dates assigned to Codex Vaticanus

Steven Avery

Administrator
We are keeping general issues of uncial dating in this Sinaiticus section.

Sister threads:

Bernard Janin Sage (P. C. Sense) questions great uncial dating edifice

https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.190

Robert Lewis Dabney astutely questions uncial dating - Sinaiticus early dating reasons analysed and shown to be insufficient
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.301

Johann David Michaelis and the dating of Codex Alexandrinus.
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.919

========================

the Vaticanus retracing - latinization - Alexandrinus - dating

https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.151

Florentine Council, Vaticanus and Latinization - Erasmus, Brugensis and more
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.269

dates assigned to Codex Vaticanus
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.924/post-2006

=============================================

Facebook - PureBible - Nov, 2018
https://www.facebook.com/groups/purebible/permalink/1959017040856842/

Facebook - The Received Text - Nov, 2018
https://www.facebook.com/groups/receivedtext/permalink/2145255369058168/

The Vaticanus retracing thread needs a careful review. The parts about original dating can be extracted and brought here. Other points, like the washing per Wieland, or the acceptance of Peter Head of 11th century for the retracing from Tischendorf, post 08176, can be reviewed as well.
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
The first article is one of the many excellent articles written c. 1850-1870 that understood the corruptness of Vaticanus. (This needs its own thread, if there is not one yet.)

And this article goes with the Michaelis, Sage, Dabney expositions:


William Lindsay Alexander (1808-1884)

British Quarterly Review (1861) p. 353-374
review of Notitia Editionis Codicis Bibliorum Sinaitici by Tischendorf
The Sinaitic Manuscript of the Greek Testament.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xHBHAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA369

Then, again, the real age of the famous MSS., A and B, though generally considered to be established, is one of the most uncertain things imaginable. That they were not executed before a certain date—the middle of the fourth century—is capable of demonstration. But lhow long afterwards they came into existence, or which is the most ancient of the two, no man, however great Ins experience or his skill in palaeography, can tell. Critics may form shrewd guesses ; but that is all they can do, for this plain reason, that there are no positive data on which to rest. There has, perhaps, never appeared a man better fitted, by his extensive researches in palaeography, to form an opinion as to the age of MSS., than the celebrated Montfaucon. Yet it is well known he judged the Vatican MS. to belong to the sixth century ; whilst Tischendorf and Tregelles confidently ascribe it to the fourth! Here is a difference of two centuries. Who shall decide where doctors disagree ?

(the rest is taken from the Facebook post and can be checked for italics, etc.)

"The fact is, too great stress should not be laid on the particular form of the letters in which ancient MSS. were written, where more conclusive proofs of their age do not exist. Supposing it all true that critics allege, as to certain forms of letters being universally characteristic of certain ages, wherever the codex chanced to be executed, and even when written, as some are said to be, by the slender hand of a female, still what more probable than that sometimes a scribe of the ninth or tenth century, when transcribing a MS. three or four hundred years old, should imitate the ancient style of Uncials which his copy presented ? Indeed, as matter of fact, we are able to affirm that such a thing has really occurred. The Codex Sangermanensis, an Uncial MS., belonging, according to Tregelles, to the ninth or tenth century, is yet written in letters of precisely the same form as the Codex Claromantanus, a production of the sixth century. If we ask those skilled in Comparative Criticism to explain this anomaly, they tell us that it was because the one was copied from the other.. In how many other cases this same process was repeated we have no possible means of determining. "

"No doubt the text of this newly-discovered MS., agreeing as it does so frequently with that of two or three other ancient copies of the Greek Testament, will be referred to as additional evidence of the authenticity of what is called the ‘ancient text,' in opposition to our current text. But the readings of the Cursive copies of the Greek Testament rest on too solid a foundation to be disturbed by the discovery of an additional MS., even of alleged great antiquity. There were bad copies, as Augustine and Jerome tell us, in the fourth century, just as much as in the tenth. We would ask the advocates of this pretended ‘ancient text,’ ‘ Whence was ‘ derived the text of the ten or twelve other Uncial MSS., and of the ‘ hundreds of Cursive codices agreeing in the main with them ?’ The only conceivable answer must be—from other more ancient MSS., and those again from other still more ancient than the boasted codices antiquissimi, whose testimony, with Tregelles and Tischendorf, usually decides a disputed reading. Thus, then, it may fairly be inferred, in the pages of these despised Uncials, E, F, G, H, &c., and the great mass of Cursives, we have, where they agree, the text, not of two or three, but of some fifty, sixty, or a hundred ancient MSS.; so that the extraordinary veneration paid to the Uncials B, C, D, and L is nothing more than a delusion of the imagination."
Titan
The Vatican Manuscript p. 138-155
editor George Gillfillan (1813-1878)
https://books.google.com/books?id=vHEEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA140

The date assigned to the manuscript is various; Hug and Tischendorf naming the fourth century; Blanchini the fifth; Montfaucon, fifth or sixth; and Le Long saving, Hic Codex non est adeo antiquus &c.

Hug seems to be the one early date before the Tischendorf and Westcott-Hort textual apostasy.

Wetstein believed the Vaticanus was accommodated to the Latin. Do not yet have his date.

Facebook - PureBible
Vaticanus recognized as corrupt and
** Tischendorf pushed for early date.**
https://www.facebook.com/groups/purebible/permalink/1255595691198984/

"The manuscript designated by the letter A., is Codex Alexandrinus, deposited in the British Museum; B. is Cod. Vaticanus, in Rome. The age of these two manuscripts is uncertain; they are assigned by different critics to the sixth or fifth century, while some (e.g., Tischendorf) assign the latter even to the fourth century."

- Philip Schaff, 1866


Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Volume 19 - Acts
https://books.google.com/books?id=VMU5AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP17

Many commentators around 1850 had commented on the corruptness of Vaticanus. That I plan to include separately.


Here you see that Vaticanus was seen as about 500 AD, not 350 AD., before "The Fixer" came on the scene, Tischendorf.
Where did the Vatican Codex come from? The earliest reference to it is a 15th-century entry in the Vatican Library catalog. Scholars have suggested that it may have been produced in Egypt, Caesarea, or even Rome. After evaluating these theories, however, Professor J. Neville Birdsall of the University of Birmingham, England, concluded:

“In short, we cannot be certain of the exact date nor the place of origin of Codex Vaticanus, nor, in spite of scholarly efforts, can its history before the fifteenth century be traced.”


https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2009727#h=5
Textus Receptus Bibles

Steven Avery And ... it may well be later than 4th century. It matches Codex Z, thought to be 8th century, in one important feature. Until the textual apostasy and shenanigans of the late 1800s, 6th century was common. It is quite likely that it was before the 10th century. It is possible that it is 4th century, c.350 the terminus post quem.

All scripts can be copied at a later time, none will be predicted at an earlier time. Script palaeography is not a time-symmetrical science.
Hug's review of the scholarship is available in his original edition, and in the reprint by Granville Penn. There is a note on p. 29 quoting Scholz in his Prolegomena p. xcvii that Hug gives "proof" for the 4th century. Yet in his English work the Hug evidences were shallow.

(p. 29 also shows the spectacularly late dates for Bezae and Alexandrinus!)

Annotations to the Book of the New Covenant (1837)
Granville Penn
https://books.google.com/books?id=S80tAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA29

The next is the Latin reprint of Hug, the scholar and date references should be in the first few pages.

Annotations to the Book of the New Covenant (1837)
Granville Penn
https://books.google.com/books?id=S80tAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA91
https://archive.org/details/annotationstoboo00penn/page/n103
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
It would be helpful to track down the Latin of Blanchini and Montfaucon

The early date movement began with Hug, and he is best accessed in the Granville Penn edition.
Not sure if Griesbach has a date.

4th century movement pushed by Tischendorf
Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott & Hort, Buttmann, Bleek, Edward Maunde Thompson in the later 1800s are 4th century
(None really address the arguments above.)

Check Scholz and Scrivener.

==============================

Skeat and Elliott

The Collected Biblical Writings of T.C. Skeat
T. C. Skeat on the Dating and Origin of Codex Vaticanus
James Keith Elliott
https://books.google.com/books?id=td_OLXo4RvkC&pg=PA281

(check for full version)

In notes on p. 293 Elliott gives some difficulties for the Rome theory.
A discussion of John William Burgon. He also went back and forth with Ezra Abbot.

Burgon quote
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/bibleversiondiscussionboard/burgon-quote-t739.html
Kenyon
The Text of the Greek Bible
http://www.katapi.org.uk/GBibleText/Ch3.html

With regard to its date and place of origin, the extreme simplicity of its writing and the arrangement in three columns point to a very early place among vellum uncials, and the first half of the fourth century is generally accepted.With regard to its place, Hort was inclined to assign it to Rome, and others to southern Italy or Caesarea; but the association of its text with the Coptic versions and with Origen, and the style of writing (notably the Coptic forms used in some of the titles), point rather to Egypt and Alexandria.
... the latest authority in this department, Mr F. G. Kenyon, has thrown light on the whole question of early Christian Greek MSS., by the discovery of a large uncial round hand on a papyrus dated Anno Domini 88.1 Thus it is quite possible, palaeographically, that the Codex Vaticanus, which has been hitherto supposed to date from the fourth century, may be much older, and there is now no conclusive evidence to prove that the Alexandrinus was not written by St Tecla, whatever the probabilities may be to the contrary.
1 The Palaography of Greek Papyri, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1899.
https://books.google.com/books?id=NnYLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA322
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
the writers c. 1850-1860 understood the corruption of Vaticanus

Here is one of many.

The Journal of Sacred Literature (1860) p. 220-224
The Vatican Codex

https://books.google.com/books?id=TG8tAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA222

from

The Titan Magazine, August 1859 p. 138-155
The Vatican Manuscript
Reverend George Gilfillan
http://books.google.com/books?id=vHEEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA138

Dr. Hug, from his being a Roman Catholic divine, would have no objection to exalt the venerable age of any document in possession of the Papal See, a process which would be the natural result of bis ecclesiastical views and position, without any disparagement of his literary honesty or capacity. We make no wilful reflection upon either the fairness or the judgment of this scholar, when we take into account the necessary bias of his education and position, as only a proper deduction from the sum of plenary confidence in his critical decisions. We may respect him personally as much as any other scholar, but we must weigh his opinions before we can receive them as indisputable verdicts and settled truths.
p. 142

George Gilfillan (1813-1878)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gilfillan



WIP - TBC
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
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Steven Avery

Administrator
Later Date for Corrections??
Fabiani Clemens
[textualcriticism] Vaticanus retracing - 15th century date traces to Enrico Fabiani, by monk Clement

Ceriani

p. 121 in Jesse Grenz

================================

Paolo Bombace and Erasmus

Sixtene Edition per Patricia Easterling

the surprising precision with which the editors assigned the fourth-century date to the codex,
“large letters” (maioribus litteris) and specifically dated 1200 years before the edition’s publication (ante millesimum ducentesimum annum) and before the time of Jerome (ante tempora B. Hieronymi).
“Before Palaeography,” 182.
“Before Palaeography: Notes on Early Descriptions and Datings of Greek Manuscripts.” Pages 179–88 in Studia Codicologica. Edited by Kurt Treu. Texte und Untersuchungen 124. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1977.
Also
Easterling, Patricia E., "From Britain to Byzantium: the study of Greek manuscripts", in Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (eds), Through the looking glass: Byzantium through British eyes. Papers from the twenty-ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, March 1995, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies publications 7 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 107-120.
Sixtene noted by Tischendorf
https://books.google.com/books?id=mf9JAwAAQBAJ&pg=PR28

Sirleto - 9th century
14 Sirleto’s Annotations are present in Vat. lat. 6134, which has not yet been digitized. However, see the examination in Höpfl, Sirlets, 39 n. 2; cf. Pisano, “L’histoire,” 111.
15 Mandelbrote, “Manuscripts Meet,” 259.

