biblical literature

Texts and manuscripts

In referring to manuscript text types by their place of origin, one posits the idea that the major centers of Christendom established more or less standard texts: Alexandria; Caesarea and Antioch (Eastern); Italy and Gallia plus Africa (Western); Constantinople, the home for the Byzantine text type or the Textus Receptus. While such a geographical scheme has become less accurate or helpful, it still serves as a rough classification of text types.

Uncials

The main uncials known in the 17th and 18th centuries were: A, D, D^p, E^a, and C.

A, Codex Alexandrinus, is an early-5th-century manuscript containing most of the New Testament but with lacunae (gaps) in Matthew, John, and II Corinthians, plus the inclusion of the extracanonical I and II Clement. In the Gospels, the text is of the Byzantine type, but, in the rest of the New Testament, it is Alexandrian. In 1627 the A uncial was presented to King Charles I of England by the Patriarch of Constantinople; it has been in the British Museum, in London, since 1751.

D, Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, is a 5th-century Greco-Roman bilingual text (with Greek and Latin pages facing each other). D contains most of the four Gospels and Acts and a small part of III John and is thus designated D^ea (e, for evangelia, or “gospels”; and a for acta, or Acts). In Luke, and especially in Acts, D^ea has a text that is very different from other witnesses. Codex Bezae has many distinctive longer and shorter readings and seems almost to be a separate edition. Its Acts, for example, is one-tenth longer than usual. D represents the Western text tradition. D^ea was acquired by Theodore Beza, a Reformed theologian and classical scholar, in 1562 from a monastery in Lyon (in France). He presented it to the University of Cambridge, England, in 1581 (hence, Beza Cantabrigiensis).

D^p, Codex Claromontanus, of the same Western text type although not remarkably dissimilar from other known texts, contains the Pauline Letters including Hebrews. D^p (p, for Pauline epistles) is sometimes referred to as D₂. Beza acquired this 6th-century manuscript at about the same time as D^ea, but D^p was from the Monastery of Clermont at Beauvais (hence, Claramontanus). It is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris.

E^a, Codex Laudianus, is a bilingual Greco-Latin text of Acts presented in 1636 by Archbishop Laud, an Anglican churchman, to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is a late-6th- or early-7th-century manuscript often agreeing with D^ea and its Western readings but also having a mixture of text types, often the Byzantine.

C, Codex Ephraemi Syri rescriptus, is a palimpsest. Originally written as a biblical manuscript in the 5th century, it was erased in the 12th century, and the treatises or sermons of Ephraem Syrus, a 4th-century Syrian Church Father, were written over the scraped text. The manuscript was found c. 1700 by the French preacher and scholar Pierre Allix; and Tischendorf, with the use of chemical reagents, later deciphered the almost 60 percent of the New Testament contained in it, publishing it in 1843. The text had two correctors after the 5th century but is, on the whole, Byzantine and reflects the not too useful common text of the 9th century.

Although there are numerous minuscules (and lectionaries), their significance in having readings going back to the first six centuries ad was not noted until textual criticism had become more refined in later centuries.

The main uncials and some significant minuscules that were discovered and investigated in the 19th century changed the course of the textual criticism and led the way to better manuscript evidence and methods of dealing with it. This has continued into the 20th century. The main new manuscript witnesses are designated ℵ or S, B, W, and Θ.

ℵ or S, Codex Sinaiticus, was discovered in 1859 by Tischendorf at the Monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mt. Sinai (hence, Sinaiticus) after a partial discovery of 43 leaves of a 4th-century biblical codex there in 1844. Though some of the Old Testament is missing, a whole 4th-century New Testament is preserved, with the Letter of Barnabas and most of the Shepherd of Hermas at the end. There were probably three hands and several later correctors. Tischendorf convinced the monks that giving the precious manuscript to Tsar Alexander II of Russia would grant them needed protection of their abbey and the Greek Church. Tischendorf subsequently published ℵ (S) at Leipzig and then presented it to the Tsar. The manuscript remained in Leningrad until 1933, during which time the Oxford University Press in 1911 published a facsimile of the New Testament from photographs of the manuscript taken by Kirsopp Lake, an English biblical scholar. The manuscript was sold in 1933 by the Soviet regime to the British Museum for £100,000. The text type of ℵ is in the Alexandrian group, although it has some Western readings. Later corrections representing attempts to alter the text to a different standard probably were made about the 6th or 7th century at Caesarea.

B, Codex Vaticanus, a biblical manuscript of the mid-4th century in the Vatican Library since before 1475, appeared in photographic facsimile in 1889–90 and 1904. The New Testament lacks Hebrews from chapter 9, verse 14, on the Pastorals, Philemon, and Revelation. Because B has no ornamentation, some scholars think it slightly older than ℵ. Others, however, believe that both B and ℵ, having predominantly Alexandrian texts, may have been produced at the same time when Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Scriptures. As an early representation of the Alexandrian text, B is invaluable as a most trustworthy ancient Greek text.

W, Codex Washingtonianus (or Freerianus), consists of the four Gospels in the so-called Western order (Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark, as D^ea). It was acquired in Egypt by C.L. Freer, an American businessman and philanthropist (hence, the Freer-Gospels), in 1906 and is now in the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. Codex Washingtonianus is a 4th–5th-century manuscript probably copied from several different manuscripts or textual families. The Byzantine, Western (similar to Old Latin), Caesarean, and Alexandrian text types are all represented at one point or another. One of the most interesting variant readings is a long ending to the Gospel According to Mark following a reference to the risen Christ (not found in most manuscript traditions).

