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.
A wonderful Christmas present. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteHere is an obvious question.
ReplyDelete“The fourth-century Greek Bible manuscript Codex Vaticanus (Vat. gr. 1209) … written in majuscule script in the fourth century …. GA 03 (= B) for the 4th century part of the New Testament‘“
What materials testing, ink and parchment, is available to confirm these bold 4th-century pseudo-facts?
Thanks!
The fourth century date was assumed in this study. This is not controversial in scholarship.
DeleteSteven, I thought you had a beef with Sinaiticus alone?
DeleteIs every single Codex now a forgery?
Hi Martijn,
DeleteQuestioning an unprovenanced and long-disputed 4th-century date (conta Sirleto, Momtfaucon, Rinck et al) is not an accusation of forgery.
It is pointing out the stubborn resistance to scientific methodology, using “consensus” or “not controversial” as the hand-wave. So we really should not have confidence in the 4th-century claim, which is now ossified as part of the Critical Text apologia, an article of faith.
Technically, Erasmus questioned the authenticity of Vaticanus and other manuscripts in the discussion of Latinization of Greek mss. coming out of the Council of Florence c. 1450. However, the Erasmus position is generally and understandably considered inoperative today, a historical footnote.
Steven
https://linktr.ee/stevenavery
Here is a fascinating paragraph from the paper:
Delete“Iron-gall inks utilize a chemical reaction between a soluble iron (II) compound (such as iron (II) sulfate) and gallic acid or tannic acid (extracted from gallnuts or tree bark). The reaction produces an ink that turns black upon oxidation in air. Iron-gall ink degrades with time, changing its color to various shades of brown.”
Yet there are many places where we see virtually jet-black ink on manuscripts (original ink or top-level of palimpsests or corrections) that are theorized to be over a millennium old.
If the statement above is correct, either they are not iron-gall ink (what are they?) or the dating of that manuscript or layer should be corrected.
My post, apologies for anonymous.
DeleteSoot, as attested by Vitruvius, Dioscorides, and Pliny, all of whom give instructions on how to prepare black ink.
DeleteI’m afraid that Mr Avery is aware of that, but it’s no use for his life-long project is to prove, against all odds, that some of our are most ancient biblical are, in fact, some of our latest. This passion is so all-consuming that any rational arguments and evidence coming his way are but bumps on his glorious road to Valhalla.
DeleteFunnily enough this article sometimes sounds a bit like Payne with its emphasis on the size of their equipment!
ReplyDeleteE.g. "We used Artax 800, a scanning 30-Watt xrf spectrom-
Deleteeter (Bruker Nano GmbH) that features a molybdenum X-
Ray tube, focusing polycapillary optics with an interaction
spot of 100 μm, and a 30mm2 sdd detector (see Figure 4)."
With a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time!
DeleteDoes this mean we can go back to calling them umlauts??
ReplyDelete"a process that only became standard in the 16th century"
ReplyDeleteThat is hardly relevant of course, what would be relevant is the oldest MS that contains such ink.
A quick Google for "chemically purified vitriol" demonstrates that the very phrase originates from this particular study, making it even more suspect
Is this a "Move on, nothing to see here" in disguise? Has anyone read any further, and perhaps able to confirm the earliest use of such ink, whatever it may mean?
Textual study of the superior LXX A (Alex.) should take precedence over the LXX B (Vat.).
ReplyDeleteThis really seems to put an end to the discussion surrounding the distigmai, the fact that the ink of the distigmai is the same as that of the replacement pages really seems to seal the deal.
ReplyDeleteI will make the audacious prediction that this will not put an end to that discussion.
DeleteA wonderful Christmas present indeed, though, alas, Santa tells me Payne is already working on a response...
ReplyDeleteNone of the VLR-reported 64 XFR tests on distigmai were done on any distigme that visually matches original Vaticanus ink. Consequently, Gordon et al. 2024’s strong denial that original scribes of Vaticanus wrote distigmai lacks relevant scientific confirmation. It is analogous to a mold-detection company asserting that there is no mold in a house even though they tested none of the places where the owner had reported mold. It’s like saying there is no car at a property without ever looking in the garage.
