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Codex Vaticanus
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The Codex Vaticanus, (The Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Vat. gr. 1209; no. B or 03 Gregory-Aland, d 1 von Soden), is one of the oldest and most valuable extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible. The codex is named for its place of housing in the Vatican Library.
It is written in Greek, on vellum, with uncial letters.
The manuscript is one of the very few, and one of the two Greek manuscript of New Testament to be written with three columns per page (the other being Codex Vaticanus 2061).
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Encyclopedia
The Codex Vaticanus, (The Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Vat. gr. 1209; no. B or 03 Gregory-Aland, d 1 von Soden), is one of the oldest and most valuable extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible. The codex is named for its place of housing in the Vatican Library.
It is written in Greek, on vellum, with uncial letters.
The manuscript is one of the very few, and one of the two Greek manuscript of New Testament to be written with three columns per page (the other being Codex Vaticanus 2061). Because it was not often used, it has survived to the present day in very good condition. Codex is comprised in a single quarto volume containing 759 thin and delicate vellum leaves. Until the discovery by Tischendorf of the Codex Sinaiticus, it was without a rival in the world.
Contents
Vaticanus originally contained a complete copy of the Septuagint ("LXX") except for 1-4 Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasseh. Genesis 1:1 - 46:28a (31 leaves) and Psalm 105:27 — 137:6b (20 leaves) are lost and have been filled by a later hand in the 15th century. 2 Kings 2:5-7, 10-13 are also lost due to a tear in one of the pages. The order of the Old Testament books is as follows: Genesis to 2 Chronicles as normal, 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras (Ezra-Nehemiah), the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the minor prophets from Hosea to Malachi, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations and the Epistle of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.
The extant New Testament of Vaticanus contains the Gospels, Acts, the General Epistles, the Pauline Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews (up to Heb 9:14, ?a?a[??e?); thus it lacks 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Revelation. These missing pages were replaced by a 15th century minuscule supplement (no. 1957). Omitted passages include Matthew 16:2b-3, Mark 16:9-20, , , John 7:53-8:11 and . It has not ending in the Gospel of Mark, but scribe was aware of it (in some manuscripts) and left empty column afte Gospel of Mark. It is only one empty column in this codex.
Description
Originally it was composed of 820 parchment leaves as 71 leaves have been lost. Currently, it conatins 617 leaves in Old Testament and 142 in New Testament. The codex is written in three columns per page, 42 lines per page, 16-18 letters per line. The size of the pages is 27 by 27 cm.
The Greek is written continuously with small neat writing, later retraced by a 10th (or 11th) century scribe. Punctuation is rare (accents and breathings have been added by a later hand) except for some blank spaces, diaeresis on initial iotas and upsilons, abbreviations of the nomina sacra and markings of OT citations.
There are no enlarged initials, no stops or accents, no divisions into chapters or sections such as are found in later MSS.
Text
The Greek text of the codex is a representative of the Byzantine text-type. Aland placed it in Category I.
Scribes and correctors
The manuscript was written by three scribes, two of them wrote the Old Testament and one the New Testament (B1, B2, B3).
The manuscript contains mysterious double dots (so called "umlauts") in the margin of the New Testament, which seem to mark places of textual uncertainty. There are 795 of these in the text and around another 40 that are uncertain. The date of these markings are disputed among scholars and are discussed in a link below. Two such "umlauts" can be seen in the left margin of the first column (top image).
On page 1512, next to Hebrews 1:3, the text contains an interesting marginal note, "Fool and knave, can't you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!"—"?µa??state ?a? ?a??, ?fe? t?? pa?a???, µ? µetap??e?" which suggests that inaccurate copying, either intentional or unintentional, was a known problem in scriptoriums. The uppermost picture of this article shows the page where this remark is found (In the middle of the yellow page, between 1st and 2nd column).
Provenance
Its place of origin and the history of the manuscript is uncertain, with Rome (Hort), southern Italy, Alexandria (Kenyon, Burkitt), and Caesarea (T. C. Skeat) all having been suggested.
A connection with Egypt is indicated by the order of the Pauline epistles and by the fact that, as in the Codex Alexandrinus, the titles of some of the books contain letters of a distinctively Coptic character, especially the Coptic mu, which is used not only in titles, but also very frequently at the ends of lines, when space is to be economised.
There has been speculation that it had previously been in the possession of Cardinal Bessarion because the minuscule supplement has a text similar to one of Bessarion's manuscripts. According to Paul Canart's introduction to the recent facsimile edition, p. 5, the decorative initials added to the manuscript in the Middle Ages are reminiscent of Constantinopolitan decoration of the 10th century, but poorly executed, giving the impression that they were added in the 11th or 12th century. T. C. Skeat, a paleographer at the British Museum, first argued that Codex Vaticanus was among the 50 Bibles that the Emperor Constantine I ordered Eusebius of Caesarea to produce. The similarity of the text with the papyri and Coptic version (including some letter formation), parallels with Athanasius' canon of 367 suggest an Egyptian or Alexandrian origin.
It is dated to the first half of the 4th century. It is likely slightly older than Codex Sinaiticus, which also was transcribed in the 4th century. One argument is that Sinaiticus already has the, at that time, very new Eusebian Canon tables, but Vaticanus doesn't. Another is the slightly more archaic style of Vaticanus, and more complete absence of ornamentation, caused it to be regarded as slightly the older than Sinaiticus.
In the Vatican Library
The manuscript has been housed in the Vatican Library (founded by Pope Nicholas V in 1448) for as long as it has been known, appearing in its earliest catalog of 1475 and in the 1481 catalogue. In catalog from 1481 it was described as a "Biblia in tribus columnis ex memb."
