An Uncial of Luke 5-6 at Mount Sinai

          At the Sinai Palimpsests Project website, part of one of the manuscripts included among the New Finds collection – Greek N.F. M 98 – has lower writing that consists of a folio from a Greek uncial, preserving text in four columns (two columns per page, probably 26 lines per column) from Luke 5:33-34, 5:36-37, 5:39-6:1, and 6:3-4.  Dr. Giuglielmo Cavallo – author of the first chapter in the superb little 2008 book, The Shape of the Book – identified and analyzed this text a while ago, and assigned it a production-date around 1000.  It has received an official Nestle-Aland identification number:  0288.  Let’s take a closer look at its text, which is on the first page (front and back) of the manuscript.

          In its four columns of text, compared to the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, this witness has two variants:  in Luke 5:33, we encounter ποικνα instead of πυκνα, and after ομοιως we meet δε και instead of just και.  Other than these two readings, the text is perfectly Byzantine, agreeing with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform.  This witness disagrees with the Nestle-Aland compilation at almost every opportunity:

In the lower writing of Greek N.F. M 98: 

● 5:34 – Ις (before ειπεν) is not included

● 5:36 – απο (after επίβλημα is not included

● 5:36 – σχίσας (after καινου) is not included [Not noted in NA27 apparatus]

● 5:36 – σκιζει (instead of σκισει in À B C L)  [Not noted in NA27 apparatus]  

● 5:36 – συμφωνει (instead of συμφωνήσει) [Not noted in NA27 apparatus]

● 5:36 – το επίβλημα before απο is is not included

● 5:39 – και is at the beginning of the verse [bracketed in NA27]

● 5:39 – ευθεως appears after παλαιον

● 5:39 – χρηστότερος instead of χρηστός

● 6:1 – δευτεροπρώτω is present

● 6:1 – των is present before σπορίμων

● 6:3 – οποτε instead of οτε

● 6:3 – οντες appears at the end of the verse [bracketed in NA27]

● 6:4 – ως is at the beginning of the verse [bracketed in NA27]

● 6:4 – ελαβεν και instead of λαβων

Reconstruction of the lower writing in Greek N.F. M 98.

           Here is a reproduction of the text of Luke in Greek N.F. M 98, with the upper writing removed.  Twice, the copyist appears to have used a kai-compendium or dwarf letters, but the writing at both points was obscured by the upper writing.  (This is signified in the reproduction by the light red squares.)          

Before presenting a transcription of the text, here are some thoughts about some textual contests that could be considered if one were defending the Byzantine readings found in Greek N.F. M 98.

● 5:34 – Ις in the Alexandrian Text could be introduced for the sake of clarity, or as a remembrance of 5:31.

● 5:36 – απο and σχίσας could be added for the sake of clarity.

● 5:36 – συμφωνει could be altered to συμφωνήσει as part of an expansion which also involved the addition of το επίβλημα before απο.

● 5:38 – In Greek N.F. M 98, space-considerations seem to favor the inclusion of και αμφότεροι συντηρουνται at the end of the verse.

● 5:39 – A copyist might excise και as an attempt at stylistic improvement.  (The entire verse is absent in Codex D and several Old Latin witnesses.)

● 5:39 – χρηστότερος can account for χρηστός with a simple parableptic error.

● 6:1 – δευτεροπρώτω is certainly the more difficult reading.

● 6:3 – οποτε can account for οτε with a simple parableptic error.

● 6:4 – The support for nothing before εισηλθων at the beginning of the verse is sparse.

● 6:4 – Part of the Alexandrian line seems harmonized to Mark 2:26.

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

Codex 064 - More Pages at Mount Sinai!

A sample of the Greek text of 064 
(under the Syriac text, which has been
digitally removed from this image.)

            Four pages from Codex 064, dating to the 400s or 500s, are among the manuscripts housed at Saint Catherine’s Monastery.  They are on pages 71 and 72 of the manuscript known as Syriac 7 (accessible, with registration, at the Sinai Palimpsests Project website), and they contain Matthew 26:70-27:7 (on fol. 72) and Matthew 27:30-43 (on fol. 71). 

             Although the Greek text on this palimpsest is partly obscured by the Syriac writing that was written on top of it, most of it can be read without much difficulty once the pages are rotated and magnified onscreen.  The text is formatted in two narrow columns on each page, with 25 lines of text per page.  In this respect it corresponds to the description that J. Rendel Harris gave to several pages which he identified as Fragment #10 in the 1890 book Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai. 