Sirleto disagrees with Sixtene editors

Denis Amelote (1687–1688)
criticized Erasmus’ claim that the Comma was absent in the oldest manuscript in the Vatican (i.e., B[03]), since he had personally seen it in the oldest Greek manuscript.16
16 Assuming he did not misread B(03), he is clearly referring to a different manuscript he believed was older. Amelote, Nouveau Testament, 2:104; cited in McDonald, Biblical Criticism, 149.

Richard Simon

Bartolocci

Many 2nd or 3rd

Montfaucon

Bianchini

Du Pin

Le Long

Pfaff

Wettstein .. omitted by Grenz except for conform to the Vulgate
Latinization - Erasmus, Mill, and Wettstein,

36 Mill, Novum Testamentum, 163.
37 The problem was exaggerated since the readings sent to Erasmus were often selected to show B(03)’s
agreement with the Vulgate against his edition. Likewise, Wettstein had apparently been refused access to readings
from Richard Bentley, which he had hoped would invalidate the codex altogether. Wettstein, Novum Testamentum, 1:24;
Birch, Quatuor Evangelia, xxiii; Michaelis, Introduction, 346–348; Pisano, “L’histoire,” 109.
38 See also Amphoux, “Les circonstances,” 163–164.
39 See, however, Giurisato’s more recent comparison of both early and late numeration in B(03) with that of
Amiatinus. Westcott and Hort, Introduction, 264–267; Giurisato, “Atti degli Apostoli,” 211–227.
**
Although his theory—sometimes called the
Foedus cum Graecis—was proven to be dubious, the accusation against B(03) of Latinization
continued with scholars like Mill and Wettstein.3 It is clear that these criticizers of B(03) are
referring to a modern project of correction, but a layer of corrections nonetheless.

Hug

Tischendorf

Cavallo

Nongbri

consensus
31 See the summary of early criticisms by José O’Callaghan, Peter J. Parsons, Jean Irigoin, and Nigel G. Wilson
in Orsini, Studies, 57–59; More recent criticism has come from Askeland, “Dating,” 457–489; Nongbri, “Palaeographic
Analysis,” 84–97.



The Scribes and Correctors of Codex Vaticanus:
A Study on the Codicology, Paleography, and Text of B(03)
Jesse Grenz
https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/se.../2ad5217b-7aac-40ae-bebf-de044061dcbb/content



1.1 Date
The antiquity of B(03) is certainly its most recognized quality throughout the history of research.
Already on 18 June, 1521, Paolo Bombace wrote to Erasmus that he found the text of 1 John in the
Vatican library, “written in very ancient characters.”11 Taking Bombace at his word, Erasmus too
cited B(03), favoring his rejection of the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7), as “a very ancient
manuscript.”12 Yet, an approximate date of the codex was not published until the Sixtine edition of
the Septuagint (1587). In the Praefatio ad lectorem, B(03) is described as having “large letters”
(maioribus litteris) and specifically dated 1200 years before the edition’s publication (ante
millesimum ducentesimum annum) and before the time of Jerome (ante tempora B. Hieronymi).
Patricia Easterling has highlighted the surprising precision with which the editors assigned the
fourth-century date to the codex, since the modern science of paleography (associated with
Montfaucon) had not yet been developed.13
While this approximate date would become the consensus in current scholarship, it was far
from stable in the opinions of early critics. Even before the publication of the Sixtine edition,
Cardinal Sirleto claimed in his notes that B(03) originated in the ninth century.14 Sirleto played an
important role in examining the Greek manuscripts for the edition, but his opinion on the date was
not followed by the editors.15 Likewise, in the seventeenth century, Denis Amelote (1687–1688)
criticized Erasmus’ claim that the Comma was absent in the oldest manuscript in the Vatican (i.e.,
B[03]), since he had personally seen it in the oldest Greek manuscript.16 Richard Simon (1689) was
happy to accept the fourth-century date of the codex, but Bartolocci (2 November, 1669) allowed for
some uncertainty, claiming instead that the codex was written more than a millennium before (piu
di 1000 anni che e scritto).17 To be sure, there were many around this time that believed the codex
originated in the third or even second century.18
However, this optimism shifted in later years as critics in the eighteenth century regularly
suggested a date between the fifth and seventh centuries. Most notably, Bernard de Montfaucon
(1739) proposed a fifth or sixth-century date, based partly on the absence of original accents.19 In
one of the earliest sample pseudo-facsimiles of B(03), Giuseppe Bianchini (1749) includes the
description, “scriptus videtur ineunte Saeculo V. Iesu Christi.”20 Writing in 1699, Louis Ellies du Pin
claimed that B(03) was older than a thousand years, apparently since it is missing section numbers
or titles that conform to the Eusebian apparatus (see Chapter 2).21 Nonetheless, there remained
some who, like Jacques Le Long (1709), regarded the codex as “not truly ancient, nor of good
esteem.”22


What was missing from these attempts to date B(03) was any clear criteria. Instead, critics
made general remarks concerning the large majuscule letters, followed by the absence of early
accents and Eusebian section numbers. From the beginning, comparison with the Vulgate and
patristic citations provided a significant anchor for situating B(03) in its historical context.
Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff (1709) suggested one of the first explicit paleographic comparisons with
the third-century inscription on a statue of Hippolytus.23 A century later, J. Leonhard Hug (1810)
provided the most significant early treatment of the codex’s antiquity.24 Among other evidence, Hug
compared the hand of B(03) with a newly unrolled Herculaneum papyrus of Philodemus’ De musica
from the first century BC (LDAB 3653). He adds to this, the absence of ornamentation, original
accents, Eusebian or Euthalian divisions, the phrase εν εφεϲω (Eph 1:1), and the presence of irregular
section numbers in the Pauline corpus (see Chapter 2).25 From this, Hug concludes that B(03)
belongs “to the earliest period of the fourth century.”26
After Tischendorf’s discovery of Codex Sinaiticus (א[01]) in the 1840s, attention shifted to
the comparative dating of the two codices (see §1.4). Since he had also assigned א(01) to the fourth
century, the question shifted to which came first.27 However, in 1967 Guglielmo Cavallo provided
the most recent and sustained argument for a date range of 328–373, with a preference for a date
around 350.28 His contribution was the establishment of an evolutionary model of the Greek Biblical
Majuscule, the bookhand of B(03). In this model, our codex represents the pinnacle of the canonical
bookhand, which coincides with the fourth century.29 Cavallo also presents the early fourth-century
papyri, P. Lond. Lit. 33 and P. Beatty IV (LDAB 1259 and 3160), as slightly earlier comparisons to the
hand of B(03). Interestingly, the date range of 328–373 is based on the episcopacy of Athanasius and
the apparent dependence of the order of books compared to those listed in his Festal Letter of 367
(see §1.3).30


INTRODUCTION 5
around 350.28 His contribution was the establishment of an evolutionary model of the Greek Biblical
Majuscule, the bookhand of B(03). In this model, our codex represents the pinnacle of the canonical
bookhand, which coincides with the fourth century.29 Cavallo also presents the early fourth-century
papyri, P. Lond. Lit. 33 and P. Beatty IV (LDAB 1259 and 3160), as slightly earlier comparisons to the
hand of B(03). Interestingly, the date range of 328–373 is based on the episcopacy of Athanasius and
the apparent dependence of the order of books compared to those listed in his Festal Letter of 367
(see §1.3).30
Cavallo’s methodology has not gone uncriticized, but a fourth-century date of B(03) remains
the consensus.31 In a forthcoming article, Brent Nongbri has criticized the earliest dating of א(01)
based on the cursive ανω and κατω notes in some of the corrections. While Milne and Skeat
confidently dated these to the fourth century—probably the first half—Nongbri has also found
parallels in the early fifth century.32 Since similar notes can be found in B(03) (see §1.4 and Chapter
4), this may call for further caution against restricting the date of the codex to less than a century.
Cavallo’s preference for a date circa 350 is likely too precise, and the use of Athanasius’ episcopacy
as a date range is unconvincing. In Chapters 5 and 6, we will see that the high proportion of
corrections of the orthographic interchange ει-ι, fits well with the fourth-century documentary
papyri.33 In summation, B(03) is unlikely to predate Emperor Constantine, though many have
argued it was ordered by him (see §1.2); nor is it likely that a codex as significant as B(03) could
evade the addition of Eusebian section numbers if it had been produced far into the fifth century.
Nevertheless, I will continue to refer to the fourth century throughout this study as a shorthand for
the age of production.