ReplyDeleteNehemia Gordon acknowledges: “The X-ray fluorescence tests carried out on Codex Vaticanus in September 2022 and February 2023 did not include the eleven distigmai categorized as apricot in Payne and Canart’s joint 2000 article.”
In fact, Gordon et al. 2024’s XRF tests provide three good reasons to expect that if XRF testing is done on the 17 distigmai that visually do match the apricot color and faintness of original Vaticanus ink, that testing will show that they, or most of them, have ink signatures that correspond to nearby original Vaticanus ink:
1. Of the 40 distigmai Canart by himself identified as “apricot” and that were given XRF tests, only the two dots at 1243 B21 gave an ink signature matching nearby original Vaticanus ink. Gordon states that it is a sigma. I tend to agree based on 50x magnification in Ultraviolet light, but there is contextual evidence that Gordon does not acknowledge for regarding it as a distigme. My visual judgment of the IPZS facsimile and VatLib images agrees with every XRF distigme test.
2. I identified only one characteristic bar obelos as matching the color and faintness of nearby original Vaticanus ink, the one at 1243 A12. Gordon et al. 2024, 146–147 confirms that 1243 A12’s “original horizontal line (Cu 0.09–0.10) was written in the same ink as the original main text (Cu 0.10). This original ink was distinct from that of the reinker of the main text on the verso (Cu 0.16–0.17).”
3. Gordon et al. 2024, 138, Table 1, lists 20 XRF tests of “apricot” distigmai. Each XRF test confirmed that the distigme’s ink signature is clearly different from the ink signature of nearby original Vaticanus ink. Nearby original Vaticanus ink as depicted in the IPZS facsimile and VatLib images is visually different from all 20.
I acknowledge that I earlier mistakenly accepted Canart’s judgments regarding those 40 distigmai. I accepted Canart’s judgments because I assumed he was using the same exacting criteria that we had used together to identify eleven distigmai matching original Vaticanus ink. Furthermore, unlike Canart, I had no access to the original Vaticanus leaves that could have provided a solid basis to challenge Canart’s judgments. Gordon’s tests show me how accurate the IPZS facsimile’s color reproduction is. It is the IPZS facsimile’s accurate representation of ink colors that gives me confidence that the ink color differences I had earlier observed between many of Canart’s 40 and original ink in that facsimile are a reliable guide for identifying ink that is not original. That facsimile’s accuracy also gives me confidence that 6 of the 40 Canart identified as “apricot” in color, do in fact match the color of original Vaticanus ink.
None of the VLR-reported 64 XFR tests were done on any of the 17 distigmai that visually match original Vaticanus ink. Consequently, they provide no grounds for denying original Vaticanus distigmai. Their shifting definition of "apricot" conceals this.
Mirabile dictu!
DeletePaul Canart and I together in 1998 examined many Vaticanus distigmai in the Biblioteca Vaticana manuscript vault. We agreed that eleven of them unambiguously match the original ink’s light apricot color. Through a high-powered, internally-lighted loupe, each dot looked like a huge apricot-colored moon. We published our findings in “The Originality of Text-Critical Symbols in Codex Vaticanus”, NovT 42.2 (2000): 105–13.
ReplyDeletePrior to any of Nehemia Gordon’s testing, I advised him to do XRF testing on those eleven distigmai. Gordon et al., VLR 128 states, “Payne and Canart initially observed that ‘eleven umlauts unambiguously match the original ink of Codex Vaticanus,’ which is correct based on a strictly visual assessment.” Nevertheless, Gordon did not direct his team to do XRF testing on any of those eleven or any other distigme that visually matches original Vaticanus ink.