            The pages that were described and transcribed by Harris as Fragment 10 constitute the uncial 074, which turned out to be part of the same manuscript identified as Codex 064, which consists of two parchment leaves with text from Matthew 27:7-30.  Making things a little more complicated, 064 and 074 are from the same manuscript as the pages which constitute Codex 090, which consists of several pages with text from Matthew 26:59-70, 27:44-46, and Mark 1:32-2:12.  To restate:  064 (at Kiev, Ukraine), 074 (at St. Catherine’s Monastery), and 090 (at the National Library of Russia, in Saint Petersburg) are all from the same codex.

            Now the surviving part of that codex is known to be a little more substantial.  The other day, after I replicated the lower writing on a page from Syriac 7, I asked Elijah Hixson for his impression of the Greek text.  He mentioned that it reminded him of the manuscript at St. Catherine's Monastery that J. Rendel Harris had discovered back in 1890 - 064.  And with a little more investigation, I confirmed that that is exactly what these pages are from.

            The text on one page of Codex 090 ends at Matthew 26:70.  So what we have in the page in Syriac 7 – 72r – that contains Matthew 26:70-27:7 is the page that came immediately after that page of 090.

            The text on another page of Codex 090 begins at Matthew 27:44.  So what we have in the page in Syriac 7/Greek 064 that contains Matthew 27:30-43 – 71r – is the page that came immediately before that page from the portion known as Codex 090. 

            The text in the newly discovered pages of Codex 064 is interesting – more Byzantine than anything else, but with significant variation.  Here are some examples of its readings:

            26:70 – At the end of the verse, 064 reads -σταμαι τι λεγεις – a reading which looks  like an agreement with D, Δ, and f1, but with a transposition.

            26:72 – After ορκου, 064 reads λεγων, a reading shared by Codex D.

            26:73 – After Μετα μικρον δε, 064 reads παλιν, an agreement with f1.

            26:73 – After και γαρ, 064 reads Γαλιλαιος ει και, an agreement with C*.

            26:73 – After λαλια, 064 has προ between σου and δηλόν.

            27:33 – 064 has the word-order κρανιου τοπος λεγομενος, agreeing with À B L 1 1582.

            27:34 – 064 has οξος, agreeing with Byz A W.

            27:34 – 064 has ηθέλησεν, agreeing with À* B D f1.

            27:35 – 064 does not have ινα πληρωθη το ρηθεν δια του προφήτου διεμέρισαντο τα ιμάτια μου εαυτοις και επι τον ιματισμον μου εβαλον κληρον.  Κληρον is followed immediately by και (beginning v. 26) on the same line.

            27:41 – After Ομοιως, 064 reads και, but δε is not present.

            27:41 – Between εμπαίζοντες and μετα, one line of text is filled by  προς αλληλους (a harmonization with Mark 15:31).

            27:41 – 064 includes και Φαρισαίων (agreeing with Byz K Π) and this reading fills exactly one line of text, following another line that also ends in –ων.    

            27:42 – At the end of the verse, 064 reads  πιστευσωμεν αυτω.

            27:43 – At the very beginning of the verse, 064 reads Ει before πέποιθεν, agreeing with D f1. 

            27:43 – 064 does not have νυν after ρυσάσθω, agreeing with A Y Π 157 565.
       
            Hopefully a full transcription of the pages of Codex 064 in Syriac 7 will be available soon.



Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

           

The Adventures of the Peckover Manuscripts

Algerina Peckover (1841-1927)

            In 1876, Bernard Quaritch sold two Greek New Testament manuscripts to Alexander Peckover of Wisbech, in Great Britain.  They were later entrusted to his sister, Algerina Peckover.  One of these two manuscripts is GA 713, which is somewhat more famous than the average manuscript, on account of its ambiguous relationship to the family-13 cluster of manuscripts (13, 69, 124, 346, etc. – 230, 543, 826, 828, 788, 983 and 1689 are also members).  Like the main members of family-13, GA 713 has Luke 22:43-44 inserted into the text between Matthew 26:39 and 26:40.  Unlike the main members of family-13, GA 713 does not contain the pericope adulterae at all, whereas they retain it at the close of Luke 21.

            J. Rendel Harris provided a description of GA 713 (then known as Cod. Ev. 561) in 1886 in the pages of the Journal of the Exegetical Society.  It is a nearly complete Gospels-manuscript (three sheets, i.e., six pages front-and-back, are missing in John), produced in the 1000s or 1100s.  On a page before the Gospels, part of Eusebius’ Ad Carpianus is written within a quatrefoil frame.  This page (and adjacent pages, and pages at the end of the manuscript) is a palimpsest; the lower uncial writing is part of Lectionary 586, assigned to the 900s.  Notes in the manuscript (at Mt. 5:14 and Mt. 16:15) indicate that it was used at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.  Harris mentions several intriguing readings in GA 713, including: 

            ● In Matthew 13:35, its text names Isaiah as the prophet being quoted (although the citation is from Psalm 72) – a reading supported by the f¹³ text, and by Codex ℵ (Sinaiticus).