11 Epistle 1213, translated in Erasmus, Correspondence, 248 ll. 74–75; Krans, “Erasmus,” 451, cites this as “the very
moment in history that Codex Vaticanus is first brought up in New Testament text-critical matters.”
12 Apologia resp. Iac. Lop. Stunica, translated in Krans, “Erasmus,” 452; cf. Annotations on 1 John 5.
13 Easterling, “Before Palaeography,” 182.
14 Sirleto’s Annotations are present in Vat. lat. 6134, which has not yet been digitized. However, see the examination in Höpfl, Sirlets, 39 n. 2; cf. Pisano, “L’histoire,” 111.
15 Mandelbrote, “Manuscripts Meet,” 259.
16 Assuming he did not misread B(03), he is clearly referring to a different manuscript he believed was older. Amelote, Nouveau Testament, 2:104; cited in McDonald, Biblical Criticism, 149.
17 Bartolocci, “Notes.”
18 See Cardinali, “Vicende Vaticane,” 390 nn. 252–254.
19 Montfaucon, Bibliotheca, 3.
20 Bianchini, Evangeliarium, cdxciii (Tabula I); cf. Michaelis, Introduction, 2:345
CHAPTER 14
claimed that B(03) was older than a thousand years, apparently since it is missing section numbers
or titles that conform to the Eusebian apparatus (see Chapter 2).21 Nonetheless, there remained
some who, like Jacques Le Long (1709), regarded the codex as “not truly ancient, nor of good
esteem.”22
What was missing from these attempts to date B(03) was any clear criteria. Instead, critics
made general remarks concerning the large majuscule letters, followed by the absence of early
accents and Eusebian section numbers. From the beginning, comparison with the Vulgate and
patristic citations provided a significant anchor for situating B(03) in its historical context.
Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff (1709) suggested one of the first explicit paleographic comparisons with
the third-century inscription on a statue of Hippolytus.23 A century later, J. Leonhard Hug (1810)
provided the most significant early treatment of the codex’s antiquity.24 Among other evidence, Hug
compared the hand of B(03) with a newly unrolled Herculaneum papyrus of Philodemus’ De musica
from the first century BC (LDAB 3653). He adds to this, the absence of ornamentation, original
accents, Eusebian or Euthalian divisions, the phrase εν εφεϲω (Eph 1:1), and the presence of irregular
section numbers in the Pauline corpus (see Chapter 2).25 From this, Hug concludes that B(03)
belongs “to the earliest period of the fourth century.”26
After Tischendorf’s discovery of Codex Sinaiticus (א[01]) in the 1840s, attention shifted to
the comparative dating of the two codices (see §1.4). Since he had also assigned א(01) to the fourth
century, the question shifted to which came first.27 However, in 1967 Guglielmo Cavallo provided
the most recent and sustained argument for a date range of 328–373, with a preference for a date
21 du Pin, Dissertation, 1:258–259.
22 Le Long, Bibliotheca sacra, 339; cited in Bianchini, Evangeliarium, cdxcii.
23 The reference is almost certainly to the seated statue of a figure associated with St. Hippolytus, held in the
Vatican Library (see E05385 in the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database). Pfaff, Dissertatio, 55–57; Cf. Hichtel,
Exercitatio, 8–9; translated in Michaelis, Introduction, 2:344; http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E05385.
24 Hug, De antiquitate.
25 Hug, De antiquitate; cf. Hug, Introduction, 1:262–267.
26 Additional arguments for the early date of B(03) include the brevity of titles (e.g., κατα μαθθαιον) and the
thinness of the parchment. Granville Penn also argued for an early date based on the proper placement of the Altar of
Incense in Hebrews 9:1–5 (cf. Exod 30:1–10). Hug, Introduction, 1:266; Penn, Annotations, 32; Taylor, Emphatic New
Testament, 50–51; MacMillan, Roman Mosaics, 366.
27 Tischendorf, Sinaiticum, xxix–xxxiii; Tischendorf, Vaticanum, xxviiii–xxxi; Tischendorf, Appendix codicum,
xi–xii; cf. Abbot, “Antiquity,” 189–200
INTRODUCTION 5
around 350.28 His contribution was the establishment of an evolutionary model of the Greek Biblical
Majuscule, the bookhand of B(03). In this model, our codex represents the pinnacle of the canonical
bookhand, which coincides with the fourth century.29 Cavallo also presents the early fourth-century
papyri, P. Lond. Lit. 33 and P. Beatty IV (LDAB 1259 and 3160), as slightly earlier comparisons to the
hand of B(03). Interestingly, the date range of 328–373 is based on the episcopacy of Athanasius and
the apparent dependence of the order of books compared to those listed in his Festal Letter of 367
(see §1.3).30
Cavallo’s methodology has not gone uncriticized, but a fourth-century date of B(03) remains
the consensus.31 In a forthcoming article, Brent Nongbri has criticized the earliest dating of א(01)
based on the cursive ανω and κατω notes in some of the corrections. While Milne and Skeat
confidently dated these to the fourth century—probably the first half—Nongbri has also found
parallels in the early fifth century.32 Since similar notes can be found in B(03) (see §1.4 and Chapter
4), this may call for further caution against restricting the date of the codex to less than a century.
Cavallo’s preference for a date circa 350 is likely too precise, and the use of Athanasius’ episcopacy
as a date range is unconvincing. In Chapters 5 and 6, we will see that the high proportion of
corrections of the orthographic interchange ει-ι, fits well with the fourth-century documentary
papyri.33 In summation, B(03) is unlikely to predate Emperor Constantine, though many have
argued it was ordered by him (see §1.2); nor is it likely that a codex as significant as B(03) could
evade the addition of Eusebian section numbers if it had been produced far into the fifth century.
Nevertheless, I will continue to refer to the fourth century throughout this study as a shorthand for
the age of production.
28 Cavallo, Ricerche, 52–56.
29 Cavallo and Maehler, Greek Bookhands, 34.
30 Cavallo, Ricerche, 55.
31 See the summary of early criticisms by José O’Callaghan, Peter J. Parsons, Jean Irigoin, and Nigel G. Wilson
in Orsini, Studies, 57–59; More recent criticism has come from Askeland, “Dating,” 457–489; Nongbri, “Palaeographic
Analysis,” 84–97.
32 Milne and Skeat, Scribes, 62; Nongbri, “The Date,” (forthcoming); cf. Cole, “The Date,” (forthcoming).
33 See Stolk, “Itacism,” 690–697.
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
An-Ting Yi
"codex vetustissimus"

Jean Mabillion - heavenly witnesses not in
In fact, just a few months previously, Mabillon had published an extensive work on the
Gallican liturgy, in which he offers his comment on the Comma (Mabillon, De liturgia Gallicana,
pp. 476–477).

Gilbert Burnet - 1400 years old according to Vatican
which the Chanoine Shelstrat, that was Librarie-keeper, asserted to
be 1400. years old, and proved it by the great similitude of the Characters with
those that are upon S. Hippolites Statue, which is so evident, that if his Statue was
made about his time the Antiquity of this Manuscript is not to be disputed. If the
Characters are not so fair, and have not all the marks of Antiquity that appears in
the Kings Manuscript at St. James’s, yet this has been much better preserved, and is
much more entire. The passage that has led me into this digression, is not to be
found in the Vatican Manuscript, no more than it is in the Kings Manuscript.61
Burnet’s account deserves to be somewhat elaborated here. In it we find a ve
he compared the majuscule letters of Vaticanus with the inscriptions on
the statue of Hippolytus of Rome. For Schelstrate (and Burnet), the letters of the
manuscript and those of the statue were so similar that they must have been
produced in the same period. Given the fact that Hippolytus died before the
mid-third century, it would have been likely that his statue was made shortly
after his death.62 Persuaded by the library’s curator, Burnet further claimed that
because of its completeness the Vatican manuscript was superior to ‘the Kings
Manuscript’, that is, Codex Alexandrinus (A 02).63 Interestingly
just as with Mabillon’s
remark cited above, Burnet also focused on the matter of the Comma.
This Vatican manuscript indeed supported his objection to that controversial
passage.64 As will be shown below (§ 4.1), Burnet’s remark would play an important
role in the debate about the age of the manuscript in the century to come.

objection?

Newton Iliffe
John Covel

Montfaucon
without accents, of
the fifth or sixth century.
Montfaucon valued Vaticanus
to the highest degree. According to him, however, it should be dated to the
fifth or sixth century, considerably later than the consensus of modern textual
critics. His opinion remained unchanged in his later work, a catalogue of Greek
manuscripts kept in the main European libraries.67 As we will see, de Montfaucon’s
judgement—a later dating of Vaticanus—was to become influential in subsequent
scholarship.

Evangeliorum
Harmonia Graeco-Latina, prepared by the French intellectual Nicolas Toinard.68
Since he had died a year earlier, this was in fact a posthumous volume. Known as
a lifelong friend of John Locke, many of Toinard’s letters have been preserved until
today. For present purposes, it is his Harmonia that deserves attention. For he
did not use the Textus Receptus as his harmony’s base text, but, as he claimed,
his text was based on two certain Vatican manuscripts. In the ‘Prolegomena’,
Toinard reveals the origin of his source:
see an overview in de Lang, De synoptische beschouwing, pp. 213–220. On
Toinard (or Thoynard; 1628–1706), see Di Biase, ‘Locke and Toinard 1’; ‘Locke and Toinard 2’, and the
literature cited there.
69. On de Court (1654
in contrast with the dominating
Latinisation theory, Toinard regarded the Greek text underlying the Vulgate as
indispensable for his reconstruction.

Fell

John Mill
Mill paid attention to Erasmus’s annotations, which were frequently
referred to in his apparatus.87 Among the five instances of Vaticanus
found in Erasmus’s 1535 edition (Mark 1:2; Luke 10:1; 23:46; Acts 27:16; 1 John 5:7–
8), four of them occurred in Mill’s apparatus. In the cases of Luke 10:1 and Acts
27:16, he explicitly mentions Erasmus’s name, indicating that the information
was from the famous humanist.88 It is not hard to imagine that by the same
means he noticed the omission of the Comma Johanneum in the manuscript

89. Mill’s opinion on the Comma is found in Mill, NT, pp. 739b–749b. There he first lists all the
witnesses that omit the passage by starting with ‘Alexandrinus, the Vatican manuscript of the
Greek Bible (according to which the Septuagint edition has been prepared)’ (‘Alex. Vaticanus Gr.
Bibliorum Codex (ad quem accurata est Editio LXX Interpretum)’—Mill, NT, p. 739b). See also Mc-
Donald, Biblical Criticism, pp. 181–185 for the discussion of Mill and the Comma.


Concerning the quantity of the comments originating from Lucas Brugensis,
an interesting tendency can be observed. On the one hand, all but one of the Vaticanus
readings in ‘Notarum ad Varias Lectiones’—eleven in total—are included
in Mill’s edition.97
As shown above, Mill’s information on Vaticanus is scarce. All his knowledge is
secondary, fragmentary, and even biased
Of note are the arguments Mill provides in favour of the hypothesis of Latinisation.
From the theoretical perspective, on the one hand, he fully embraces
Erasmus’s theory and the confirmation given by Simon. Although Simon actually
expresses some hesitation in putting Vaticanus among those Latinised manuscripts
(see p. 39 above), Mill nevertheless references him as one of the strongest
supports for that theory.117 On the other hand, from the perspective of the data
used, the references given by Lucas Brugensis become the main source for ar-

(‘Codex celebris Vaticanus’), which may give the impression
that it was already called Codex Vaticanus, the Vatican manuscript par
excellence. But a close look at various references to the manuscript shows that it
is not the case. Fi

Zaccagni Zacagni
the recurrence of the simple usage ‘the Vatican (Greek) manuscript’
might imply the growing awareness of this manuscript’s distinctnes
the three Roman projects on the Greek New
Testament initiated in the seventeenth century: Caryophilus’s collation work of
the Barberini manuscripts, Bartolocci’s collation, and Zaccagni’s work
. Despite
their different scopes and plans, each of them made advanced use of Codex Vaticanus
as part of their sources.
These eyewitness accounts raised the issue of
its age, and different proposals of dating were given by various means. Among
them Burnet’s account was noteworthy. By comparing the manuscript’s letters
with the characters inscribed on the ancient statue of Hippolytus, he dated Vaticanus
to a very ancient age, namely around the late third century, and hence appreciated
its superiority. Besides, the high appreciation of the manuscript was
also found in the case of Toinard’s Harmonia. Although it seems to have had
some certain readings from Vaticanus and to have used it in a critical way, this
edition never played a role in the history of New Testament textual criticism.

Barberini double countin for Mill
Despite all his efforts, Mill embraced the hypothesis of Erasmus’s Latinisation theory to dismiss
the value of Vaticanus without a second thought. And the main reason for
his confidence was the data mainly culled from Lucas Brugensis’s notes, which
usually show the similarity between the Vatican manuscript and the Latin text.
In other words, the theory of Erasmus and the data provided by Lucas Brugensis
in combination have ‘persuaded’ many critics—including Mill—to firmly believe
Vaticanus as a Latinised witness.
That is, the contrast between the acceptance of the Latinisation
theory and the declaration of the superiority of the Vulgate progressively
surfaced. The former position was generally followed by Protestant scholars,
such as Mill. They disregarded any manuscript showing conformity with the Latin
text, including the ancient manuscript in the Vatican. On the contrary, the latter
position was mainly supported by those with a Catholic background, for instance
shown in the principles of Bellarmine’s project and Toinard’s
prolegomena. For them, the ancient Vatican manuscript was used to substantiate
the excellent quality of the Vulgate. In other words, our manuscript was not
studied independently, but it was generally examined in the light of the Latin
renderings.
From those unfinished Roman projects and Toinard’s unsuccessful attempt, to
Mill’s significant edition that was unable to comprehend the value of Vaticanus,
in one way or another, they were all stories of failure regarding this manuscript.
In the next chapter, we will explore a young colleague of Mill and his use of Vaticanus,
whose theory and data were both far advanced in comparison with his
contemporaries

Grotius Simon Maldonat
Pericope Adulterae
A difficulty
needs to be solved if one wants to attribute Mill’s knowledge of the Vaticanus reading to Simon’s
reference. That is, he had already included the manuscript in the apparatus, which would
have been composed before the appearance of Simon’s work.

Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) and Casaubon
Caryophilus, ‘Collationes ex Bibliotheca
Barberina’, p. 462.

Barberini manuscripts
 
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Chapter 3
The Precursor: Bentley and His Proposed Edition


Collins challenge (like Ehrman)
Anonymous defense of heavenly witnesses
Mico collation
To sum up, Mico’s collation contains all the New Testament proportions of Vaticanus,
as well as the supplement part written in minuscule scripts. Many paratextual
features are also given, such as inscriptiones, subscriptiones, and titloi. Concerning
scribal corrections in particular, this collation almost always records the
corrected readings instead of those from the first hand. Although it is not of the
best quality according to the standard of modern critical scholarship, this is an
indispensable source for Bentley in making his edition, as will be demonstrated
later (§ 3.4).
1697803804534.png

Gal 2:17 3:14area
Thomas Bentley:
The writing is not unlike that of the Alexandrian MS., only there’s a gentle division
of words. As to the Accents, I can answer you with certainty, that they are added by
another hand, but an old one. The person that added them has also taken a strange
piece of pains, to retouch every letter in the Book; one side only sometimes, when
he thought the other side very plain; also, when he thought a letter superfluous, as
in εσθειετε, ρειψαντες, etc. he leaves the ε untouched. … The first writing is very
white, but ’tis very legible.70
Given that Mico’s collation consistently contains variants with accents, it
is likely that Bentley could have wondered whether Vaticanus was written in—in
his own term—‘true Capitals’. But now after the confirmation from his nephew,
he would have probably assigned an early age to this manuscript.71
71. The question of the presence of accents in B 03 could have troubled Bentley for quite some
time. In fact, in one of the printed editions he used for preparing his New Testament project, he
once wrote down some interesting notes under the title ‘To be asked about the Roman manuscript’
71. The question of the presence of accents in B 03 could have troubled Bentley for quite some
time. In fact, in one of the printed editions he used for preparing his New Testament project, he
once wrote down some interesting notes under the title ‘To be asked about the Roman manuscript’
1697804100206.png

3.3.3 Rulotta’s Collation (1729)
1697804220597.png

According to my examination, there are no
fewer than eighty textual changes in comparison to his base text, a slightly modified
text of Stephanus’s 1550 edition.85 In the light of the method Bentley applied
and the sources he obtained, one should not be surprised by such a great number
of changes. Among these changes, around two-thirds agree with the Modern
Critical Text (see appendix 3 for the overview).

Among all the changes Bentley makes in Galatians, references to our manuscript
occur fifty-four times.86 He chooses a reading identical to the manuscript’s
text forty-five times, but in the rest of the cases different readings are given.
These statistics lead to the following questions: Are there any observable patterns
in Bentley’s textual decisions? In what way does he use the Vaticanus readings
known to him?
Bentley
once considered Codex Alexandrinus as the best witness among all, but such an
assertion had been made prior to the arrival of Mico’s collation. Did Bentley
change his mind after receiving sufficient information from Rome?
3.5 Vaticanus as the ‘Death Knell’?
To the best of my knowledge, the conjecture that Codex Vaticanus was actually
one of the main factors for the abandonment of Bentley’s project was firs
century, Adam Fox seems to have been the first
one who elaborated on (Richard) Jebb’s hypothesis
William L. Petersen
It was clear that Vaticanus, a very ancient manuscript, did not fit into Bentley’s
stemma; indeed, its readings led him to realize that the whole basis for his edition
was flawed. He would have to redraw his stemma, allowing for at least two major recensions
in the fourth century, and this effectively rendered unachievable the goal
of his edition: to recover a single recension in the fourth century.118
Epp
mid-nineteenth century, the time
when Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ 01) appeared in European scholarly communities, one
can find an excursus entitled ‘Bentley’s Surrender in Face of Codex Vaticanus’.119
1697804971123.png

1697805004472.png


Moreover, despite
the dominance of the Latinisation theory in his day, as shown in the previous
chapters, Bentley regarded our manuscript as one of the pillars to reconstruct
the text.
his pioneering methodology and
his critical thinking as a well-trained classicist.

This tendency can be
explained in the light of one of his premises: the reconstructed Greek text should
have coincided with the Latin version. A remarkable twist can be noticed here:
for Erasmus the conformity with the Vulgate is the main reason for disregarding
Vaticanus, but for Bentley its agreement with the Latin tradition rather proves its
superiority.
And yet, some readings of Vaticanus are rejected because of their dissimilarity
to the Latin renderings.
 
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p. 121
Chapter 4
Contestation and Polemics: Wettstein and His Contemporaries


Johann Georg Pritius’s long-standing handbook Introductio in Lectionem Novi Testamenti, published in 1704.6 In the chapter on New Testament manuscripts, he places Vaticanus as one of the three ancient manuscripts, alongside Codices Bezae and Alexandrinus.7 In his second edition of 1722, Pritius further adds a footnote on Vaticanus, indicating that some doubt has been raised:
‘That manuscript was written in square letters, which nevertheless do not always prove the antiquity of manuscripts, because books with the character of this kind are found written in eighth and tenth centuries.’8 This remark illustrates that the antiquity of Vaticanus was questioned in the first decade of the century.
8. ‘Scriptus ille est littera quadrata, quae tamen non semper antiquitatem codicum arguit, quia libri eiusmodi charactere, seculo octavo, et decimo scripti, inveniuntur’ (Pritius, Introductio [1722], p. 281 n. *; the comment remains the same in the third and final edition of 1725).

Jacques LeLong
Eusèbe Renaudot

Christoph Matthäus Pfaff - the most important ms
Burnet’s eyewitness
account: the apparent similarity between the letters of this manuscript and
the characters engraved on the ancient Hippolytus statue was brought to the
fore.15

4.2 Vaticanus in Wettstein’s 1730 Prolegomena
certain collation of Vaticanus. The information did not come
directly from Bentley, but from his friend Johann Daniel Schöpflin

von Mastricht, NTG
In his last paragraph on Vaticanus, Wettstein refers to several citations from
Erasmus and his correspondence with Sepúlveda, Bombace, and Stunica.35 These
are followed by a reference given by the philologist Johann Heinrich Hottinger.36
Next to this,Wettstein lists several names who have provided first-hand information
on the manuscript, including Werner, Agellius,37 and Maldonatus.38 Despite
This seems
to be less correct than his judgement on Erasmus’s use of the polyglot. A similar remark is found in
his discussion on the Comma Johanneum: ‘The orthodox nowadays use 1 John 5:7 as their showpiece.
Yet the Complutensians edited that passage not according to the testimony of a Greek manuscript
(since it is absent in the Vatican manuscript and in the Rhodian manuscript according to
Erasmus and Stunica), but from the authority of St. Thomas and the Vulgate Latin version.’ (‘Orthodoxi
hodie loco I Io. V. 7, tamquam palmario utuntur. Illum vero Complutenses ediderunt, non ad
fidem Graeci alicuius exemplaris, (aberat enim, testibus Erasmo et Stunica, a Vaticano atque
Rhodiensi codice Msto.) sed ex authoritate S. Thomae et Vulgatae Latinae versionis’—Prolegomena,
p. 190; translation in Castelli, Wettstein’s Principles, p. 411, but I made one modification: ‘in the
Vatican manuscript and in the Rhodian manuscript’ instead of ‘in Vatican and in the manuscript
Rhodiensis’; for the translation issue of the name of manuscripts, see Introduction, § 4.)
Theodor Bibliander (c. 1505–1564, Theodor Buchmann, who later changed his name to the
Greek form as Bibliander), a linguist with expertise in Islam and the Qur’an. According to Hottinger,
the addressee is Thomas Blaurer (1499–1567), mayor of Konstanz who supported Luther’s
reformation movement. In
37. Antonius Agellius (Antonio Agellio, 1532–1608), one of the editors of the 1587 Rome Septuagint,
frequently mentioned B 03 as one of the main sources in his work on the Psalms (Agellius,
Commentarii). Cf. Martini, Recensionalità, p. 10; Mandelbrote, ‘Editing the Bible’, pp. 256–259.
In conclusion, in his 1730 Prolegomena Wettstein offers a helpful overview of
Codex Vaticanus. Although exclusively relying on secondary literature, he challenges
the presumption of the Latinisation theory. For him, this manuscript is a
valuable witness for reconstructing the Greek text of the New Testament. In fact,
that he introduces Vaticanus right after Alexandrinus and Ephraemi—at that
time regarded by him as two of the best manuscripts—may also reflect well his
preference for ancient manuscripts.40 There

the famous maxim ‘manuscripts should be weighed on the basis of their authority,
not of their number’.45
 
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4.3 Developments in Scholarly Discussions of Vaticanus
4.3.1 Bengel’s Contributions


50. See Castelli, Wettstein’s Principles, pp. 180–187 for a discussion on the background of this
principle. Although it had already been hinted at in his earlier works, this was the first time that
Bengel formulated and published the principle.

that reads the harder reading is superior to the easier.51
Moreover, this so-called ‘harder reading principle’ can and should be applied to a
broader context, as shown in his explanation of the word ‘proclive’:
manuscript twenty-six times among the thousands of variant readings he discusses
across the whole New Testament.56 Most of its references are from

More
important is his remark on the Barberini manuscript, namely the identification
of Vaticanus with one of the manuscripts collated by Caryophilus. Remarks of
the same kind—‘perhaps the same one’ (‘idem fortasse’)—recur in thirteen other
places where the attestation contains one ‘Barberini codex’ and Vaticanus.58 In
Erasmus and Lucas Brugensis, probably culled from Mill’s edition.

p. 137
4.3.2 Other Works Between 1730 and 1751

Johann Samuel Hichtel argued
that the Roman manuscript (that is, Codex Vaticanus) is superior to Codex Alexandrinus.
71
Based on Burnet’s account and notably the dating of the statue of
Hippolytus, Hichtel attempted to prove that the former manuscript is far better
than the latter regarding their age and quality. According to him, Vaticanus
would be dated to the third century or the beginning of the fourth, which is
much earlier than Alexandrinus.72
Following Pfaff’s opinion, he questioned the
Latinisation theory by challenging Mill’s point of view, the main antagonist in
his Exercitatio.73

Note: Michaelis covers Hichtel on Vaticanus

he almost never addressed any single variant reading, except for the
famous Comma.75
1737.76 Somewhat surprisingly, unlike Pritius, who questioned the antiquity of
Vaticanus, Hofmann valued this manuscript highly. By referring to several wellknown
sources, he sketched some of the manuscript’s characteristics including
its scripts, content, and the debate on its text-critical quality. Concerning its dating,
in particular, he considered it to be written in around 380 CE.77 For present
purposes, it is important to note that Hofmann heavily relied on Pfaff’s opinion
Let the Vatican manuscript be set forth with the highest praises. It is very difficult
to deny the antiquity of this manuscript, since it carries infallible signs of antiquity,
as cited above. However, it is lamented that now the manuscript has been diminished
in many places to such a degree that those who edited it introduced fresh ink
upon its lines: by bad counsel, if I am not mistaken, for in such a way the authority
of the manuscript depending on autopsy has been destroyed. For how easily could
the one who superimposed black ink above to deviate from the truth?78

Here Hofmann moved one step further to be suspicious of the intention of those
who had retouched the manuscript. That is to say, the work was made in order to
destroy the use of all first-hand examinations, since the genuine text of the Vatican
manuscript has been covered by the retouched and corrupted readings.79


79. To be sure, such an accusation is not correct. According to current scholarship, the re-inking
was probably conducted in the medieval age. In fact, due to this re-inking the original readings did
become a bit more difficult to detect but to a great extent they are still accessible. Moreover, although
the corrector did regularly introduce orthographical variants and on occasion also corrections,
the reason was mainly a practical one, that is, to extend the usability of this ancient manuscript
by retouching its entire text with a standardised spelling system and a set of ‘corrected’
readings. See Versace, Marginalia, pp. 43–50 for an overview of this scribe (his B18).

