Just in time for Christmas:
Nehemia Gordon, Patrick Andrist, Oliver Hahn, Pavlos D. Vasileiadis, Nelson Calvillo, and
Ira Rabin, ‘Did the Original Scribes Write the Distigmai in Codex Vaticanus B of the Bible (Vat. gr. 1209)?’ the Vatican Library Review 3 (2024), 125–156. Click here.
Abstract: The fourth-century Greek Bible manuscript Codex Vaticanus B (Vat. gr. 1209) contains pairs of horizontally aligned marginal dots known as distigmai, which correspond to textual variants in other manuscripts. The production of the distigmai
has been variously dated to the 4th or 16th centuries. A fourth-century
date would prove the early existence of hundreds of textual variants,
many of which are otherwise only witnessed by later manuscripts. Near
infrared microscope reflectography combined with micro-X-ray
fluorescence spectroscopy proved that the distigmai, both those
categorized as “apricot” (which are visually similar to the ink of the
original main text) and “chocolate” (which are visually similar to the
reinking of the main text) were written with ink(s) made from chemically
purified vitriol, a process that only became standard in the 16th
century. As a result, there is no reasonable chance that the distigmai were written in the fourth century. Horizontal lines that have been hypothesized to function as text-critical obeloi were written in the same ink as the original main text, which differs completely from that of the distigmai. In other words, the distigmai
and horizontal lines tested were not produced during the same writing
session and are separated by more than 1,000 years, making it impossible
for them to have functioned as conjoining text-critical symbols in the
4th century.