Steven Avery
Administrator
Simeon Brazzelle
http://www.brazzellstoaustralia.com/
contact form
https://www.brazzellstoaustralia.com/new-page
Two episodes
https://blue-collartheology.com/podcast/the-baseball-card
https://blue-collartheology.com/podcast/holey-left-sleeves
That said, the Codex Vaticanus is mostly uncial, but there are whole sections that are written with miniscule letters! Some have said this may be due to damage to the text therefore a scribe had to go back and replace those places. This excuse is eliminated with the advent of the digital scans. It is now clear that the uncial portions and the miniscule portions have the same coloring and age qualities in their pages. This means they had to have been written around the same time. Therefore, it is likely it was being worked on by multiple scribes. Some who were working in original style letters and some working in more modern letters. This casts serious doubts as to the credibility of the document.
Another issue is that the 4 pastoral epistles of Paul are missing altogether. I & II Timothy, Titus, and Philemon are missing completely. Normally it would not be concerning as many ancient manuscripts are missing pages, portions, or entire books. The issue is that there is pagination in the Codex Vaticanus. This exists in all modern books. It is the page numbers at the bottom of each page for reference. The issue is that the Vaticanus pagination does not even leave room for these books. It goes straight from II Thessalonians to Hebrews. The copyists of the Vaticanus intended to not include them. One other quick note on pagination, in the book of Acts there was obviously a leaf inserted at some point because from that point on the pagination is scratched out and overwritten to correct for the added page.
Now it has come time to talk about worm holes. No, I am not talking about traveling great distances through space and time. I am talking about holes caused by worms. Ancient books were prone to be eaten by bugs and worms since they were made of animal skins. God made these little creatures to help things decompose properly. So, you would expect the manuscript to have holes in it due to insects and worms chewing their way through the book. What you would not expect is for those worms to be so picky! Interestingly, there are several places in the Codex Vaticanus where worms have eaten through one page, but not the next. Or they have eaten through several pages, but suddenly stop and restart a few pages later. They must have crawled out of the book and back in a few pages later to start back up again. That or these pages were added later! If the pages have been taken out of the binding and laid out to be inscribed, you could surmise that they were eaten while they were out of the binding. You now have another problem. Why were they out of the binding? You can be sure that the original scribe would not have used a page for Scripture if it already had a hole in it. Another interesting thing is that the words are often found to go around the holes. As if the holes already existed in the page when it was inscribed. That or worms have figured out how to move the letters so as not to eat the important stuff. You can see how ridiculous it would be to try and give a reasonable explanation for the worm's aversion to certain pages and words. What is implied here is that the pages already had worm holes when the scribes used them. Meaning, they were using secondary pages of ancient age, but inscribing them at a later date. The pages themselves are indeed old, but the work done on them does not appear to be. There are also a few rectangular holes in the text. This is obviously not the work of worms or bugs. Nobody really has a good explanation for them.
Think of it like this, you are moving to another part of the world. You must pack all of your things in the smallest possible way so that they can fit in suitcases. You decide to vacuum seal your clothes. You buy those little plastic bags, pack them full of clothes, and then suck the air out with the included little pump. When you are done, a giant pile of clothes has been stuffed into a small, but very heavy, clear bag. When you arrive at your new home, you open your bags. To your dismay, you realize that you had trapped a moth in one of them. The moth had eaten holes in all your shirts. However, interestingly the moth had only eaten holds in the left sleaves. No right sleave was touched. You had not packed them facing the same direction, so the moth had to cross the bag and eat through a few sleaves on that side. Some were even upside down and the moth had to go to the bottom of the bag to eat the left sleaves. Also, the moth left all of your pants alone. Only the left sleaves were touched. This is a ridiculous illustration because it would never happen, but that is precisely what appears to have happened to the Vaticanus, unless of course it has been significantly altered over the years.