Johann David Osiander

In 1741, a polemical
work concentrating on 1 Tim 3:16 was published by John Berriman, in
which he argues for the traditional reading θεὸς ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί (‘God was
manifested in the flesh’), instead of the controversial alternative ὃς ἐφανερώθη ἐν
σαρκί (‘who was manifested in the flesh’).82 In fact, Berriman’s antagonist was
Wettstein, who doubted this particular clause based on his personal examination
of Codex Alexandrinus.83 I NEWTON

Wettstein considered the
reading οσ therein as authentic and suspected that a second hand has corrected
this to the ‘orthodox’ reading θ̅σ̅, the ?????

blunder?

It has been retouched throughout, … as I have been lately informed, by a Gentleman
who examined it himself: Only, this Gentleman observes, that some Passages
are to be excepted, which by mistake had been written twice over; which serve for a
Specimen of the original Character, as well as a proof that the rest of the MS. has
been faithfully renew’d. He adds, that the Corrections (which are many) are so
managed, that for the most part they leave the original Reading still discoverable.89
Thomas
Wagstaffe
Giuseppe
Bianchini reproduced a page from Codex Vaticanus in his Evangeliarium quadruplex,
published in 1749.96 Although it only contained a single page, taken from
the upper part of the manuscript’s page 1349, this was the first-ever printed
facsimile of its New Testament part (see figure 8).97 A

1697808271905.png


p. 144
4.4 Wettstein’s Sources on Vaticanus
Between his 1730 Prolegomena and the appearance


von Mastricht’s
Castelli
a citation from Maldonatus:
I have consulted many ancient manuscripts, and especially that most ancient and
most correct Vatican manuscript, written in majuscule letters, and the most celebrated
one in the whole world.108

Denis Amelote
Several aspects should be mentioned here. First, Amelote makes clear that his
reason for striving for ancient Greek manuscripts was to show the conformity
between Latin and ancient Greek manuscripts
Among all his comments, the one on the Comma Johanneum has drawn
particular attention not only from his contemporaries but also scholars in later
generations. In his comment on 1 John 5:7, Amelote claims that, in contrast to
Erasmus’s annotation, he found that the Comma is attested in the most ancient
manuscript in the Vatican Library:
Elle manque dans trois MSS. du Roy, dans celuy de S. Magloire, et dans six de ceux
d’Estienne. Elle manque dans le MS. d’Alexandrie, et en trois autres d’Angleterre.
Elle manquoit, dit Erasme, dans un ancien MS. grec du Vatican, (mais je la trouve au
contraire dans le plus ancien de cette Bibliotheque).115
It is not difficult to imagine that such a statement has been cited and referred to
many times, notably by those who argued the Comma as part of the genuine
text.116 Many others have criticised him for providing erroneous information.
However, as will be shown below, although he should be held responsible for his
carelessness, the reason for Amelote’s claim may well have been more complicated
than simply neglecting the fact that the Comma is absent in Vaticanus.
116. See, e.g., McDonald, Biblical Criticism, p. 227. Besides, Bengel mentions this remark in NTG,
p. 747; see also Gnomon, p. 1058: ‘If Amelote afterwards read the words in the Vatican manuscript, it
does not seem to be Latinised in this place’ (‘Si Amelotus postea in Vaticano codice dictum legit,
videndum, ne hic latinizet’). In fact, despite being absent from most of the Greek manuscripts,
Bengel views the Comma as authentic; cf. McDonald, Biblical Criticism, pp. 243–245.

Velesian Readings - separate page like Berberini
1570 this set
of variant readings was collected by Pedro Fajardo and written on the margin of
a copy of the 1550 Stephanus edition. That edition was then received by Juan
Luis de la Cerda, who printed those collected readings in his Adversaria sacra in
1626.125 What is surprising is that in about two thousand readings in this collection
almost every single one agreed with the Greek text underlying the Vulgate,
but many readings were so unique that no attestation could be found in any
known Greek manuscripts.
?
authenticity challenged by Wettstein

It seems thatWettstein does not refer to Amelote in his notes
on the Comma (Hand copy of von Mastricht 1711, vol. 3, pp. 520 sup.v and 521 sup.r).
Interestingly, among the nearly thirty instances where Amelote mentions Vaticanus
in the Catholic Epistles, only four of them are imprecise (including the
one on the Comma).
Intriguingly, the latter two descriptions
were identical to the collation made by Bartolocci, Scriptor Hebraicus
of the Vatican Library (see § 2.2.2 above).140
And Aldina’s text did not have the Comma,
since it closely followed Erasmus’s first edition, in which the passage had not yet
been added. In other words, Aldina’s edition omits the Comma in its text, just as
most Greek manuscripts. As a consequence, unless particularly mentioned,
every collation against the Aldine text would have no reference to the Comma,
simply because the base text and the collated manuscript agree at this point.142
If
Amelote’s now-lost collation followed the same logical rule, then it is very plausible
that the collation simply provided no information at this place. Therefore,
Amelote could have misunderstood the silence of the Comma in his collation as
support for the presence of the passage.143

4.5 Vaticanus in Wettstein’s Novum Testamentum Graecum
(1751–1752)


half-page facsimile attached to Bianchini’s Evangeliarium quadruplex,
which contains Luke 24:32–39, 44–50 and John 1:1–10 in Vaticanus (see
my discussion in § 4.3.2).150

Of particular relevance here is his criticism of the famous ‘harder reading
principle’:

In fact, hardly two or three [very ancient manuscripts] are extant (the Alexandrine,
Vatican, and Parisian),
It is clear that about a decade after his review of BengelWettstein now suspected
that these three ancient manuscripts had been ‘interpolated and corrupted’ (‘interpolatos
corruptosque’) according to the Latin version. His line of reasoning is
also noteworthy: that since, alone with the versions, they disagree with most of
the Greek manuscripts, it is more likely that these majuscules have followed the
versions. This reasoning implies that evidence from the majority of the Greek
manuscripts should be the criterion. In other words, for Wettstein these ancient
manuscripts could not have reflected the authentic readings because otherwise
one would have found traces remaining in other Greek manuscripts as well. The
criterion of counting witnesses would become more pronounced at a later stage,
known as the ‘majority rule’ in the ‘Prolegomena’ of NTG (on which see the discussion
below).167

Wettstein noted that the Comma Johanneum is not present in the very an
cient manuscript at the papal library in the Vatican, according to Bombace’s collation
for Erasmus.
On the opposite page, he listed the names of Lucas Brugensis,
the Complutensian Polyglot, the Barberini manuscripts, Maldonatus, and also
Sepúlveda. On the middle of the same page he wrote down a citation from the
1673 publication of Caryophilus’s collations, as well as referring to Vossius’s witness
to seeing them in Rome.1
In the penultimate paragraph of his section on Vaticanus,Wettstein expresses
his belief that the manuscript must have been Latinised. Here we find Wettstein’s
clearest verdict as he declares,

In order to put the whole matter in a clearer light, as far as it is at least possible to us, we will demonstrate that the Complutensian edition has not derived from thismmanuscript, that the New Testament in the Vatican manuscript has been interpolated from the ‘versio Itala’, and that in other aspects it is similar to the Alexandrine,to such a degree that they might have come from the same workshop.191

What is remarkable is that he now considers not only our manuscript to be ‘interpolated’,(‘interpolare’) according to the Latin version but also that the Vaticanmmanuscript is so similar to Alexandrinus that they could have originated ‘from
the same workshop’ (‘ex eadem officina’).192 He also states that although the Old,Testament in Vaticanus has generally retained the pure form of the Septuagint, its New Testament text is quite the opposite. Here an interesting twist is found in comparison with one of his arguments given in the 1730 Prolegomena, in that the consistency of the textual quality between the Old and New Testaments is particularly mentioned.193 Wettstein then raises three factors to argue for the Latinisation of this manuscript: (1) its Latinised readings are evidently proved by the three hundred places Erasmus received from Sepúlveda, as well as by Wettstein’s own comments in passing in the apparatus;194 (2) its resemblance with Alexandrinus is confirmed by Bentley,195 and also by some notable textual features;196 and (3) its chapter division is closer to that found in ancient Latin manuscripts than that of Greek manuscripts, as shown by Zaccagni. In the next and the last paragraph, he cites Grotius, Simon, and Mill in showing that they all considered the manuscript to be interpolated from the ‘versio Itala’. With these citations Wettstein concludes this section.

bottom of p. 166 GOOD on Latinisation reasons

Velesian readings and the Barberini manuscripts Fajardo
Already hinted at by his review of Bengel’s edition in 1734, in the end he came to the so-called ‘majority rule’.2
I consider the authority of the Latin version, of all other versions, and of the Greek,manuscripts agreeing with the Latin version for the most part secondary to the reading of all the other Greek manuscripts; hence, it cannot be otherwise that innseveral crucial passages where Bengel changes the received reading I retain it and defend it.203

4.6 Conclusions

In the end, Wettstein fell victim to the Latinisation delusion, just as Erasmus and Mill before him. By applying the notion of Latinisation to other ancient witnesses, he even became one of the main advocates of that theory.
 
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p. 171
Chapter 5
Fresh Collation Available: Birch and the
Recension Theory


Michaelis does not seem to give his own opinion concerning
the dating of Vaticanus. Besides, he also mentioned Lucas Brugensis and his annotations
as the main source for the variant readings of the manuscript.5
More important were his comments against the Latinisation theory proposed
by Erasmus and followed by Mill and Grabe:
 
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Wagstaffe
93. These passages are Acts 20:28; Rom 9:5; Gal 1:12; Phil 2:6; Col 2:9; 1 Tim 3:16; Tit 2:13; 1 John
5:7–8; 1 John 5:20 (Wagstaffe, Collation, ff. 4r–v). A

In itWagstaffe
collated nine specific passages from numerous Greek New Testament manuscripts
in the Vatican Library and the Barberini Library.93

Michaelis cautiously examines two pieces of
evidence Hichtel provides: (1) the manuscript’s resemblance with the characters
on the Hippolytus statue; and (2) its chapter division, in particular the absence
of the Eusebian Canons.17 Concerning the former argument, on the one hand, he
points out that the comparison can at best only prove that the manuscript is
very old, but the vague expression given by Burnet cannot be used to determine
which century the manuscript belongs to. On the other hand, Michaelis argues,
the scribe who copied the manuscript could have simply followed the Vorlage regarding
its unique chapter division. This would lead to a later age of the manuscript,
and he considers the fifth century to be more plausible, as supported by
the two eyewitnesses de Montfaucon and Bianchini.18
In his eyes, Vaticanus is a better witness because the evidence for its Latinisation
is not sufficient, and more importantly because Alexandrinus has already been
proved as being Latinised. Compared to the first edition where he embraced the
excellence of Alexandrinus, Michaelis now regards the same manuscript as of

5.1.2 From Semler’s Wetstenii Prolegomena to His Recension Theory
Particularly striking
is the footnote commenting on Wettstein’s last paragraph which contained the
citations from Grotius, Simon, and Mill to support the view of Vaticanus being
Latinised. Semler’s remarks deserve to be cited in full:
Therefore Erasmus had the correct judgement about the correction of Greek manuscripts
according to the Latin ones, and I do not despair at all that gradually many
Here Semler not only agrees withWettstein and stays in line with the majority of
scholarship in seeing the ancient Greek manuscripts—Vaticanus included—as
Latinised, but he even goes one step further: several conjectures based on certain
historical events are presented as possible scenarios for such a large-scale plan
for correcting the Greek manuscripts. Although most of his proposals are
groundless, this is a telling example to show how convincing in Semler’s opinion

However, Semler did not retain this position very long. In fact, in the third
volume of his Hermeneutische Vorbereitung, published less than one year after
his Wetstenii Prolegomena, he began to depart from that influential theory of Latinisation.
30 It was in this work that one can see the inauguration of the famous
‘recension theory’, which would become the standard notion to describe different
‘text-types’ of New Testament witnesses in the following centuries.31

5.2 Griesbach and His First NTG Edition (1775–1777)

recensions - omits Laurence
text-critical symbols
 
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p. 190

I think I counted 7,000 entries?