            ● In Matthew 17:27 (concluding the episode about the temple-tax), the text in 713 is somewhat tweaked so that Peter says, “Yes” after Jesus’ statement in v. 26 that the children are free, and then Jesus prefaces His instructions to Peter by saying, “Therefore, you give also, as a stranger to them.”  This little addition probably goes all the way back to the Diatessaron.

            ● In Matthew 24:45, it reads οἰκίας instead of θεραπείας – agreeing with 69 and with Codex ℵ. 

            ● In Mark 14:41, it has the reading ἀπέχει τὸ τέλος (a reading also found in the f¹³ text, and which Burgon (in a footnote on p. 226 of The Last Twelve Verses of Mark Defended, 1871) had already proposed is accounted for as the intrusion of a margin-note indicating the end of a lection).

            ● In Luke 14:24, it has “For many are called, but few are chosen” – again agreeing with the f¹³ text.

            ● In John 7:8, it reads ὁ κληρος (portion) instead of ὁ καίρος (time), which (as Harris deduced) indicated that somewhere in 713’s ancestry, the copyist of an uncial manuscript confused the letters Η and Ι (an ordinary case of itacism), and a copyist also confused the letters Α and Λ (not a hard mistake to make in uncial script, but harder in minuscule script).

            GA 713, to which Harris gave the name Codex Algerina Peckover, instructively shows that when attempting to establish relationships among manuscripts and their texts, one should keep in mind the potential influence of liturgical treatments of the text, which can independently affect the texts of manuscripts in the same way at the same point, and even do so in multiple passages, although the manuscripts themselves are not closely related.

           

Baron Peckover's coat-of-arms

            But although GA 713 has greater text-critical significance than GA 712, it is to GA 712 that we now turn our attention.  Scrivener, in his Plain Introduction, described GA 712 as “an exquisite specimen” from the 1000s, containing the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles – that is, a complete New Testament except for Revelation.   It features portraits of the four Evangelists.  This codex is presently extant as two items in two distant libraries:  the main portion is in the United States – specifically, in California, at UCLA at the Charles E. Young Research Library’s Special Collections, where it is catalogued as item 170/347, the “Peckover-Foot Codex.” – and a much smaller portion (in which the only New Testament text is the last part of the Epistle of Jude) that consists of five folios is at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg.

            The story of how two different portions of the same manuscript ended up in two collections separated by 5,700 miles is told by Julia Verkholantsev in the 2017 article From Sinai to California:  The Trajectory of Greek NT Codex 712 from the UCLA Young Research Library’s Special Collections (170/347), which was published in Manuscript Studies, A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. 

            To grasp the details of the history of GA 712’s travels, Verkholantsev’s article is indispensable.  Briefly, what appears to have happened is that when Porfirii Uspenskii (sometimes spelled Uspensky – the Uspensky Gospels, GA 461, is named after him) was studying manuscripts in Cairo, at a metochion – basically, a satellite – of Saint Catherine’s monastery, in the Juvania district (or, perhaps, on a street called Juvania) and there he encountered GA 712.  He proceeded to describe it in his catalogue of Greek manuscripts, including the closing note by the scribe Iōannikios.  Uspenskii died in 1885, but eventually, his catalogue of manuscripts was edited and published in 1911 by Vladimir Beneshevich – a Russian Orthodox scholar who was eventually executed by the Soviet Union – under the title Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Graecorum.  (The description of GA 712 begins on page 90, as entry 73). 

  

One of the pages (from the Euthalian
Prologue to Acts) that Uspenskii
took from GA 712.

          Uspenskii also took five folios of GA 712 from the metochion of Saint Catherine’s Monastery (just as he had taken recycled fragments of Codex Sinaiticus from where he had found them in the bindings of other manuscripts in the collection – later describing, but not taking, pages from the main volume).  That is how that section of GA 712 ended up at the National Library of Russia.   

            But how did the main portion of the manuscript end up in California?  Verkholantsev’s article provides some tantalizing clues, but no conclusion.  The exact path that GA 712 took from the collection of Saint Catherine’s Monastery’s satellite-church in Cairo, in 1860, to the collection of Bernard Quaritch in 1876 remains, at this time, an unsolved mystery.