Θ, Codex Koridethianus, is a 9th-century manuscript taking its name from the place of the scribe’s monastery, Koridethi, in the Caucasus Mountains, near the Caspian Sea. Θ contains the Gospels; Matthew, Luke, and John have a text similar to most Byzantine manuscripts, but the text of Mark is similar to the type of text that Origen and Eusebius used in the 3rd–4th centuries, a Caesarean type. The manuscript is now in Tbilisi, capital city of the Republic of Georgia.

Minuscules

Although there are many minuscules, most of them come from the 9th century on; a few, however, shed significant light on earlier readings, representing otherwise not well attested texts or textual “families.” In the early 20th century, the English scholar Kirsopp Lake (hence, Lake group) discovered a textual family of manuscripts known as Family 1:1, 118, 131, and 209 (from the 12th to 14th centuries) that have a text type similar to that of Θ, a 3rd–4th-century Caesarean type. At the end of the 19th century, W.H. Ferrar, a classical scholar at Dublin University (hence, the Ferrar group), found that manuscripts 13, 69, 124, and 346—and some minuscules discovered later (from the 11th to 15th centuries)—also seemed to be witnesses to the Caesarean text type. Manuscript 33, the “Queen of the Cursives,” is a 9th–10th-century manuscript now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris; it contains the whole New Testament except Revelation and is a reliable witness to the Alexandrian text (similar to B) but, in Acts and the Pauline Letters, shows influence of the Byzantine text type.

Lectionaries range from the 5th to the 6th century on; some early ones are uncials, though many are minuscules. Scholarly work with lectionary texts is only at its beginning, but the textual types of lectionaries may preserve a textual tradition that antedates its compilation and serves to give examples of the various text forms.

Papyri

The earliest New Testament manuscript witnesses (2nd–8th centuries) are papyri mainly found preserved in fragments in the dry sands of Egypt. Only in the latter decades of the 20th century have the relatively recently discovered New Testament papyri been published. Of those cataloged to date, there are about 76 New Testament manuscripts with fragments of various parts of the New Testament, more than half of them being from the 2nd to 4th centuries. All the witnesses prior to 400 are of Egyptian provenance, and their primitive text types, though mainly Alexandrian, establish that many text types existed and developed side by side. One of the most significant papyrus finds is p⁵², from c. 130 to 140, the earliest extant manuscript of any part of the New Testament. P⁵² consists of a fragment having on one side John 18:31–33 and on the other John 18:37–38, indicating that it was a codex, of which the text type may be Alexandrian. It is now in the John Rylands Library at Manchester.

In the early 1930s, British mining engineer A. Chester Beatty acquired three 3rd-century papyri from Egypt; they were published in 1934–37. Known as p⁴⁵, p⁴⁶, and p⁴⁷, they are, for the most part, in his private library in Dublin.

P⁴⁵, Beatty Biblical Papyrus I (and some leaves in Vienna), contains 30 leaves of an early- or mid-3rd-century codex of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. Each Gospel is of a different text type, and, although the leaves are mutilated, the Alexandrian text appears to predominate (particularly in Acts, in which a short non-Western text prevails); the whole may be thought of as pre-Caesarean.

P⁴⁶, Beatty Biblical Papyrus II (and Papyrus 222 at the University of Michigan), consists of 86 leaves of an early-3rd-century (c. 200) codex quire containing the Pauline Letters in the following order: Romans, Hebrews, I and II Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and I Thessalonians. Although some of the leaves are quite mutilated, the text type of p⁴⁶ appears to be Alexandrian. P⁴⁷, Beatty Biblical Papyrus III, is from the late 3rd century. It contains Rev. 9:10–17:2. It is the oldest, but not the best, text of Revelation and agrees with A, C, and ℵ.

Other early significant papyri are p⁶⁶, p⁴⁸, p⁷², p⁷⁵, and p⁷⁴. P⁶⁶, also known as Papyrus Bodmer II, contains in 146 leaves (some having lacunae) almost all of the Gospel According to John, including chapter 21. This codex, written before 200, is thus merely one century removed from the time of the autograph, the original text. Its text, like that of p⁴⁵, is mixed, but it has elements of an early Alexandrian text. P⁶⁶ and the other Bodmer papyri, which Martin Bodmer, a Swiss private collector, acquired from Egypt, were published 1956–61. They are in the private Bodmer library at Cologny, near Geneva. P⁴⁸ is a late-3rd-century text of Acts now in a library in Florence. It contains Acts 23:11–17, 23–29 and illustrates a Greek form of the Western text in Egypt in the 3rd century. The papyri of p⁷², Papyri Bodmer VII and VIII, are also from the 3rd century. VII contains a manuscript of Jude in a mixed text, and VIII contains I and II Peter. In I Peter the Greek was written by a scribe whose native language was Coptic; there are many examples of misspellings and itacisms that when corrected leave a text similar to the Alexandrian witnesses. The papyri of p⁷⁵, Papyri Bodmer XIV and XV, are 2nd–3rd-century codices containing most of Luke and of John, with John connected to Luke on the same page (unlike the Western order of the Gospels). The text coincides most with B but also has affinities with p⁶⁶ and p⁴⁵ as a predecessor of Alexandrian form.

P⁷⁴, Bodmer Papyrus XVII, is a 6th–7th-century text of Acts and the Catholic Letters. Acts show affinities with ℵ and A and no parallels with the Western text.

These and other papyri witness to the state of the early text of the New Testament in Egypt, indicating that no one text dominated and that text types of different origin flourished side by side.