THE CODEX SINAITICUS

T. S. PATTIE

T H E Codex Sinaiticus of the Greek Bible, even though it has lost over 300 leaves, is stillthe earliest complete New Testament, and is the earliest and best witness for some of thebooks of the Old Testament. It was written in the first half of the fourth century, whenChristianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, when all the books of theBible were collected in one volume for the first time, and the codex (our modern sewnbook) achieved its final victory over the roll, a victory only now challenged by the gluedbook.

This priceless treasure was purchased in 1933 from the Soviet Government who werein desperate need of foreign currency. The price paid was ;£ioo,ooo, a sum comparablein magnitude, allowing for infiation, with the j£ 1,763,000 raised in 1971 by the NationalGallery to acquire Titian's Death ofActaeon. The acquisition of the manuscript arousedsuch interest and excitement that the British Government contributed £39,319 to matchthe sum raised by public subscription.

The manuscript itself was first identified by Constantine Tischendorf, an accuratebiblical scholar and tireless traveller in search of manuscripts. In his own words :

It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Convent of St. Catherine, that I discovered the pearlof all my researches. In visiting the library of the monastery, in the month of May, 1844, I Per-ceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and thelibrarian, who was a man of information, told me that two heaps of papers like these, moulderedby time, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find amid this heapof papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, whichseemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the conventallowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty-three sheets, all themore readily as they were destined for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possessionof the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had aroused their suspicionsas to the value of this manuscript.

The picture of the leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus lying in a basket about to be burnedreceives some general confirmation by a report by V. N. Beneshevich^ that he had heardfrom the steward Polycarp in 1908: 'Quite recently, in order to get rid of "rubbish", theyheated the bread oven with old books, among which were very rare editions.'

Fig. I. Codex Sinaiticus. Double opening: end of Gospel of Luke and beginning of Gospel ofJohn. Each page written in four columns

Tischendorf took back to Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, who had sponsored hisjourney, the manuscripts he had collected including the 43 leaves from Sinai which hecalled the Codex Friderico-Augustanus in honour of his patron. All these manuscriptswere deposited in the University Library, Leipzig, where they still are. He visited themonastery for the third time on 31 January 1859. On 4 February the steward entertainedhim in his cell and, resuming a former conversation, said •? 'And I too have read a SeptUa-gint' (i.e. Greek Old Testament). He then brought out a

bulky kind of volume, wrapped up in a red cloth and laid it before me. I unrolled the cover, anddiscovered, to my great surprise not only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I hadtaken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete,and in addition the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas. Full of joy, whichthis time I had the self-command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community,I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamberto look over it more at leisure. There by myself I could give way to the transport of joy whichI felt. I knew that I held in my hand the most precious Biblical treasure in existence - a documentwhose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had ever examined duringtwenty years' study of the subject.

Tischendorf borrowed the manuscript and presented it to the Emperor of Russia,believing in his excitement that he had the monks' agreement to do so. It is likely enoughthat Tischendorf and the head of the monastery, Cyril, Archbishop-Elect of Sinai, hada private agreement to this effect, but when the proposal came to the ears of Cyril's enemies

^

itxr roexe b ceo YKXnxcxtrixcHMC

KX|-roKXTD| Kei N McXHM

2. Codex Sinaiticus. Page from the Psalms written in two columns. Psalm 23 ('KB') andother psalms with corrections

he was forced in self-defence to say that there was no intention of giving away the manu-script. This impossible situation was regularized by the Russian diplomatic service tenyears later, in 1869, by an agreement with the new Archbishop of Sinai, Callistus, inwhich the monks agreed to donate the manuscript to the Emperor, and the Emperor gavethe monks some money and some decorations. However, the monks on Sinai still resentthe way in which their Treasure was given away.

Once the manuscript was in St. Petersburg Tischendorf gave it the name of CodexSinaiticus Petropolitanus, in honour of its place of discovery and its place of residence.He prepared a luxurious edition complete with scholarly commentary, in 'facsimile type'of the 346^ leaves, published in 1862 at Russian expense. The 43 leaves at Leipzig he hadalready published. Both parts were pubhshed in 1911 in collotype facsimile by Kirsoppand Helen Lake.

The text of our Bible is supremely well attested, but there are a few puzzles. One ofthese is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which has two main forms, the long endingand the short ending. The Sinaiticus agrees with other early manuscripts like the Vaticanusin having the short ending. Another puzzle is the story of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8: 11) which some manuscripts place after John 7: 36, or 7: 52, or 21: 24, or even afterLuke 21: 38. The Sinaiticus, like the Vaticanus, omits the adulterous woman altogether.Are we to assume that there was at an early date an editorial decision to leave out both ofthese sections, this decision being reflected in the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, but notin the text which became standard in the Orthodox Church and thence in the AuthorizedVersion ? It seems quite likely. There is no separate translation of the Codex Sinaiticus,but many of its readings, including the two we have just discussed, are recorded in theNew English Bible, and in 1869 Tischendorf published in Leipzig an edition of the EnglishAuthorized Version, with the variant readings in English of the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus,and Alexandrinus as the thousandth volume in the Tauchnitz collection of British authors.