            Perhaps there are notes in other manuscripts that were once in the Peckovers’ collection (some of which were sold in 1927-1951 in a series of auctions) that can contribute to a solution to this question.  Here are a few of them:

            ● Morgan Library MS 737 (Latin), a Sacramentary from the mid-1100s.  

            ● Morgan Library MS 783 (Syriac), a Gospels-MS from the 500s.
            ● Goodspeed Collection MS 953 (Latin), Pauline and General Epistles from the 1400s.

            ● Gwynn’s Peshitta Codex 20 (Syriac), from the 1400s.

            ● The Peckover Hours (Latin), a Book of Hours from c. 1490.

            ● The Peckover Psalter (Latin), from 1220-1240.

            ●  A Summary of the Sacred History (Armenian), from 1693, now in Israel.

            Page-views of GA 713, including, near the beginning and the end, the palimpsest-pages with text from Romans, I Corinthians, and II Corinthians, can be accessed at the University of Birmingham’s ePapers Repository, where GA 713 is catalogued as Peckover Greek 7 in the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts.   Here is a selective index:

            Link 17 = Matthew 1:1

Uncial text from Romans 15
lurks under this picture near
the beginning of GA 713,
which depicts the inspiration of John.

            Link 29 = Matthew 3:9

            Link 37 = Matthew 5:7

            Link 60 = Matthew 8:8

            Link 99 = Matthew 13:13

            Link 133 = Matthew 17:26

            Link 200 = Luke 22:43, in Matthew 26

            Link 229 = Mark 1:1

            Link 312 = Mark 11:7

            Link 356 = Mark 16:7

            Link 365 = Luke 1:1

            Link 422 = Luke 7:8

            Link 473 = Luke 12:21 (with expansion)

            Link 500 = Luke 16:15

            Link 540 = Luke 22:30

            Link 567 = John 1:1

            Link 595 = John 5:1

            Link 622 = John 7:51

            Link 660 = John 14:1

            Link 704 = John 21:24

           

GA 712, as far as I can tell, has not yet been digitized.

Readers are invited to check the data in this post. 

093: A Byzantine Fragment of Acts from the 500s in Egypt

            Today, let’s take a close look at part of 093 – a small fragment that contains text from Acts 24:22-26, and text from First Peter 2:22-3:7.  (I will focus here especially on the text from Acts.  093 is a palimpsest with an interesting history:  it was among the approximately 193,000 fragments that had been stored in the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo over the course of centuries.  (The story of how researchers Charles Taylor and Solomon Schechter discovered this immense collection of materials and, in 1896-1897, arranged for its transportation to Cambridge University for continued study, can be found online.) 

            Charles Taylor published a transcription of the text from Acts in 093 in 1900, along with a short summary of the text from First Peter, and some other texts.  He also noted that the upper writing on the palimpsest consisted of Hebrew extracts from the Bereshith Rabbah (ch. 45, 47,and 98). The lower writing contains most of Acts 24:22-26 on one page in two columns of 24 lines each.  The text on the verso is mostly illegible but Taylor made out words from the tops of the two columns:  from Acts 24:26, οτι χρηματα / δοθησεται, and from Acts 24:27, ελαβεν διαδο / χον ο Φηλιξ  / Πορκιον Φη / στον.  (This manuscript is identified in the catalog of Joseph van Haelst as item 487; in the Taylor-Schechter Collection it is in Collection 12, 189 and 208.  For a while, 093 was identified with the siglum ﬥ.)

Green lines:  093 disagrees with Alex.
Red lines:  093 disagrees with Byz.

            The smattering of text on the verso does not allow much insight regarding the type of text of Acts that 093 contains, inasmuch as the Alexandrian Text and the Byzantine Text are in exact agreement in those parts of Acts 24:26 and 24:27.  When we turn to the much more extensive text on the recto, however, there can be no doubt:  093’s text of Acts is Byzantine:  except for its inclusion of the contracted sacred name Ιν after Χν in verse 24, and the reading λαβων instead of μεταλαβὼν in verse 25, the text from Acts in 093 agrees perfectly with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform.  (The Textus Receptus differs from RP2005 in this passage in two places; the TR includes αυτου after γυναικι in 24:24, and reads δε between αμα and και in 24:26.)

            Meanwhile, 093 disagrees with the Nestle-Aland compilation at the following seven places:
● 1.  In verse 22, there is a word-order variant:  ανεβαλετο αυτους follows Φηλιξ, instead of the Alexandrian reading in which ανεβαλετο δε αυτους precedes ὁ Φηλιξ.

● 2.  In verse 22, after οδου, 093 reads ειπων, not ειπας.

● 3.  In verse 23, before τω, 093 reads τε. 