One of the more egregious issues with this Codex is the fact that there are several places where the text has been written over with India ink. India ink is just ink, but it is of much more modern origin. It cannot be ancient, so at some point a scribe wrote over the original text, again totally hampering the credibility of the document.
http://www.brazzellstoaustralia.com/
contact form
https://www.brazzellstoaustralia.com/new-page
Two episodes
https://blue-collartheology.com/podcast/the-baseball-card
https://blue-collartheology.com/podcast/holey-left-sleeves
That said, the Codex Vaticanus is mostly uncial, but there are whole sections that are written with miniscule letters! Some have said this may be due to damage to the text therefore a scribe had to go back and replace those places. This excuse is eliminated with the advent of the digital scans. It is now clear that the uncial portions and the miniscule portions have the same coloring and age qualities in their pages. This means they had to have been written around the same time. Therefore, it is likely it was being worked on by multiple scribes. Some who were working in original style letters and some working in more modern letters. This casts serious doubts as to the credibility of the document.
Another issue is that the 4 pastoral epistles of Paul are missing altogether. I & II Timothy, Titus, and Philemon are missing completely. Normally it would not be concerning as many ancient manuscripts are missing pages, portions, or entire books. The issue is that there is pagination in the Codex Vaticanus. This exists in all modern books. It is the page numbers at the bottom of each page for reference. The issue is that the Vaticanus pagination does not even leave room for these books. It goes straight from II Thessalonians to Hebrews. The copyists of the Vaticanus intended to not include them. One other quick note on pagination, in the book of Acts there was obviously a leaf inserted at some point because from that point on the pagination is scratched out and overwritten to correct for the added page.
Now it has come time to talk about worm holes. No, I am not talking about traveling great distances through space and time. I am talking about holes caused by worms. Ancient books were prone to be eaten by bugs and worms since they were made of animal skins. God made these little creatures to help things decompose properly. So, you would expect the manuscript to have holes in it due to insects and worms chewing their way through the book. What you would not expect is for those worms to be so picky! Interestingly, there are several places in the Codex Vaticanus where worms have eaten through one page, but not the next. Or they have eaten through several pages, but suddenly stop and restart a few pages later. They must have crawled out of the book and back in a few pages later to start back up again. That or these pages were added later! If the pages have been taken out of the binding and laid out to be inscribed, you could surmise that they were eaten while they were out of the binding. You now have another problem. Why were they out of the binding? You can be sure that the original scribe would not have used a page for Scripture if it already had a hole in it. Another interesting thing is that the words are often found to go around the holes. As if the holes already existed in the page when it was inscribed. That or worms have figured out how to move the letters so as not to eat the important stuff. You can see how ridiculous it would be to try and give a reasonable explanation for the worm's aversion to certain pages and words. What is implied here is that the pages already had worm holes when the scribes used them. Meaning, they were using secondary pages of ancient age, but inscribing them at a later date. The pages themselves are indeed old, but the work done on them does not appear to be. There are also a few rectangular holes in the text. This is obviously not the work of worms or bugs. Nobody really has a good explanation for them.
Think of it like this, you are moving to another part of the world. You must pack all of your things in the smallest possible way so that they can fit in suitcases. You decide to vacuum seal your clothes. You buy those little plastic bags, pack them full of clothes, and then suck the air out with the included little pump. When you are done, a giant pile of clothes has been stuffed into a small, but very heavy, clear bag. When you arrive at your new home, you open your bags. To your dismay, you realize that you had trapped a moth in one of them. The moth had eaten holes in all your shirts. However, interestingly the moth had only eaten holds in the left sleaves. No right sleave was touched. You had not packed them facing the same direction, so the moth had to cross the bag and eat through a few sleaves on that side. Some were even upside down and the moth had to go to the bottom of the bag to eat the left sleaves. Also, the moth left all of your pants alone. Only the left sleaves were touched. This is a ridiculous illustration because it would never happen, but that is precisely what appears to have happened to the Vaticanus, unless of course it has been significantly altered over the years.
One of the more egregious issues with this Codex is the fact that there are several places where the text has been written over with India ink. India ink is just ink, but it is of much more modern origin. It cannot be ancient, so at some point a scribe wrote over the original text, again totally hampering the credibility of the document.
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