Codex Sinaiticus

[Robert Wurtz IIModerator]

It has come to y attention that the BBC is rerunning an earlier series called ‘the beauty of books’. The first installment deals with the Codex Sinaiticus. I was privileged to view this ancient Codex with Ron in 2012 at the British Library.

Is the Codex Sinaiticus the manuscript from which all NT manuscripts descend? Below is an intro to the topic from the BBC’s perspective.

Discuss?

[JonahParticipant]

Sadly this series is so typical of the highly secularised “BBC perspective” on faith and truth, because having watched the episode on the Codex Sinaticus I note that it singles out two particular features of the Codex which it uses to reject both the divinity and the resurrection of Jesus, and goes on to draw attention to multiple corrections (“on average 300 per page”) in the Codex superimposed onto the original scribal work in order to undermine the authority of scripture.

This latter point however perhaps gets to the heart of the topic as you wish to discuss it.  It is typical BBC journalism (and typical of the academia it relies on) to present unproven conjecture as fact – the origin of the universe and evolution being its worst example of this practice – and in this case, taking one historical treasure as the basis for a definitive commentary on the reliability and trustworthiness of scripture from other sources.

Robert, given that the contents of this Codex were allegedly found in a waste bin, presumably as parchment sheets, how is it that they claim a whole book was discovered which is now preserved intact in the British Library?

 

[JonahParticipant]

And here is another thought…

According to the BBC commentary, the scribes who wrote the Codex would have been paid for the amount they wrote rather than the time spent writing it, which they gave as a reason for many corrections having had to be made subsequently.

Now my understanding of the Masoretic Hebrew text is that the Jewish scribes who made the copies were highly meticulous and that is why that text is considered to be so reliable.

If this were not the case for Sinaiticus, surely the opposite conclusion, that we do not have grounds to trust it, should apply?

[ronbaileyModerator]

Hi Jonah

Many scholars do prefer the Majority Text (Byzantine Textform) and the Sinaiticus has evidence of several different editors. While it is true that the last verses of Mark are missing, the documentary didn’t tell you that there is a space at the end of the Sinaiticus indicating that the scribe was working at a time when ‘more text’ was known to exist but which the copiest did not judge as authentic, but kept his option open by leaving room for its addition.

The Codex Vaticanus also has evidence of multiple alterations. Since the time of Westcott and Hort (late 1800s) a narrative has been created about the history of the text transmission. This narrative has no real substance but has become the underlying theme for subsequent translations.

There is an interesting note in Deuteronomy that I have never seen mentioned that undermines, in my view, the whole so-called narrative of textual transmission…

¶ And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the priests the Levites:

and it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear Jehovah his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them;

that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his children, in the midst of Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18–20 ASV)

This refers to a future time when Israel would have a monarchy. The king was required to create his own copy of the book of Deuteronomy that was to accompany all the days of his reign. He was to read in the book of Deuteronomy ‘all the days of his life’ with the express purpose of preventing his from becoming an oriental type monarch by reminding him that he was not ‘over’ but ‘part’ of his brethren.

The key part is that he was instructed to make his copy of from the original Moses’ document that was kept in the presence of the Ark. This meant there was no narrative for a textual transmission as each copy was only a second-generation copy and not the results of multiple generations of kings (or scribes) adding incremental errors to the text.

Westcott & Hort’s hypothesis is based on the idea of incremental error through multiple generations of scribal copies. The Majority Text has many more copies than the Westcott-Hort family but the W/H family does seem to have ‘older’ manuscripts. It has been suggested that the Sinaiticus and Vatican survived simply because they were inferior documents and so little used. The Vaticanus was found on a shelf in the Vatican and the Sinaiticus was found in a basket used for paper that lit their fires. ie neither document was held in high regard until they were rediscovered centuries later. The latter representatives of the Byzantine Textform may be the result of multiple copies being made of older documents thant Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by ronbailey.

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