● 4.  In verse 23, after τηρεισθαι, 093 reads τον Παυλον instead of αυτον.

● 5.  In verse 23, before αυτω, 093 reads η προσέρχεσθαι.

● 6.  In verse 24, before γυναικι, 093 does not read ιδία. 

● 7.  In verse 25, after μέλλοντος, 093 reads εσεσθαι.

            Two points are illustrated by this evidence. 

            First, contrary to the much-repeated claim that the Textus Receptus is a late medieval compilation (as opposed to an essentially early form of the text with a relatively small stratum of late medieval readings), 093 confirms that the Byzantine Text of Acts – at least, Acts 24:22-26 – existed in the 500s, around a thousand years before Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza made their compilations.

            Second, there is some reason to suspect that apparatuses in some widely used Greek New Testaments cannot be trusted to present evidence in an even-handed way in cases where Byzantine readings receive early support:  

                 ● Of the seven reading in Acts 24:22-26 that are supported by 093 and the majority of Greek manuscripts, the Nestle-Aland apparatus (in NA27) fails to record four of them (#2, 3, 4, and 6). 

                 ● In the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (4th ed.) only one variant-unit is covered in the verses that are extant in 093:  the contest between Ιν Χν and just Χν in 24:24.  In this case the theoretical mechanics of the “expansion of piety” have been rejected in favor of strong early support (including support from 093) for the longer reading. 

                 ● In the apparatus of the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament, only one textual contest in the passage that is extant in 093 is mentioned:  the contest in Acts 24:24 between the inclusion or non-inclusion of ιδια before γυναικι, and the inclusion or non-inclusion of αυτου after γυναικι.  The reading found in 093 is mentioned as a reading supported by C* L P 1424, but 093’s support is not mentioned.  The compilers of the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament apparently never looked at 093.  (A list of consulted witnesses in an appendix of THEGNT does not mention 093, although over a dozen manuscripts younger than 093 are listed.)   

            Third – provisionally accepting the classification of the fragmentary text from First Peter 2:22-3:7 as Alexandrian – it was possible for a Byzantine text of Acts to appear in the same manuscript as an Alexandrian text of First Peter in Cairo, Egypt.  While it cannot be demonstrated that 093 was produced in Egypt, the presence of an Alexandrian text of First Peter in the manuscript favors this possibility, and the presence of 093 among the genizah’s fragments also indicates that the Byzantine Text of Acts in the 500s was used in a broad range of territory. 

            093 is not the only manuscript with texts from the New Testament that was discovered in the Cairo Genizah.   A few palimpsests were discovered to have material from the New Testament in their lower writing, in Palestinian Aramaic; these texts were studied, and published, by the scholarly sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, with assistance from J. R. Harris – including a palimpsest-fragment with Palestian Aramaic text from John 14:25-15:16.  The Syriac specialist G. H. Gwilliam published the contents of five palimpsest-fragments (assigned to the 700s) in 1893, containing text from chapters 4 and 5 of Numbers, and from Colossians 4:12-18, First Thessalonians 1:1-3 and 4:3-15, Second Timothy 1:10-2:7, and Titus 1:11-2:8.  Michael Sokoloff and Joseph Yahalom brought such investigations up to date in 1979, and expanded upon them, in a detailed essay in Revue d’Histoire des Textes, “Christian palimpsests from the Cairo Geniza.”  (Fragments of manuscripts of the Hexapla from the Cairo Genizah, by the way, can be viewed at the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism website.)

            A few other palimpsest-fragments in the Cairo Genizah contain some New Testament passages.  (One fragment contains Syriac text from Second Corinthians 3:2-15; another fragment contains Syriac text from chapters 3 and 4 of First Thessalonians.)  The lower writing on yet another fragment consists of the remains of an early (600s or 700s?) Greek uncial lectionary, now catalogued as lectionary 1276, a.k.a. Taylor-Schechter 16.93, containing excerpts from Matthew 10:2-15 and John 20:11-15.  We may take a closer look at lectionary 1276 in a future post.

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

The Sinaitic Syriac: Now in Color!

 

The old black and white photos of the pages of the Sinaitic Syriac
show that there is writing (including much of the Gospels)
underneath the more recent writing. 
In the new MSI-enhanced images,
the older text can be not only detected, but read.

          The Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, one of the most important non-Greek manuscripts of the Gospels, is online at the Sinai Palimpsests Project website.

            This fifth-century manuscript has already been online for a while, in black and white photos at the website of the Library of Congress.  Those old photos, however, mainly show only the upper, most recent layer of writing.  While that may be quite interesting for people who can read Syriac and have an interest in the lives of various female saints and martyrs, it’s not as interesting as the Syriac Gospels-text which (along with the texts of a few other compositions) was on the parchment that was recycled in the 700s to provide writing-material for a collection of biographies of female saints and martyrs.  