But what is the point, the poor taxpayer may ask, of paying out so much money for anold book, which has already been carefully studied by that conscientious scholar Tischen-dorf and which, moreover, has been published in facsimile by Professor and Mrs. Lake?The answer to that is to be found in a superb book called The Scribes and Correctors ofthe Codex Sinaiticus^ by H.J.M.Milne and T.C. Skeat. Milne and Skeat were able toshow decisively that only three scribes and not four were responsible for the manuscript(Tischendorf had called the anonymous scribes A, B, C, and D : the work attributed toC should in reality be attributed to A and D). These three scribes, who were all carefullytrained to write in the same style, can be distinguished not so much by the letter forms,but by the general appearance of the page, some habits of punctuation, and above all thedecorative tail-piece with which the scribe ended each book of the Bible. The tail-pieceamounts to the scribe's signature and Milne and Skeat were able to show that the tail-piece could be used to distinguish scribes in the other two early Greek Bibles, CodexVaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus.

After the scribes of the Codex Sinaiticus had been securely identified, an interestingfeature emerged - they were not equally good at spelling. Greek spelling is like English

in that both became fixed at a certain period, but the pronunciation changed in succeedingcenturies. Consequently Greek speakers of the period after Christ, like English speakersof today, had to learn correct spelling by memory. Of the three scribes, D was an excellentspeller, A a poor speller, and B an appaUingly bad speller. It is an entertaining thoughtthat the human frailty of the weakest of these spellers is enough to demolish a theoryformulated sixteen hundred years later. The traditional view was that commercial copiesof books were made by a group of scribes listening to a reader. Kurt Ohly,^ however,denied that dictation was used, and pointed to the marks indicating the number of lines

nrr

k x i rfA^^xc TXTKAIO/AAMeNOTiAXHencecrnNH

KXIr I

<j>HTXlA'XYTOMOl M XITONKOCM OWX-CDfHCT

TX rp A 4 > O M fc N XK »KAIXt »

u

CXTFig. 3. Codex Sinaiticus. End of St. John's Gospel with earlier colophon

drawn in pencil from traces visible by ultra-violet light

written (stichomctry) and to the consideration that a certain number of scribes copyingand recopying by eye would produce the same amount of work as if dictation were used,and of course far more accurately. Ohly's theory is exploded by the evidence of spelling -the miserable B omits letters or syllables or duplicates syllables or adds meaningless lettersin a way that would be incredible if he were copying by eye. Besides, 4 Maccabees andPsalms are both begun by D and continued by A, and the spelling reflects the change ofhand. From another point of view B's spelling is valuable evidence of the current pro-nunciation, such as the confusion between ot and f, and omission of intervocalic y {<f>ouvfor (j)vy€Lv^ Act for Aeyct, and conversely Xeyovrocs for AeoKras"). It is worth making the pointthat the excellence of D's spelling is paralleled by other scribes who could spell.

Under ultra-violet light it was possible to read letters that had been erased and writtenover. One surprising discovery was that originally the Gospel of John ended at 21: 24. Thetail-piece and end-title were later deleted, verse 25 was added with a fresh tail-piece andend-title (fig. 3). It seemed that an unknown editor decided on internal grounds that theGospel ended at 21:24, and that verse 25 was an interpolation, which has been argued inmodern times.

Another surprise seen under ultra-violet light, was at Matthew 6: 28: 'Consider how thelilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do not spin/ This is the reading of theNew English Bible which also adds at the foot of the page: 'One witness reads "Considerthe lilies: they neither card nor spin nor labour".' This is the original reading of the CodexSinaiticus, subsequently corrected to the familiar version. The original reading seemsa great improvement on the familiar reading: it makes a perfect parallel with the birds ofthe air in verse 26: 'they do not sow and reap and store in barns.' It is so much betterthat it outweighs, in my opinion, the evidence of the other 5,000 manuscripts of the GreekNew Testament.

1 C. Tischendorf, Codex Sinaiticus. The AncientBiblical Manuscript nom in the British Museum.,Tischendorf's slory and Argument related byHimself. 8th edn., [1934], p. 23.

2 V. N. Beneshevich, Opisante grecheskikh rukopiseimonastyrya Sv. Ekateriny, I [1911], p- xvi, n. i.

3 C. Tischendorf, op. cit., p. 27.4 K.Ohly, Sttchometrische Untersuchungen (Zentral-

blatt fiir Bihliothekswesen, Beiheft 61), 1928,PP- 123-5.

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