5.3 Birch’s Early Works
1697837222423.png



Nevertheless, although Birch’s collation is generally of good quality, it is still
far from perfect. A serious drawback is that he fails to note all the differences
between the manuscript and the base text. Take Gal 4 as a test case. In this
chapter Birch records seventeen variant readings,86 but according to my examination
there are at least eleven extra variations in this single chapter.

In short, a considerable number of readings
in Vaticanus have escaped Birch’s notice, so his collation can at best provide
an imprecise picture of the manuscript.89

I now come to Codex 1209, the most important of all the Greek manuscripts preserved
at the Vatican Library. … Of all the Greek manuscripts containing the New
Testament, none have more often been described, and none other in so many respects
have deserved merited diligence and careful examination more than this
one. Its highly esteemed age, its completeness—a rare characteristic of ancient manuscripts—
and more importantly, the remarkable readability of the text, are likewise
many excellent features that are rarely found combined in one and the same
manuscript.96

First, while
describing the corrections in the manuscript, Birch raises the issue of whether
the accents and breathings were from the original scribe or the one who has retouched
the entire manuscript. After weighing up different options, he eventually
opts for the latter:
Ueber den Buchstaben sind Accente und Spiritus, diese haben die Form die in den
ältesten Handschriften sich findet, und bis zum Ausgang des X. Jahrhunderts beybehalten
wurde, nemlich ˫ und ˧. Ob diese von der ersten Hand beygeschrieben,
oder später hinzugesetzt sind, wage ich nicht zu entscheiden. Man hat die Handschrift
als die erste Schrift blaß und unleserlich zu werden anfieng, mit schwarzer
Dinte aufgefrischt. Bey den Buchstaben erkennt man noch oft die Spur der ersten
bleichen Schrift; allein bey den Accenten und Spiritus, fällt dieß wegen ihrer Feinheit
weg, und es bleibt ungewiß, ob der Schreiber der die Handschrift erneuerte,
die Accente und Spiritus schon da fand, oder sie selbst hinzu schrieb. Doch vermuthe
ich, daß die Handschrift in ihrer ersten Gestalt, Accente und Spiritus nicht
hatte.123


Especially from an
historical perspective, his announcement of the ending of Mark in Vaticanus
provided scholars—for the first time—with manuscript attestation to the omission
of the last twelve verses.136
Indeed, although the omission in Vaticanus is noticed
by some of the collators before Birch, his comments in both the Beskrivelse
and ‘Nachricht’ were the very first reports actually published.137
136. This is perhaps the reason why James A. Kelhoffer starts his investigation of the history of
scholarship on Mark 16:9–20 with Birch, albeit only the 1801 reproduction is discussed; see Kelhoffer,
Miracle and Mission, pp. 6–7 (on Birch’s text-critical works after his 1788 edition, see § 6.1.1 below).
In fact, that scholars ponder the endings of Mark can indeed be traced back to the sixteenth
century; see Kamphuis, ‘Markus’, pp. 173a–175b for a summary of Erasmus, Mill, Simon, and Wettstein.
An overview of the history of scholarship is given by Krans and Yi, ‘Trajectories’.
137. It should be noted that until Birch’s publication, among all the collations of B 03 only the
one by Caryophilius had been published. But Caryophilius failed to notice this very omission (‘Collationes
ex Bibliotheca Barberina’, p. 472). Both Bartolocci and Mico marked the omission in their
collations, but in Birch’s day they were still kept on the bookshelves and remained unexplored.

5.4 Birch’s Quatuor Evangelia Graece (1788)
5.4.1 Vaticanus in the ‘Prolegomena’


Although he had once dated the corrector who retouched the manuscript to
around the eleventh century, here no precise dating is given. He simply judges
the work as being made in recent centuries. Besides, nowhere do his remarks
convey the impression that he is aware of the possibility of multiple correctors in
this manuscript. Therefore, since he regards the corrector as a later one, almost
all the corrections are viewed by Birch as of little value. Subsequent scholars
would be misguided by his imprecise judgement, thereby downplaying the importance
of the corrections in Vaticanus, especially those made shortly after the
composition of the codex.
No manuscript comes closer
to Origen’s text, or shows so many readings in which it is the only one to agree with
Origen. As you can see, also in its singular readings it betrays agreement with the
Paris Codices 9 [C 04] and 62 [L 019], the Cantabrigiensis [D 05], and that old Syriac
Version, made in the sixth century A.D. under the guidance of Philoxenus and in
the following century corrected and perfected after Greek manuscripts through the
assiduous work of Thomas Harclensis.149
Birch then shows his disagreement
with the Latinisation theory. Instead of holding the conviction that Vaticanus
has been corrected according to the Latin, he states, that one should follow the
voice of ancient witnesses. Therefore, in contrast to that theory, it is not later
manuscripts but ancient Latin versions that should be valued more highly:
At this point, one particular example is given to illustrate the extreme antiquity
of Vaticanus, that is, the ending of the Gospel of Mark: ‘The last pericope
of Mark, from verse 9 in Chapter 16, continuously up to the end of the chapter, is
entirely absent in our manuscript, so that below the words ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ the
subscriptio κατὰ μάρκον is placed.’152 Similar to the evidence he presented in his
Danish work, Birch here refers to some patristic witnesses, notably Jerome’s, the
scholium in the two Venice manuscripts, and the lack of consistency in the Eusebian
Canons.
5.4.2 Variant Readings of Vaticanus
Textual critics often speak of Birch’s collation of Codex Vaticanus as the first
complete source that was accessible to the scholarly world. But seldom does anyone
actually compare his collation with the readings in the manuscript in order
to evaluate its quality. The current section is intended to provide some grounds
to achieve this task. By applying my analytical framework, all the variant readings
occurred in the Gospel of Matthew of the Quatuor Evangelia Graece are
examined.156
In the First Gospel, there are more than 800 variant readings noted by Birch.
Statistically speaking, more than ninety percent of the readings are collated as
found in the manuscript, and the number of the imprecise and erroneous readings
is relatively low.157 Notably, the readings where a scribal correction takes
place are abundant. This may reflect Birch’s interest in scribal corrections on the
one hand, and on the other hand it indicates that less attention is given to different
hands in Vaticanus. Some examples can show what is at stake. Let us start
with those erroneous cases.
To detect an error, that is, that
More important is Michaelis’s opinion on the Latinisation theory: he once
again changed his mind and turned back to the former position against that theory.
In the section on Vaticanus, only a few clues can be found, and yet he discussed
the Latin versions extensively in another part of the book.178 There he explicitly
stated that the Latin text should be regarded highly, as should those
Greek-Latin bilingual manuscripts. The main adversary—Wettstein and his influential
theory—was so persuasive that even Michaelis himself had been convinced
for some time, but now the opposite should be more plausible:
Besides his opposition to Wettstein’s theory, Michaelis further discussed the socalled
‘foedus cum Graecis’, a hypothetical event that Erasmus used for situating
the origin of those Latinised manuscripts, Vaticanus included.180 Here various ef-
forts were made to show how little ground Erasmus laid his hypothesis on. In
particular, the evidence from Sepúlveda’s correspondence was raised, and Michaelis
pointed out that Vaticanus could not have been one of the corrected manuscripts
simply because it was undoubtedly much older than the council that
made such a treaty between the Latin and the Greek churches.181 Therefore, by
way of emending himself, Michaelis states his appreciation of the value of the
ancient Greek manuscripts, just as Griesbach’s recently proposed theory has
shown.182


First, throughout his
translation Marsh referred to the manuscript as ‘the Codex Vaticanus’, a term
where Michaelis
occasionally mentioned the manuscript as ‘der Codex Vaticanus’
Although according to de Montfaucon there was no accents
in this manuscript, Birch claimed that those diacritics were undoubtedly
added by the prima manu. If one followed Birch’s statement, Marsh said, this
would have prevented dating the manuscript any time prior to the seventh century,
the earliest Greek majuscules with accents known to him. But he does not
seem to exclude the possibility that the presence of the accents and breathings
could have occurred in Greek New Testament manuscripts a few centuries
earlier.186

However, the reviewer also pointed out that the manuscript does not seem to
have a uniform recension throughout the New Testament text. In a larger part of
Matthew, it appeared to have followed another recension, which is very close to
Codex Bezae.189
The overall examination and especially this significant remark
would tally with Griesbach’s opinion given in his 1796 Greek New Testament, as
will be discussed below. Therefore, some suggest that this review was indeed
written by the renowned German scholar himself.190

Rückersfelder

5.6 Griesbach’s Second NTG Edition (1796–1806)
5.6.1 Griesbach’s Opinion on Vaticanus

Griesbach’s
scheme becomes more comprehensive to include more Greek manuscripts and
versions. Concerning Vaticanus in particular, he now points out that on the one
hand its text in Matthew shows great similarity with Greek-Latin bilingual ma-
nuscripts and the Old Latin version, thus belonging to the Western recension.
the way in which Griesbach
weights the different sides of the evidence is significant

Matthew 5:22
based on Birch’s collation Griesbach
considers Vaticanus as a member of the Western recension for about the
first twenty chapters of Matthew. Thus
Several aspects deserve some elaboration. In the first place, it is notable that Vaticanus
became the only Greek manuscript known in Griesbach’s time that exactly
ends at Mark 16:8. From now on, he was able to refer to this ancient majuscule
as the ‘hard evidence’ to support his suspension of the traditional ending

Conclusion:
Quatuor Evangelia Graece of 1788,
Variae lectiones ad textum IV evangeliorum: ex codd. mss. Bibliothecae Vaticanae, Barberinae, S. Basilii, Augustinianorum Eremitarum Romae, Borgianae Velitris, Laurentianae, S. Marci Venetorum, Vindobonensis caesareae, Parisiensis, Escurialensis, Havniensis regiae, quibus accedit varietas lectionis versionum Syrarum, Veteris, Philoxenianae et Hierosolymitanae, ex editione regia Havniensi IV Evv. iterum recognitae et quamplurimis accessionibus locupletatae (1801)
https://books.google.com/books?id=AikNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1
About 450 pages

Variae lectiones ad textum act. app. epp. catholicar. et Pauli (1798)
http://books.google.com/books/about/Variae_lectiones_ad_textum_act_app_epp_c.html?id=zyE7AAAAcAAJ
http://books.google.com/books/about/Variae_lectiones_ad_textum_Act_App_Epp_C.html?id=v5gdAAAAYAAJ

1697839960785.png



He cogently
associated the omission in Vaticanus with the indirect witnesses that hint at the
absence of the longer ending. Y

? and continues with Griesbach
 
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p. 238
Chapter 6
Verdict Announced: Hug and Lachmann


Between 1798
and 1801, Birch published a series of collations in three volumes entitled Variae
lectiones ad textum Act. App. Epp. Catholicarum et Pauli, Variae lectiones ad
textum Apocalypseos, and Variae lectiones ad textum IV Evangeliorum.4 U
nlike

How many variants?