            Many other Syriac manuscripts are at Saint Catherine’s monastery but this one is the earliest and most important one.  It was brought to the attention of Western researchers in the 1890s by Agnes Smith Lewis, who edited and published its contents; her English translation of the text, with an informative introduction, was published in 1894.  (This was one of several important contributions made to New Testament research by Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson.)  It has been prominently cited in compilations of the Greek New Testament ever since.  

               Now it is online, in full-color digital page-views, with multi-spectral imaging enhancement tools that allow Syriac-readers to read the ancient Syriac Gospels-text in the lower writing.  The text of some recycled pages from an ancient Greek Gospels-codex (with text from the Gospel of John) can also be read in the lower writing (just look for the slanted uncial Greek lettering on fol. 142, 144, 147, and 149).

               The Sinaitic Syriac manuscript is somewhat famous (or infamous) for being the only Syriac manuscript that ends the Gospel of Mark at the end of 16:8.  The last page of Mark in the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript (in the lower writing) is 23v; after you have applied for and received admittance to the images-gallery at the Sinai Palimpsests Project, you will need to find manuscript Syriac 30, explore its page-views, and rotate the page-view for 23r until it is upside down, and then use the MRI-selection tools to see the lower writing (in two columns).

             Before you explore the images, it is highly recommended that you thoroughly explore the manuscript-description and the sub-menus, especially the  Undertexts descriptions, to get some idea of what texts in what languages are on what pages.

            Hopefully in a few days, I shall post more about the Sinai Palimpsests Project and share some details about a few of the Greek New Testament manuscripts that are lurking in the lower writing of the palimpsests, along with some tips on how to navigate the site.

Meet 0269: A Little-known Uncial Fragment

0269
Right-side up

            Uncial 0269 is a somewhat unusual manuscript:  it is a one-leaf fragment embedded within another manuscript, Codex Blenheimus (0133, a.k.a. Codex ϒ (Upsilon), and known previously – before the discovery of Codex Washingtoniensis – as W^g).  Codex Blenheimus is a palimpsest:   its parchment pages were used in the 1400s as the material out of which a Menaeon was made.  (A Menaeon is a Greek Orthodox service-book – in this case, the services for the month of February).  Before its parchment pages were used for that purpose, they had been part of a Gospel-codex. 

Some time before the pages were recycled, a damaged page was repaired by some who had access to a strip of parchment pages from another Gospels-manuscript – one that had been produced in the 800s.  It is that strip, containing text from Mark 6:14-20, that constitutes 0269.  It was glued to the damaged page of 0133; as a result, 0269 has more text visible on one side than the other.  The lower writing on 0269 is upside-down compared to the upper writing. 

J. Harold Greenlee transcribed the text of 0269 in an article that was published in 1976 in Studies in New Testament Language and Text, a volume prepared to commemorate the 65th birthday of George D. Kilpatrick.  Greenlee had the benefit of ultraviolet light when making his transcription.  Digital images of 0269 are online (as the outer part of fol. 23 of Codex Blenheimus) but without ultraviolet light the lower writing is extremely difficult to read.  The accompanying pseudo-replica may give readers some idea of what it looked like before it was recycled.  

This pseudo-replica reconstructs
the appearance of Mark 6:14b-20
in two columns of text in 0269.
Small blue letters and verse-numbers
are supplied.  (Based on Greenlee's
transcription.)

    

The text of 0269 is distinctly Byzantine.  Its only variations from the text of the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform are orthographic:  ἀπεκεφάλησα instead of ἀπεκεφάλισα in 6:16, and ουτον instead of αυτον; this second variation, however, should not be readily accepted, inasmuch as Greenlee stated that the line containing it was read from the opposite glued-on side of the parchment; in addition, Greenlee did not mention it when listing non-Textus Receptus readings in 0269.  Meanwhile, 0269 disagrees frequently with Codex Vaticanus: 

v. 14 – 0269 reads ελεγεν; B reads ελεγον

v. 14 – 0269 reads εκ νεκρων ηγερθη; B reads εγηγερται εκ νεκρων

v, 15 – 0269 does not read δε after the first αλλοι

v. 15 – 0269 reads εστιν; B does not.

v. 16 – 0269 does not read ὁ before Ἡρωδης

v. 16 – 0269 reads ειπεν; B reads ελεγεν

v. 16 – 0269 reads οτι; B does not

v. 16 – 0269 reads εστιν; B does not

v. 16 – 0269 reads εκ νεκρων after ηγερθη; B does not

v. 17 – 0269 reads τ[ην γυ]ναικ[α]; B initially did not include these two words, but was then corrected to include them.