In the 16th century it became known for scholars in result of the correspondence between Erasmus and the prefects of the Vatican Library (Paulus Bombastius, Sepúlveda) in 1521-1534.
In 1669 a collation was made by Bartolocci, librarian of the Vatican, but it was not published, and was not used until Scholz in 1819 found a copy of it in the Royal Library at Paris. Another collation was made in 1720 for Bentley by Mico, and revised by Rulotta. A further collation was made by Gray Birch in 1780, but it was incomplete.
Before the 19th century no scholar was allowed to study or edit it. In 1809 Napoleon brought it as a victory trophy to Paris, but in 1815 it was returned to the Vatican Library. In that time, in Paris, German scholar Johann Leonhard Hug (1765-1846) saw it. Cardinal Angelo Mai printed an edition in 1828 and 1838, which, however, did not appear till 1857, three years after his death, and which was most unsatisfactory. It was called by Tischendorf "Pseudo-facsimile". In 1843 Tischendorf was permitted to make a facsimile of a few verses, in 1844 — Eduard de Muralt saw it, and in 1845 — S. P. Tregelles was allowed to observe several points which Muralt had overlooked. He often saw the codex, but "it was under such restrictions that it was impossible to do more than examine particular readings."
"They would not let me open it without searching my pockets, and depriving me of pen, ink, and paper; and at the same time two prelati kept me in constant conversation in Latin, and if I looked at a passage too long, they would snatch the book out of my hand".
Tregelles left Rome after five months without accomplishing his object. During a large part of the 19th century, the authorities of the Vatican Library obstructed scholars who wished to study the codex in detail. Henry Alford in 1849 wrote: “It has never been published in facsimile (!) nor even thoroughly collated (!!).” Scrivener in 1861 commented:
"To these legitimate sources of deep interest must be added the almost romantic curiosity which has been excited by the jealous watchfulness of its official guardians, with whom an honest zeal for its safe preservation seems to have now degenerated into a species of capricious wilfulness, and who have shewn a strange incapacity for making themselves the proper use of a treasure they scarcely permit others more than to gaze upon". It (...) "is so jealously guarded by the Papal authorities that ordinary visitors see nothing of it but the red morocco binding".
Thomas Law Montefiore (1862):
"The history of the Codex Vaticanus B, No. 1209, is the history in miniature of Romish jealousy and exclusiveness.”
In 1889-1890 a photographic facsimile of the whole manuscript was made and published by Giuseppe Cozza-Luzi, in three volumes. Another facsimile of the New Testament text was published in 1904 in Milan. As a result the codex became widely available.
Importance
Codex Vaticanus is one of the most important manuscripts for the text of the Septuagint and Greek New Testament, it is a leading member of the Alexandrian text-type. It was heavily used by Westcott and Hort in their edition, The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881). In the Gospels, it is the most important witness of the text, in Acts and Catholic epistles, equal to Codex Sinaiticus, in Pauline epistles it has some Western readings and the value of its text is a little lower than of the Codex Sinaiticus. Unfortunately the manuscript is not complete. Possibly it had some apocryphal books of New Testament (like codices Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus).
See also
Further reading
- S. Kubo, "P72 and the Codex Vaticanus", S & D XXVII, Salt Lake City, 1965.
- C. M. Martini, "Il problema della recentionalita del Codice B alla Luce del Papiro Bodmer XIV (P75)", Analecta biblica 26, Roma, 1966.
- B. M. Metzger, "Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography", Oxford University Press, New York – Oxford 1981.
- J. Edward Miller, "Some Observations on the Text-Critical Function of the Umlauts in Vaticanus, with Special Attention to 1. Corinthians 14.34-35", JSNT 26 (2003) 217-236 [Miller disagrees with Payne on several points. He notes and uses this website.]
- Curt Niccum, "The voice of the MSS on the Silence of the Women: ...", NTS 43 (1997), pp. 242-255.
- Janko Sagi, "Problema historiae codicis B", Divius Thomas 1972, 3-29.
- T.C. Skeat, "The Codex Vaticanus in the 15th Century", JTS 35 (1984) 454-465.
- Philip B. Payne "Fuldensis, Sigla for Variants in Vaticanus and 1 Cor 14.34-5", NTS 41 (1995) 251-262 [Payne discovered the first umlaut while studying this section.]
- Philip B. Payne and Paul Canart, "The Originality of Text-Critical Symbols in Codex Vaticanus", Novum Testamentum Vol. 42, Fasc. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 105-113.
- Philip B. Payne and Paul Canart, "The Text-Critical Function of the Umlauts in Vaticanus, with Special Attention to 1 Corinthians 14.34-35: A Response to J. Edward Miller", JSNT 27 (2004) 105-112 [Payne still thinks, contra Miller, that the combination of a bar plus umlaut has a special meaning.]
- T. C. Skeat, "The Codex Vaticanus in the 15th Century", JTS 35 (1984), pp. 454-465.
- B. H. Streeter, "The Four Gospels. A Study of Origins", Oxford 1924.
- C. Vercellonis, J. Cozza, "Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecus Codex Vaticanus", Roma 1868.
- James W. Voelz, "The Greek of Codex Vaticanus in the Second Gospel and Marcan Greek", Novum Testamentum 47 (2005), 3, pp. 209-249.
External links
Pseudo-Facsimiles
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- Edition in PDF format. 16MB download
Articles
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- Detailed description of Codex Vaticanus with many images and discussion of the "umlauts".
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