1697840236213.png

1697840283066.png


Woide


To sum up, after waiting for more than half a century, scholars eventually had
access to the collation made by Mico—known as ‘Bentley’s collation’—at the
turn of the nineteenth century. Despite the complicated process of its making,
Woide’s ‘Apographum’ became another valuable source on the text of Vaticanus
alongside Birch’s collation.

Moreover, although Mico’s collation is more comprehensive
than Birch’s, the reproduced ‘Apographum’ seems to have received less
attention than the Copenhagen publications.38 For those who had access to both
collations, the differences between the two would cause them to ponder which
one was correct at certain places. In a time when there were only collations at
hand, this kind of limitation was unfortunate but unavoidable.39

Johann Philipp Gabler

6.2 Hug’s Eyewitness Account of Vaticanus
Indeed, the antiquity of this manuscript is so great, that—except for the books hidden
in the destruction of Herculaneum for more than seventeen centuries—there
are only a few able to compete with it. Furthermore, the manuscript’s fame was so
far and extensive, that, as if it were alone in the richest and the best-equipped library
with books of all kinds, it was named ‘Vaticanus’ par excellence.61
It was written on thin parchment, extraordinary fine and almost translucent, in an
elegant hand, clear and secure, in the simplest ductus, and, as anyone without expertise
in antiquity would easily convince themselves, with a raven quill. So subtle
are the lines of the letters, where the thicker ductus ends in a thin one. Moreover,
all the letters are thus arranged, that they can be circumscribed in an equilateral
quadrangle. None of those are squeezed or pressed together into a small space; but
the letter, as they say, is exactly square, majuscule, and similar to those observed in
the books brought to light from the ruins of Herculaneum.62

Next to the addition of punctuation, Hug turns to the hotly debated issue of
whether the accents and breathings belong to the original hand. In contrast to
Birch’s opinion, who insists that these diacritics were added by the original
scribe, on the basis of a series of examinations Hug draws the conclusion that
they must be later additions. It is necessary to discuss his observations at some

p. 258
Although one might wonder why, since the letters had almost disappeared, the very
small features of accents had not vanished away, nevertheless with this conviction
[that the accents were original], I approached and unrolled the manuscript, even
though the ink appeared at first sight thicker and more recent, in comparison with
the colour of the letters and the words that have not undergone the second hand.
However, after I assisted my sight with glasses, the difference in the ink revealed itself
much more clearly. It preserves a middle colour between the, the more lively
than the old and dead one, and weaker than the one recently superimposed. The
reason is evident: the ancient letters served as background, on which the new superimposed
colour stands out more strongly; but the accents and breathings, even
if they were written with the same more recent ink, shine less, since they do not lie
on a more ancient background that would enhance the colour.65
These remarks are important in two respects. First, only throug
Two other arguments for an early dating of Vaticanus are then given. On the
one hand, Hug discusses the sequence of New Testament books in this manuscript.
83 He first refers to Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis at the end of the
fourth century, who knew two different sequences attested in manuscripts. According
to Epiphanius, some manuscripts placed Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians—
the same sequence as found in Vaticanus—and in some others the book
follows the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.84 Second, the Vaticanus sequence
is also attested in Athanasius’s famous thirty-ninth letter, given on the
occasion of the Easter celebration in 367 CE.85 Accordingly, Hug suggests that the
manuscript could have been prepared in that transition period of the fourth century,
that is, as the sequence of New Testament books shifted from the old consensus
to the newly settled one.
On the other hand, attention is given to the variant of ἐν Ἐφέσῳ in the first
verse of the Letter to the Ephesians.86 In Vaticanus, the variant is absent in the
text, thus making the recipients as τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν καὶ πιστοῖς (‘to the saints
who are also faithful’). Yet the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ are added in the right margin.
Hug suggests reconstructing the scribal activities as follows: the addition had
been inserted by the first hand in equal elegance and the insertion went uncorrected
during the retouching process.87 He further refers to a citation from Basil,
indicating that the reading that lacks ‘in Ephesus’ was evident in the old copies.
Hug argues that since Basil’s words imply that the lack of reference to the city
was already an ancient matter, the Vatican manuscript must have been copied
before the time of Basil, namely around the middle of the fourth century.88 All in
all, in piecing all the arguments together, Hug is confident to date this manuscript
to the first half of that century:
All this shows clearly that the manuscript must indisputably be adjudged to be of
the fourth century, and indeed not the

Eichhorn

Frederick Nolan
Nolan now attributed the origin of Vaticanus to the fourthcentury
church historian Eusebius.110
Another remarkable aspect of this work is that Vaticanus was used to support the traditional reading in Acts 20:28, but its
omission of other notable passages was nevertheless left undiscussed

Dr . Ford?
A more sophisticated way of arguing against the textual value of Vaticanus
can be found in Johann Martin Augustin Scholz’s work.112 He approached this issue
solely on text-critical grounds
On Nolan (1784–1864), see Goodwin and Matthew, ‘Nolan’; for a summary of
Nolan’s work and his view of the Comma Johanneum, see McDonald, Biblical Criticism, pp. 294–295.
109. Nolan,
Goodwin and
Matthew
‘Nolan’
Goodwin, Gordon, and Henry Colin Gray Matthew. ‘Nolan, Frederick’.
ODNB. Released 10 October 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb

6.3 Lachmann’s Groundbreaking Edition
Lachmann produced the first-ever text that decisively breaks
with the Textus Receptus.118 A
Scholz (that is, the one by Bartolocci), Birch, and Woide.128
Yet, none of those has a satisfactory quality in offering precise readings of the
manuscript.
128. It should be noted that concerning Woide’s reproduction Lachmann mistakenly identifies
the collator as Thomas Bentley. It seems that the confusion started with Woide’s
There is yet another feature that sometimes creates difficulties for Lachmann
in having the precise Vaticanus readings. That is, the presence of scribal corrections
in the manuscript and the fact that they are often neglected by the two collations
available to him. As already noted in the previous examinations, both
Mico and Birch infrequently address corrections in their works, thus preventing
Lachmann from knowing the accurate readings of the first hand. For
The choice to focus on Matthew, as I mentioned above, allows us to compare
Lachmann’s text with Griesbach’s. In contrast to Lachmann who frequently corrected
the text in a cogent manner from the perspective of modern critics, Griesbach
merely made twelve changes in Matthew 1–7, about only one-tenth in comparison
with the number of changes made by Lachmann. In light of the fact that
the data available to Griesbach was almost as much as Lachmann was able to obtain,
it is not surprising that Lachmann was disappointed by the Jena professor’s
conservative and even reluctant attitude toward changing the traditional text.

similarity between Lachmann’s edition and Bentley’s project

6.4 Vaticanus in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Scholarship
6.4.1 Reception and Reactions


Samuel Davidson
Porter
Buttmann
Reuss

Rinck Tischendorf

Rinck suggested dating the Vatican manuscript to the seventh century.186 Such a controversial proposal was based on several observations. First, the handwriting of Vaticanus and Basilensis (E 07), according to Rinck, was strikingly similar. Since the latter was usually dated to the eighth century, he believed that Vaticanus had been copied around the same time or at most several decades earlier.187 Second, Rinck thought that Birch’s opinion on the originality of accents and breathings should not be excluded without hesitation, and that even if the diacritics has been added at a later stage, it cannot be used to support the antiquity of the manuscript. For there were majuscules without accents and breathings composed in the seventh or later centuries.188 Third, he pointed out two main deficiencies found in Hug’s arguments: first, the lack of the Eusebian Canons and the Euthalian Apparatus could not intrinsically lead to a dating before the time of Euthalius but could have been due to other reasons such as geographical differences; second, the missing phrase ‘in Ephesus’ (Eph 1:1) could not be used as the main proof for supporting the manuscript as a product before the time of Basil.189 All in all, Rinck concluded that we should better date Vaticanus to the
seventh century at the earliest.190
But in his later editions he Reuss turned to the fourth-century dating. 186. Rinck, review of von Tischendorf, NTG, especially pp. 547–552. On Rinck (1793–1854), see a brief biographical account in Pick, ‘Rinck’. Tischendorf’s New Testament editions and his involvement with B 03 will be discussed in the next chapter. 187. Rinck, review of von Tischendorf, NTG, pp. 547–548. Interestingly, he actually refers to Hug’s own description on the hand of E 07 and its dating, but then refutes Hug’s proposed dating of B 03; cf. Hug, Einleitung 1 (1821), pp. 280–282. 188. Rinck, review of von Tischendorf, NTG, pp. 548–549. He refers to de Montfaucon to support his argument. In fact, Rinck also dates other majuscules to centuries much later than scholarly consensus: the examples he gives here are A 02, D 05, and L 019, which—according to him were copied in the ninth century. 189. Rinck, review of von Tischendorf, NTG, pp. 549–551. Rinck also points out that Hug himself acknowledges the reading of ἐν Ἐφέσῳ was added by the first hand in the margin, thus suggesting that the original scribe must have known this reading.


6. VERDICT ANNOUNCED: HUG AND LACHMANN 289


6.4.2 Editions of Vaticanus
In addition to the growing consensus as to the manuscript’s excellence, in the
mid-nineteenth century there were also attempts to publish the entire New Testament
text of Codex Vaticanus, albeit still based on the former collations. As all
those collations were incomplete in nature, the appearance of this kind of edition
is not surprising, at least for the sake of convenience.
In 1846, an edition that claims to have been edited on the basis of personal inspection
was published in Hamburg by Eduard von Muralt.191 This edition—
called by von Muralt his editio minor—contained the text of every New Testament
book, even including those that are lacking in Vaticanus.192 There was no
prolegomena part but only a three-page epilogue with some explanation of the
rationale behind the edition.193 The most important element in this brief account
concerns von Muralt’s claim that he was able to consult the manuscript in
person:
It [that manuscript] was granted to us in 1844 for three days to be scrutinised sufficient
for removing the differences, which existed between the Bartolocci collation
having been copied by our charge from the Royal library of Paris and the Birch one.
Therefore, dear reader, you can drink with assurance from this genuine fountain of
Christian truth.194
190. Textual similarity with D 05 is also raised as a side argument for such a later dating. For
Rinck, that Greek-Latin bilingual was probably written in the seventh century, thus making his proposal
for dating B 03 around the same period even more plausible. The seventh-century dating of
D 05 seems to have been based on Tischendorf’s opinion in his first edition (‘It is believed to be
written in the beginning of the seventh century’ [‘Scriptus putatur ineunte sec. VII’—von
Tischendorf, NTG (1841), p. lxxv]). Yet, modern textual critics (including Tischendorf himself at a
later stage) tend to date D 05 much earlier, for instance Parker (Codex Bezae, p. 30) proposes to
date it around 400 CE. In a later contribution Rinck somewhat modifies his view, but he still retains
his suspicion of Hug’s early dating of B 03; see Rinck, ‘Beitrag’, pp. 400–401.