Nor does 0269’s text agree particularly with the Western flagship manuscript of the Gospels, Codex Bezae, which reads ελεγοσαν in v. 14, βαπτιστης in v. 14, εγηγερται εκ νεκρων in v. 14, omits προφητης ως in v. 15, reads εκ νεκρων after Ιωάνην in v. 16, includes και βαλεν in v. 17, transposes the last two words in v. 17, and reads σε in v. 18. 

Considering this data, it seems quite justifiable to call shenanigans regarding the Alands’ assignment of this fragment to Category III, as if it has a text that is mixed or unusual; its text should be confidently regarded as Byzantine. 

Five Palimpsests

Mark 16:14-20 in Codex C,
with later Greek text
written over it.

            Today, let’s take a look at some palimpsests among the New Testament manuscripts.  What is a palimpsest?  A palimpsest – so-called because the parchment has been scraped twice; once in the course of the manuscripts’s initial production, and again when it was recycled; the term is derived from the Greek words πάλιν (again) and ψάω (scrape) – is a manuscript that has been recycled.  After the manuscript was initially produced, someone came along, took it apart, and removed the writing by washing and/or scraping it off the parchment, so that the parchment could then be used as writing-material for another composition (sometimes even another copy of part of the New Testament). 

This happened especially (but not exclusively) in places where writers did not know Greek and/or did not have the means to buy (or to easily buy) new parchment.  We are able to read palimpsests because the recyclers’ efforts to scrape away the ink were frequently only partly successful; ink embedded in the parchment-material was not so easy to erase completely.  Sometimes the lower writing (the older writing) is in the same format as the upper writing (the more recent writing that covers the older writing), but in other cases, it is upside down or sideways compared to the upper writing – and this can vary in the same palimpsest.   

            Over 50 palimpsests are continuous-text uncial manuscripts with text from the New Testament.  Here are five of them: 

Even without multi-spectral
imaging, much of the text of
Codex C can be recovered.
It is online at Gallica (BnF).

● Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus (C, 04) is an important manuscript made in the 400s.  In the 1100s, someone recycled its pages, and used them as writing-material for a Greek translation of some of the writings of Ephraem the Syrian, written in Greek minuscule script.  That is how the manuscript obtained its name.  For many years, European scholars attempted to read the lower writing, but with limited success.  Finally in 1843-1845, Constantine von Tischendorf (who is perhaps best-known for his acquisition of Codex Sinaiticus) carefully transcribed the text of Codex C, representing part of the Old Testament in the Greek Septuagint version (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon) and almost every book of the New Testament (except Second Thessalonians and Second John).  Tischendorf also noticed the corrections in the text, introduced by three distinct persons in the 500s, 900s, and (probably) the 1200s. 

            Tischendorf’s work, while excellent, could be improved or at least double-checked (as R. W. Lyon attempted in 1958) by the use of multi-spectral imaging.  Hopefully this will be done before the manuscript’s Greek text becomes completely illegible as result of the harmful chemicals that were used upon it in the 1830s in attempts to make its lower writing easier to read.    

           

● Codex Nitriensis (R, 027):  In the 700s, a monk named Simeon needed parchment to make a copy of the Syriac composition Against the Impious John the Grammarian, by Severus of Antioch.  To obtain the parchment, a few old Greek manuscripts were recycled:  a manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from the 400s, a manuscript of Euclid’s Elements from the 600s, and a manuscript of the Gospel of Luke from the 600s.  This manuscript was once in the impressive library of the monastery of St. Mary Deipara, which was located in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt; this is why it is called Codex Nitriensis. 

This digitally enhanced
image shows text from
Luke 16 in Codex R (027).

            After this manuscript was purchased, William Cureton (the same researcher who discovered and published the Curetonian Syriac manuscript) published its text of part of the Iliad in 1851.  Its text of Luke was studied by both Samuel Tregelles and Constantine Tischendorf; the latter published it in 1857 in his series Monumenta Sacra Inedita, volume 2 (beginning on page 56 of the downloadable file), and each page’s contents are identified in his transcription. 

Now housed at the British Library (and catalogued as Add. MS 17211), Codex R has been rebound so that the opening pages contain the portion which has text from the Gospel of Luke in the lower writing.  Tischendorf managed to not only transcribe the text but also the Eusebian Section-numbers and the marginal note seen here (which accompanies text from Luke 16 but relates to the parable of the Prodigal Son which was on the preceding page).  On some pages, quite a bit of the Greek text, written in two columns per page, is in the margins and is not obscured by the Syriac upper writing; on other pages practically all of the Greek text is thoroughly eclipsed.  Some of the British Library’s digital images of pages of Luke have been helpfully indexed.

