Friday, December 02, 2005

Codex Sinaiticus in the News

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Jim Davila of paleojudaica has a good discussion of a poorly researched article about Codex Sinaiticus and St Catherine's Monastery (here).

One point might be worth adding to Jim's discussion; he wrote: "The discovery of Marcan priority had nothing to do with Tischendorf and progress on the Synoptic problem was not based on study of Sinaiticus or Syriacus." This is basically true, although could do with a little careful nuancing: progress on the Synoptic Problem (assuming for the moment that Markan priority was a 'discovery' and 'progress') was related to advances in textual criticism, which were in turn related to manuscript discoveries (including Sinaiticus). For example Sinaiticus lacks Mark 16.9-20 and so helped support the view that this long ending (which looks like it draws upon Matthew and Luke and thus supports the Griesbach hypothesis) was not original to Mark.

1 comment

  1. I suppose that the problem is caused by the fact that Syriasts may refer to the Sinaitic Syriac Palimpsest at Codex Sinaiticus. Of course there are many Codices Sinaitici just as there are many Codices Vaticani, but we all (myself included) tend to get lazy and just talk of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus as if these were unique designations.

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