191. von Muralt, NTG minor (1846); as indicated by its title: ‘… edited according to the testimony
of the leading Vatican manuscript …’ (‘… ad fidem codicis principis Vaticani edidit …’). Cf. Reuss,
Bibliotheca, pp. 265–267 (§ 24.2). On von Muralt (or de Muralt; 1808–1895), see Maeder, ‘Johannes
und Eduard von Muralt’, pp. 43–47.
192. Other manuscripts are used for the remaining portions. For instance, in Revelation the text
is taken from 046; see von Muralt, NTG minor (1846), p. 488.
193. von Muralt, NTG minor (1846), pp. 488–490 (‘Epilogus cum siglorum explicatione et sphalmatum
indice’).
194. ‘is nobis a. MDCCCXLIV per triduum concessus est perlustrandus quantum sufficiebat ad
discrimen illud tollendum, quod inter collationem Bartoloccianam nostris sumptibus e bibliotheca
Regia Parisiensi descriptam et inter Birchianam intercedebat. Confidenter igitur, candide lector, ex
VATICANUS
A decade after von Muralt’s editio minor, another edition of Codex Vaticanus appeared.
In 1856, Philipp Buttmann—Lachmann’s assistant for the famous Greek
and Latin New Testament edition—published his own edition, Novum Testamentum
graece ad fidem potissimum codicis Vaticani B recensuit.210 As clearly
shown in its title, Buttmann’s edition was principally based on the text of Vaticanus.
Ind

2427 ?

6.4.3 Conjectural Projects

Granville Penn
for
Penn the only available sources were Birch’s collation and Woide’s reproduction
of Mico’s collation. Despite the indirectness of his sources, Penn was confident
in his reconstruction of the Vaticanus text:
base text imprecise regarding the attestation of Vaticanus.237
Although in most places he slavishly follows the text of Vaticanus as known to
him, in some instances Penn departs from the manuscript’s readings by calling
for emendation. For him, the application of conjectures for the New Testament
text is justifiable, since ‘the true reading may have lapsed from every surviving
MS.’, even the Vatican manuscript.238

Jan Hendrik Holwerda

6.5 Conclusions

However, the precise
text of Vaticanus was still unavailable to all the scholars outside Rome, the same
barrier as had existed for more than three hundred years. What was also wanting
was a systematic and overarching use of the manuscript for making the text of
the New Testament. These will be the main subjects to be explored in the next
two chapters.
 
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Administrator
p. 306
Chapter 7
Endeavours and Assessment: Tischendorf and
Tregelles

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given in chronological order.
At the outset, our manuscript is touched upon in an 1844 article replying to
Rinck’s review of his first Greek New Testament edition.29 As a response to the re-
viewer’s opinion that the Vatican manuscript should be dated to as late as the
seventh century, Tischendorf devotes considerable space to palaeographical
comparison. Yet, instead of focusing on Vaticanus, his attention is mostly given
to the hand of Codex Basilensis (E 07), employed by Rinck as the main argument
for the late dating of Vaticanus.30 For Tischendorf, the hands of these two majuscules
are not comparable, and Basilensis clearly belongs to a much later age,
probably in the eighth century. As for the hand of Vaticanus, he mentions it in
passing while addressing the common scribal tendency to compress letters at
the end of a line. Here a reference to his eyewitness account in Rome is given:
In den Uncialcodd. finden sich nicht selten am Ende der Linie verkleinerte Schri
Among the extant biblical manuscripts, however,
Tischendorf considers Vaticanus probably the second oldest one, inferior to Codex
Friderico-Augustanus, a Septuagint majuscule containing forty-three leaves
that he had recently discovered in St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai
That Sinai fragment would later become known as the ‘Leipzig portion’ of Codex
Sinaiticus. Therefore, in a way one could find—albeit implicitly—the inauguration
of the great pair of fourth-century biblical majuscules, perhaps for the first
time in the history of textual scholarship.
Then he compares the handwriting of Vaticanus with Codex
Friderico-Augustanus:
Im Allgemeinen ist nun der Schriftcharakter im vaticanischen Codex ohne Zweifel
dem höchsten Alterthume zugehörig; mit einziger Ausnahme des Codex Friderico-
Augustanus (vergl. meine Prolegomena dazu) übertrifft ihn an Alterthümlichkeit
keine einzige der mir bekannten griechischen Pergamenthandschriften.38
According to Tischendorf, both majuscules are undoubtedly of the highest antiquity
and superior to all other manuscripts in terms of their age. On the basis
of all his observations, he considers dating Vaticanus to the middle of the fourth
century, as Hug had proposed several decades earlier. But as to the marginal note
at Eph 1:1, he disagrees with Hug and attributes this addition to another, much
later hand. His argument is mainly a palaeographical one: the hand of the correction
contains several features that cannot be found in the oldest majuscules:
actual
variants of Vaticanus from the false ones.
Nearly a decade after the publication of the ‘Nachricht’, Tischendorf released
a brief article in 1856 that reports some of his text-critical endeavours during his
travels to England a year earlier.56 Notably, one of the greatest discoveries he
made while staying in Cambridge was that he incidentally found the collation of
Vaticanus made by Rulotta—a document thought to have been lost for quite
some time—among Bentley’s remaining papers.57 In this report Tischendorf on
the one hand mentions Tregelles’s failure to locate the collation, and on the other
hand highlights his own contribution, as he was accustomed to do:
Then the collations of the manuscript are discussed in
chronological sequence: Bartolocci, Mico, Thomas Bentley, Rulotta, and Birch’s

p. 333
7.4 Tregelles’s Journey to Rome (1845–1846)

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7.5 Tregelles’s Works on Vaticanus (up to 1856)

Besides, Tregelles also disagrees with Tischendorf regarding the text of John
1:18. The latter critic is in favour of the Textus Receptus reading ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός,158
but Tregelles argues for changing the text into ὁ μονογενὴς θεός. The line of reasoning
presented by him deserves to be cited in full:
155.

Tischendorf 1871
John 1:18 BUYERS REMORSE


In other words, although Vaticanus happens to be the oldest Greek manuscript
attainable, the superiority of its text is not only grounded on its old age but also
on its accordance with other ancient witnesses. Furthermore, by way of illustration,
Tregelles discusses more than seventy cases throughout the New Testament
to demonstrate the actual practice of his ‘comparative criticism’.179

7.6 Tregelles’s Use of Vaticanus in His GNT 1 (1857)

7.7 Conclusions
 
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p. 370
Chapter 8
The Editio Princeps: Maius and Beyond


This edition
was prepared by Angelus Maius (1782–1854) over several decades but was
only published posthumously in 1857.

Vercellone
Wiseman

p. 384
8.2 The First Edition of Vaticanus
 

Steven Avery

Administrator
CHECK THIS WITH WIKIPEDIA ABOUT REVELATION

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For Mike Ferrando


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p. 396

8.3 The 1859 Revision and Vercellone’s Codice Vaticano

CORRECTION IS NOT POLEMICAL

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The mistakes made by the scribe who wrote the Vatican manuscript are actually
very frequent; but almost all of them consist of simple omissions, sometimes of
one, two, or three words, sometimes of half a sentence, sometimes of a whole sen-
tence, and at times even of two or three verses and more.
This happens to our
scribe when two similar words meet at a short distance. ... the frequency of such
oversights is indeed extraordinary in the Vatican manuscript: and I do not hesitate
to affirm that in the whole codex, which now consists of over one thousand four
hundred and sixty pages, it is easier to find a folio that has two or three of these
omissions, than to meet one that has none. Sometimes these omissions do not
bring any notable damage to the meaning; but not infrequently it happens that the
sentence is left not only defective and indecent but also completely meaningless
and without any sense at all.”8

Constantine 50

8.4 First Reactions
8.4.1 Critical Reviews


Westcott criticism of RCC not being textual critics

MISSING REVIEWS c. 1860


p. 409-410 Burgon

good point
ceptus were often criticised as well. However, it should be noted that Maius’s
purpose was not to produce a diplomatic edition of this ancient manuscript, as
we have already shown. Instead, he intended to prepare a text based on Vatic-
anus for publishing the first Roman edition of the Greek New Testament. In fact,
this veiy point was hinted at by its title: Vetus et Novum Testomentum ex antiquis-
simo codice Vaticano, that is, an edition according to Codex Vaticanus.15® Particu-
larly due to such contrasting expectations between (mostly) Protestant textual
critics and the Vatican authorities, this edition was severely censured, perhaps
much more than it should have been.

Muralt
Buttmann
Ornsby
Kuenen and Cobet
Alford

Edward Halifax Hansell,
who was preparing a Greek New Testament edition, Antiquissimorum codicum
textus in ordine parallelo dispositi accedit collatio codicis Sinaitici, which was published
in three volumes in 1864.199
Hansell **
In short, based
on all the sources attainable, Hansell’s edition served as a useful and reliable tool
for scholars who wanted to compare the text of Vaticanus with other majuscules

p. 422
8.5 Further Developments
To my knowledge, most of them are kept by the Universitätsbibliothek in Leipzig, within the
archive entitled ‘Nachlass von Konstantin von Tischendorf’ (see http://kalliope-verbund.info/
DE-611-BF-42648).
Tischendorf’s Vaticanus edition would have a great impact on the textual
scholarship of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Plenty of its information
was then included in the last edition of his Greek New Testament, the famous
editio octava, published in two volumes between 1869 and 1872.215 Yet, although
he tried his best to provide a text as precisely as possible, his work was still not
free from errors. A telling example is found in Jude 5. In his eighth editi
STUPID SINAITICUS EDITION

Tisserant
Unlike Tischendorf’s Novum Testamentum Vaticanum, which was a diplomatic
edition with pseudo-facsimile elements, the new Roman edition was a true
facsimile of Vaticanus.
This edition not only provides a reliable facsimile, but it also reproduces the text
with superior quality. Given the fact that the editors were able to examine the
manuscript without any limitations, it is not surprising that there are very few
errors to be found.225 Although the commentary part was still in the making, the
238
In fact, Hort not only supplemented and completed Tregelles’s edition, but in
a way his own New Testament enterprise could also be seen as the continuation
of Tregelles. The now-famous edition—The New Testament in the Original
Greek—published in 1881 by Hort and his Cambridge fellow Brooke Foss Westcott
(1825–1901), started its initial phase as early as 1853.239

HOSTILE QUOTES TO TR OMITTED

8.6 Conclusions

EPILOGUE

1. The History of ‘Codex Vaticanus’

2. Methodological Contributions

4. For instance, though receiving very little attention among scholars, Toinard’s Harmonia and
Zaccagni’s unpublished transcription deserves serious study in their own right. It would also be
worth giving attention to Tischendorf’s extensive correspondence collection in Leipzig.
Yet, the driving factors were very different between the two, thus leading
to their divergent views of the manuscript. For Tischendorf, his pursuit of
academic prestige and his ability to network made it possible for personal examination,
clear descriptions, and eventually an accurate edition of the manuscript.
At the same time, his opinion on it was always affected by his ‘discovery’ of the
other fourth-century majuscule, Codex Sinaiticus. For Tregelles, his assiduousness
and skilful comparison allowed him to make great use of the available
sources, but his lack of social and political capital prevented him from further
study of Vaticanus. Moreover, although his opinion on the value of the manuscript
was mainly text-critical, the motive that drove Tregelles to scrutinise every
detail was purely religious: he hoped to reconstruct the best attainable text of
theWord of God. In a way, Tischendorf and Tregelles’s perceptions of Codex Vaticanus
reflect their own personality, characteristics, and interests.6
The preceding example also illustrates the recurring theme o

Appendix A
Chronology of the Scholarly Use of Vaticanus


Maldonat missing

How about Laurence and other pure Bible people? what was omitted
Review of course TITAN etc.
Birch numbers of variants only one .. 800

Appendix B
Data of the Scholarly Use of Vaticanus


Birch p. 463 to 491

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p. 531
Bibliography
Introduction and Abbreviations
The bibliography
 
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