A study of the text of R by Robert Waltz indicated that there is considerable mixture in R’s essentially Byzantine text, especially in chapters 13, 14, and 15.  It is one of the relatively few manuscripts which do not include Luke 22:43-44.  Despite the importance of Codex R, the compilers of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece deliberately stopped citing it, as stated in the Introduction of that edition.   

           

● Codex Guelpherbytanus A (024, P^e) and 026 Codex Guelferbytanus B (026, Q) are two early Greek witnesses to the Byzantine text of the Gospels.  They are often consulted together, because each one was recycled when someone in the 700s used their pages for writing-material with which to make a copy of the Latin text of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, a.k.a. Origins, a highly significant work in its own right.  

            The person who prepared this palimpsest also recycled pages from a Latin-Gothic copy of Romans (this text is known as Codex Carolinus, a.k.a. Beuron 79) and the lower writing dates to the 500s or 600s), a Vulgate copy of the book of Judges, a Vulgate copy of Job, a copy of Ambrosiaster’s Commentary on Romans, and a copy of the Roman author Galen’s composition On the Properties of Foods.

Tischendorf gave 024 and 026 his attention and transcribed then both:  024’s text of portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is recorded in Monumenta Sacra Inedita, Volume 6, published in 1869, following the title-page on digital page 276.  Tischendorf’s transcript of 026’s text of portions of Luke and John (especially Luke) follows digital page 310 in Monumenta Sacra Inedita, Volume 3, published in 1860. 

            Unfortunately, few individuals other than readers of Tischendorf’s publications (in which most of the introductions and notes were written in Latin) seem to have paid much attention to Codices 024 and 026.  Bruce Metzger did not mention them in the chapter Important Witnesses to the Text of the New Testament in his textbook The Text of the New Testament.  026, but not 024, was consulted for the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament.  Hopefully this neglect will not last long.  A complete index of 024 and 026 (facilitating comparisons between the online digital images of the manuscript, and Tischendorf’s page-by-page transcript) is available as a free download among the files stored at the NT Textual Criticism group on Facebook.

            (Those who page through the digital page-views may also notice Isidore’s comments and diagrams about the spherical shape of the earth, the moon’s rotation around the earth, etc.)  

           

On this page from Codex Zacynthius (040),
an excerpt from the writings of Cyril of Alexandria
stands in the upper and lower margins. 
The text of Luke is written in different lettering. 
The old parchment was reused to make a medieval lectionary, written in black and ink.

● Codex Zacynthius (040, Ξ) is two New Testament manuscripts in one:  the upper writing is Lectionary 299, produced in the 1200s or 1300s.  The lower writing contains, in uncial script, text from the first half of the Gospel of Luke, and was probably written in the 700s, although some researchers have proposed that it was made in the 600s or even the 500s.  The text of Luke is framed by a  catena-commentary in the margins; the excerpts from patristic writings are also written in uncials, but the letters are smaller and vertically elongated so as to avoid confusion between the Scripture-text and the patristic excerpts. 

Included among the patristic writers cited in the catena – Chrysostom, Origen, Isidore of Pelusium, Titus of Bostra, Cyril of Alexandria (especially) and more – is Severus of Antioch, who wrote in the 500s (the same person whose composition constitutes the upper writing in Codex Nitriensis); this may seem to weigh in against the idea that the catena in Ξ was made during or very shortly after his lifetime; on the other hand, Severus’ name was erased, which suggests that the manuscript was read and used by someone who was apparently not altogether willing to attribute helpful comments to Severus on account of his problematic Christological views.  

            One of the notable features of Codex 040 was noticed by Samuel Tregelles in his 1861 publication of its contents:  chapter-divisions, accompanied by the letter Ψ, are the same as those found in Codex Vaticanus.  This suggested to Tregelles what a detailed study of its text confirmed:  it often agrees with the Alexandran uncials.  At Luke 4:8, for example, Ξ is allied with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus by not including the phrase “Get behind Me, Satan” (Υπαγε οπισω μου σατανα).    

Tregelles avoided using chemicals to restore the text, preferring instead to use “every clear day for about four months” – by which I deduce that he held the pages up to sunlight (or else used a mirror to catch the sunlight and project it onto the pages) to see the lower writing.  Modern-day researchers are using new methods, including multi-spectral imaging, to continue to investigate the text of this palimpsest.

[Readers are encouraged to use the embedded links in this post to explore additional resources.]