Cy Kellett talks with Jimmy Akin about the Codex Vaticanus.
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: There’s a lot of interest in the canon of Scripture. So people start throwing these words around, and among them are the words Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. And they almost are like magical talisman in the way some people talk about them. So are they magical? What are these magical codexes?
Caller: Well, they aren’t magical.
Caller: Okay.
Jimmy Akin: There’s a young evangelical apologist named Wes Huff that people may have seen. And he kind of became famous overnight, I don’t know, a year or two ago when he had a debate with a gentleman who had some very eccentric theories about Jesus and stuff like that. And this gentleman kept saying that his ideas about Jesus were endorsed in the Sinai Bible. And he kept using the term Sinai Bible. And it’s like to anyone who knows much about the history of the Bible, it’s like, what the heck is he talking about? And I was watching the video of this and I thought, could he mean Codex Sinaiticus? And at that moment, Wes said the same thing. It’s like, do you mean Codex Sinaiticus? And he’s like, yeah, the Sinai Bible. And Wes says, well, it doesn’t contain what you think it does. And Wes happens to be a manuscript guy. So he reached back onto the bookcase behind him and pulled out a reproduction of Codex Sinaiticus. And it was a very powerful moment in a debate. And it kind of caused Wes to rocket up to quite a degree of notoriety in Christian apologetics. Unfortunately, Wes isn’t really an apologist, and that shows in his later work. This was just a lucky moment. But I can tell you what Codex and Codex Vaticanus are. So I’ll start with what they have in common. First, they’re both codices. And what a codex is is what we today think of as a book. This is not what ancient people thought of as books. To ancient people, what they considered a book was what we would call a scroll. In the ancient world, the standard format for books was you took sheets of paper which were either made of papyrus or they were animal skins. Parchments, usually papyrus, because it rolls EAs. And so what you do is you’d stitch the pages together side by side so you could roll them up. And that the scroll was what ancient people thought of as books. But. And they did have the other more modern kind of binding where you take the pages and you only stitch one side together. So it’s like a book with a spine and you can flip the pages rather than having to roll through them. But they didn’ it for standard works, they would use what we would think of as a book as like a notepad, a little thing for notes. You wouldn’t put a work of literature in one. And they tended to be short as a result. They were like our little spiral notebooks. But one of the things that Christianity did was change all that. And when Christianity started sometime like in the first century, there seems to have been a very famous modern form of the book with the spine, which is what’s known as a codex. And then it seems to have been either a book or a set of books from the Bible. And it became extremely influential in Christian circles. So Christians, unlike everybody else, started using codices instead of scrolls. And so you can tell like, was this a Christian book or was this a pagan book or a Jewish book by looking at is it a scroll or a codex? And so codices were the, like the Christian book form. And so Christians, unlike everybody else, would put their sacred books in the form of a codex. And in the early. Now at this time, codices couldn’t contain really the whole Bible, not easily. It took a while to get things to the point that you could put all the books of the Bible in a single volume. But by the, by the three hundreds, by the fourth century, that was starting to happen. And there was a request by the first Christian emperor, the Emperor Constantine. He wrote an early Christian author, Eusebius, who was a bishop, and said, I founded this new city named after myself, Constantinople, which is now Istanbul. And I’m sorry, but that is other people’s business besides the Turks. And so he’s founded this new city, Constantinople, and he is promoting Christianity. And he writes Eusebius and says, I want you to make me 50 high quality copies of the Scriptures. And so there were these 50 copies of scriptures of the Bible basically that got made. It is speculated that two of them were Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. We don’t know that for a fact. There is some evidence that would suggest they are. There is some evidence that would suggest they are not. But that’s one of the things that’s debated about these two works. So it’s something else they have in common. Are they among Constantine’s 50 copies? Now, another interesting thing about, about them that they have in common is they are what are known as unseal manuscripts. That means that they’re written in all capital letters. So there are no lowercase letters. Every letter in them is a capital letter. And there are no spaces between the words and no punctuation. It just all runs together. And so if you want to read them, you have to be careful for like where does one word stop and another word begin? And that’s actually where the Latin word for reading comes from. The Latin word for reading is legere, and it means to pick out. Because originally, with