Steven Avery
Administrator
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While I was fairly critical of Bill Cooper's ebook The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus (2016) in my review, I also praised the clarity of his writing and a number of points that he brought forth. Especially those where he appears to have done his own research. (Example: where he discusses the "india ink".)
Here is one section that is interesting, looking at how linguistics issues are combined with the place of production ideas of Westcott and Hort on Vaticanus. And the question arises as to whether they point to Rome, and even whether the Greek text had been written in Rome and subject to Latin influence (it is much easier for this to occur in later days, as James Donaldson pointed out in his analysis of Latin influence in Hermas and Barnabas in Sinaiticus.)
Now we go to chapter two and extract some points made by Cooper:
Now, my purpose is not to evaluate his overall position on Vaticanus or the Bodmer papyri he references. That would take us far afield. There are individual points he makes that we can discuss from the above.
Skeat
As a curiosum we ought to mention a third contender as the place of composition of Vaticanus, namely Rome, this was put forwarded by Hort and by Wettstein but has found little favour. More recently Hahneman has repeated this extraordinary suggestion.24 Arguments based on alleged Latinisms in the manuscript are not persuasive. In any case it is the essential Greek character of Vaticanus which requires it to have been written in—and then used in, and preserved in—a Greek-speaking milieu. Among these distinctively Greek features are:
1. A Greek autograph by a monk named Clement was written on pp. 238 and 624, possibly as late as the fifteenth century.
24 G.M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) pp. 164-5.
https://books.google.com/books?id=0HKOJt33wLYC&pg=PA3
CONTACT HIM
It is unclear what this assertion is based on.
This assumes that the conjectures story of Vaticanus has it in the Vaticanus library, rather than just .. places unknown. It also assumes that there were equivalent Vatican library catalogs in earlier years from which Vaticanus was omitted.
The 1475 catalog has had varying perspectives as to whether it references Vaticanus. I had not seen before that it uses the number 1209, and I will plan to include the references I had seen separately. Epp made a point to emphasize that he felt 1481 was the right date.
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Now we go to the two points that I find most interesting.
First from Westcott-Hort:
This has long been a puzzling reference, which does deserve greater scrutiny.
This important linguistics assertion from Bill Cooper is taken from the Westcott and Hort example:
The New Testament in the original Greek, the text revised (1881)
B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort
https://books.google.com/books?id=gZ4HAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA265
Here is the Latin name part from Hort along with the Bill Cooper take:
And here is a notation how the Old Latin Fleury Palimpsest (an Old Latin ms with parts of 1 and 2 Peter, 1 John and Revelation) uses one of these unusual forms:
62
THE JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
PROLEGOMENA TO THE TESTIMONIA OF ST CYPRIAN. II.
(See J.T.S. vi [January 1905] 246-270.)
§ 6. The Old Latin forms for the names Ezekiel and Daniel
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23948955?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
And here you can see the unusual form (which apparently would never be transmitted through a purely Greek line) in the Wordsworth Vulgate
https://archive.org/details/nouumtestamentu00whitgoog/page/n124
Also see the footnote for verse #14 on this Vaticanus Greek Old Testament page:
https://archive.org/details/p3oldtestamentin02broouoft/page/462
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We welcome any input. Note how I point out above that Latinization in Vaticanus was an ongoing question in regard to Vaticanus (including Erasmus) and there is a separate PBF resource page on the topic.
Latin-->Greek will affect:
theories of origin
date of composition
conjectured value of the ms.
This whole issue of the Book of Acts chapter divisions requires a reexamination. The Vaticanus divisions are considered to be a later hand, not the 4th century (c. 700 is their guess, from memory, which, ironically weakens any attempted Sinaiticus-Vaticanus antiquity connection involving those headings).
Now we know that Sinaiticus, with similar headings (although ending early on chapter 15 in the Sinaiticus hack job) as Vaticanus, is 1800s. Any other Greek mss should be discussed, and how different are the Vulgate chapter headings.
This issue is generally discussed separately, because it is given as an argument for authenticity ("how did Sinaiticus get such similar chapter headings as Vaticanus?") Yet it is very possible that the chapter headings in Sinaiticus were simply added in ad hoc in the Times of Tischendorf.
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