Long before Gordon submitted the VLR article, I notified him of specific differences between the color and/or faintness of the ink of every XRF-tested distigme VLR 138 lists as “apricot” and original Vaticanus ink on the same page in the high resolution 1999 IPZS Vaticanus color facsimile as well as the images at https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1209. I repeatedly explained to Gordon that it is imperative that his article make it clear that his team did not perform an XRF test on any distigme that matches the original Vaticanus ink color. Otherwise, readers will get the false impression that his team had tested original-apricot-color distigmai. I had hoped that Gordon would make this clear because he talked to me prior to his SBL presentation in 2023 about distinguishing the original eleven “apricot” distigmai and the “non-apricot” ones that Canart had classified as “apricot” and on which Gordon’s team did XRF tests.
Neither Gordon’s SBL presentation nor VLR article, however, acknowledges this, even though VLR 128, n. 18 discusses at length “confusion about the precise number of apricot distigmai”. Both the SBL presentation and VLR article repeatedly give the false impression that their XRF tests were done on both original apricot-color distigmai and chocolate-color distigmai (e.g. pp. 125–26, 138). In fact, none of the XRF tests was done on a distigme that I personally identified to Gordon as “apricot”. VLR identifies as “apricot” eight distigmai that I had told Gordon are “not apricot” (1276 C31; 1279 B1, C41; 1285 C14; 1308 B27; 1332 B10, B15, C20).
The VLR article completely ignores the distigmai in the 4th or 5th century Codex Sarravianus Colbertinus (LXX G) that has close similarities to Vaticanus and may have been written in the same scriptorium. How does one explain LXX G’s distigmai if “there is no reasonable chance that the distigmai were written in the 4th century”?
VLR also completely ignores the distigmai in the Vaticanus LXX. It suggests that the distigmai were added by Sepúlveda. How does one explain Vaticanus’s LXX distigmai if distigmai are the result of a collation of Erasmus’s Greek NT or any other NT texts available to Sepúlveda? How does one explain the stark differences in the color of different distigmai or even between the two dots in a single distigme if they are the result of a collation?
Perhaps the most important revelation of the XRF and other tests reported in VLR is that they confirm that three of the obeloi I attributed to scribe B (1241 B9, 1243 A12, and 1285 B12, see VLR 144, 146, 147) also match original Vaticanus ink. Each of these three obeloi mark long blocks of spurious text in some other manuscripts that would interrupt the earlier text in Vaticanus. In each, the interruption begins at the precise point of a gap in the Vaticanus text, just like all 16 obeloi I have identified in the NT.
That sounds like an awful lot of work to prove that 1 Cor 14.34-35 is a textual variant!
DeleteWhen I began my textual research on manuscripts containing 1 Cor 14:34–35, it was not "to prove that 1 Cor 14.34-35 is a textual variant." I did it with the goal of finding evidence to support the originality to Paul of 1 Cor 14.34-35. I thought that if I could find manuscripts that link 14:33b with 34–35, 33b could be interpreted in a way that qualifies and limits 34–35’s demands that women be silent and not to speak in church. Perhaps, all Paul was prohibiting was speech that was not in accordance with the customs, “As in all the churches of the saints ….” My research, however, found no manuscript evidence for my hoped for “solution” to the problem of making 14:34–35 compatible with Paul’s encouraging women co-workers in the gospel. It was in the process of looking for evidence for the authenticity of 1 Cor 14:34–35 that I found evidence against its authenticity. You may find that evidence by downloading free my three NTS articles on Codex Fuldensis, Codex Vaticanus, and manuscript 88 and other articles in NovT and JSNT at www.pbpayne.com under Publications: Articles.
ReplyDeletePhil Payne has indeed worked hard providing evidence that 1 Cor 14:34-35 is a gloss. If people really want him to stop talking about the distigmai in Vaticanus, they could urge that XRF testing be done on the 17 distigmai that he claims are visually the same as the original ink on the same pages. Then we would have our answer about the distigmai. (Of course, many Bible scholars believe the verses are a gloss for reasons not related to distigmai). I'm personally looking foward to seeing the results of XRF tests on the 17 distigmai identified by Payne as matching the color and faintness of original Vaticanus ink on the same page. Then, and only then, can we truly put the distigmai matter to rest.
ReplyDelete