no spaces between words and no punctuation, you had to carefully pick out where the words were in a text you were reading. And so these being unsealed manuscripts fit that format. It’s all capital letters, no spaces, no punctuation, with a few little exceptions, but that’s the gist. And these two, because they have or originally had basically the whole Bible, they’re two of what are called the four great uncials. So in addition to Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Feticanus, there’s also Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraimi. And those are the four great uncials that originally had basically the whole Bible in them. Now, for the Old Testament, it would be the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, and then they’d also have the Greek New Testament. And because these come from the 4th century, and specifically they look like they’re both from the first half of the fourth century, they represent some of the earliest complete Bibles that we have, or near complete Bibles today that we have from this period. And they’re very important to the study of what the original Greek text was. They both represent a tradition known as the Alexandrian text type. And that is thought to be one of the most accurate early traditions of the text because scribes change things even unintentionally. And so different text types develop. But the Alexandrian text type is. I’m sorry, the Antiochian text type is thought to be very early and more reliable than many. So modern Bible translations put a lot of weight on what it says in Codex Dein Atticus and Codex Vaticanus. So those are some of the things they have in common. Now, what makes them different? First there’s the names. Why is Codex Sinaiticus called Codex Sinaiticus? It’s cause it was kept at the famous monastery on Mount Sinai that is run by the Eastern Orthodox, the Mount Athos Monastery. And it was discovered in the 1800s by a German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf. And he was visiting the monastery and the monks had a bunch of old sheets of parchment, animal skin, with writing on it. And they were going to burn them for heat.
Caller: What?
Jimmy Akin: It’s like it got cold and they were going to burn them for heat. And he started looking at them and he discovered this fourth. They were from this fourth century manuscript. And that’s how Codex Sinaiticus was discovered and he discovered it in batches because they weren’t all bound together in a single volume anymore. He would find a bunch of sheets and then he’d later find another bunch of sheets and they actually found some more sheets. 1975. And because of the complex history of how the manuscript was found, among other factors, it’s not stored in a single place today. Some of it’s like in Russia, some of it’s in England and so it’s in different places. And it looks like this manuscript was written somewhere around 345 AD. So that’s Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Vaticanus is called Codex Vaticanus cause it’s at the Vatican and it’s been stored at the Vatican since the 1400s. How it got to the Vatican we’re less sure of. But we know it’s been at the Vatican since the 1400s and it’s a little bit earlier. Scholars based on the way it’s written. And scholars have estimated it was written maybe around 330 or so. 325, something like that. And so it’s quite early. And because it’s older and because of other factors, it’s actually considered more important than Codex Sinaiticus. So if like you had to pick, what are we going to base our. If you had to pick one manuscript to base your modern Bible translation, what would it be? It would be Vaticanus. Interestingly, both Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus contain books that are not in all Christian Bibles today. They both have deuterocanonical books that are in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but not Protestant Bibles in their Old Testaments. But in the case of Vaticanus, there are even two books that it has grouped with the New Testament that are not in standard Christian Bibles today. One of them is a work called the Letter of Barnabas, which was thought by many in the early church to have been written by the apostle Barnabas. And the other is a work that you know, called the shepherd of Hermas. Ah yeah, and I hadn’t planned that. And that’s a book, it’s a first century book of early private revelations. And I hadn’t planned this. But just by coincidence, today’s Jimmy Akin’s mysterious world is all about the shepherd of Hermus.
Caller: Oh cool, Very nice.
Jimmy Akin: If you want to know about this other book that’s found in Codex Vaticanus, check out today’s episode of Mysterious World on the shepherd of Hermitage.
Cy Kellett: Jimmy, thank you so much for that history and for the clarity of all of that. So the Vaticanus text, unlike the Sinaiticus text, is a whole text. It’s still.
Caller: There are some pages that are missing.
Caller: I got you.
Jimmy Akin: And that were later replaced, but both of these originally were basically the whole Bible. But because it didn’t get used for heat and didn’t get scattered into as many different chunks as Cyanaticus, Codex Vaticanus is. I don’t know that more complete is quite the right way to say it, but it’s more put together.
Caller: Jimmy A.
Caller: Can I ask all in one place?
Caller: Your Bible questions are welcome.