the numbering (and wrote over the earlier copyist’s numbers) but he stopped in Luke at section 106.  Simonides would have no reason to make such a quirky feature, and at Mount Athos there were (and are) many resources where a complete form of the section-numbering could be found.  Meanwhile, this phenomenon is accounted for by the use of the Eusebian Canons by copyists in the 300’s to whom it was a puzzling novelty.    

(7)  Codex Sinaiticus Does Not Have Second and Third Maccabees.  There would be no motive for Simonides to omit these books, if he were intending to make a complete Bible for the Czar. Copies of Second Maccabees, at least, would be readily available in the resources of Mount Athos.  Yet these two books are not in the codex.  (Baruch is not there either, but it probably was present when the codex was in pristine condition.)  

(8)  Sinaiticus Has Marginalia In Acts Shared Only By Vaticanus.  In the margins of the text of Acts in Codex Vaticanus there are two different sets of chapter-divisions.  In the second set, the text is divided into 69 chapters.  Each chapter’s beginning is indicated by the appearance of a Greek numeral (represented by characters of the Greek alphabet).  These numerals are not in the same script used in the text, and appear to have been added centuries after the manuscript was initially made.  Many other manuscripts also have numbered chapter-divisions (the “Euthalian Sections”), but until the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus, the form of chapter-divisions in Acts in Codex Vaticanus was unique.  When Tischendorf’s publication of Codex Sinaiticus was released, however, it did not take long for researchers to notice that in the margins of Acts in Codex Sinaiticus, chapter-divisions appear which very closely resemble the chapter-divisions which are otherwise unique to Codex Vaticanus.     

            A side-by-side comparison of the chapter-numbers in Acts in Vaticanus, and the chapter-numbers in Sinaiticus, can be found by consulting the detailed and interesting (but highly technical) essay Euthaliana,by J. Armitage Robinson, which appeared in 1895 in the journal-series Texts and Studies.  The author’s observance bears heavily on the question of whether Codex Sinaiticus can have been made in the 1800’s:    

            “Where did this system of numbers, common to א [Aleph, i.e., Sinaiticus] and B, come from?  The two codices have got hold of it quite independently of one another.  It cannot have been copied from B into א, for א has one number (Μ) [that is, 40] which is not found in B; nor can it have been copied from א into B, for nearly a third of the numbers (from ΜΒ [i.e., 42] onwards) are not found in א.  We must go back to a common source – some MS which gave its numeration to them both – and this seems to imply that א and B were, at an early stage of their history, lying side by side in the same library.”
          Robinson may have overstated his case, for it is equally possible that the source of this marginalia met each codex separately.  But this does not erode the point that Simonides not only had no access to data about Codex Vaticanus’ marginalia, but he also had no motive to imitate it, nor to do so incompletely; the chapter-numbers in Codex Sinaiticus stop at Acts 14:40.

(9)  Sinaiticus Is Missing Exact Lines of Text.  Occasionally, a copyist’s line of sight drifted from the beginning or end of a line to the beginning or end of the next line (or, of a nearby line further down the page), causing him to accidentally omit the intervening letters.  Where the amount of absent text corresponds to a particular line-length, it indicates that an exemplar was in use which had lines of that length.  Simonides, however, claimed to have worked from a printed Greek Bible, which would not elicit this kind of omission.

(10)  Sinaiticus’ Text-Type Shifts in the First Eight Chapters of John.  As Gordon Fee showed in a detailed paper, although the Gospels-text of Codex Sinaiticus is mainly Alexandrian, in John 1:1-8:38 it is Western.  Whereas Simonides had no motive to suddenly change exemplars (and gave no indication of ever possessing an exemplar with a Western text of John), and then change back, this is accounted for by a scenario in which copyists in Caesarea in the mid-300’s were transferring texts from decaying papyrus onto parchment – a scenario confirmed to be historical by Jerome in De Viri Illustribus and other sources; the organizers of this project were Acacius and Euzoius.

To be continued . . .