The Largest Greek Manuscript?
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Incidentally, the word scholia in modern Greek literally means comments :-)
"Christian commentators adopted a similar system. They placed the Biblical text in the centre of each page, written in larger, more prominent characters, adding the commentary around it in smaller letters, so that as much as possible could fit on the page."
We still do this with modern study Bibles! NET and ESV as very recent printings, for example, both have fairly similar layouts, though NET is probably closest to this since it doesn't contain introductory text typeset differently from the rest of the commentary. If it works...
Even more amusing: The red ink connections bring to mind how Logos (the Bible software) works where each commentary or other text that references another text are all interlinked within your library and can be clicked or moused-over. And we think our modern era is so novel! Hah!
In all seriousness, it'd be interesting to see how the sample of OT texts in this compare to the LXX since the article (to me) seems to suggest this contained comments specifically to help with the Septuagint's peculiar grammar (and I didn't get from their remarks that the verse text is changed or updated?). Absolutely fascinating!
On the inside (in purple in the image) we have the actual writing down of the Mishnah, a record of part of the oral Torah. Immediately underneath that is the Gemara, a key commentary/interpretation written around 200 AD. Surrounding that are the commentaries of rabbis who lived in the Middle Ages. And at the very edge in small print, there are commentaries from modern (1600s - 1800s) rabbis.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Labeled_...
â like this
(Sadly, Unicode contains no superscript versions of those.)
What systems exist like this for managing manuscripts and their collaborative translation and discussion?
You can't see the original image though.
one can see that the book's confirmed provenance is: "Purchased from C. G. Aspiotis, 11 October 1897."
How do they determine it to be from: "2nd half of the 12th century- 1st half of the 13th century" ?
Where was the document for 700 years? (From 1200's to 1897.) Why should one accept the older date?
Its surely possible that this sort of thing is fakeable... and worth a fortune, etc..
"Whoever removes this present book from the place where the humble body of me, Theodosius the Prince, lies, let them be anathema, separated from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and may their portion be with Judas the betrayer."
which is presumably used to assert the ownership of the book by Theodosius of Prinkipos
There's also another inscription on page 3r which translates as
"And this [is] from Paisios, Bishop of Vothrotou and Glykeos, among others."
Where we get the date of many of these manuscripts from is some combination of how and where they were found, in this tome's case the custodial history helps, but also the writing style, use of particular idiomatic language, or word/grammar utilization. Mentions of specific events or pieces of information that may have a known point in history also help, because obviously a material cannot predate an event that hasn't yet occurred. Often works cite others that have more well-established provenance or are themselves cited elsewhere.
Carbon dating helps, but because of material reuse it's sometimes unreliable (and obviously can be faked with enough money to purchase/reuse ancient materials, as you pointed out in your earlier comment). In the case of this manuscript, I would find this possibility to be rather unlikely due simply to the volume (ahem) of materials used. Given also that it is mostly a commentary on what appears to be based on the LXX the motivation for faking it is much less.
Here are a couple of sources that might help:
https://textandcanon.org/four-ways-scholars-date-early-hebre...
https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/words-b...
One example of the use of idiomatic language as a dating tool that comes to mind: It is one of reasons why the precise dating of the book of Daniel is a somewhat problematic topic. Its use of specific vocabulary wasn't known in any extant works at the time of the earlier date, suggesting it was either authored later or saw edits/redactions by the time of the Babylonian exile. Exhilic and post-exhilic edits aren't entirely unknown in much of the OT, so that's always a possibility. My personal opinion reading the body of literature surrounding Daniel is that it is likely an edited work around a much more ancient core (6th century BC), but I'm always open to other arguments.
I suspect the age of this manuscript is accurate and isn't a later contrivance.
Welcome to the world of textual criticism!
I am aware of the fuzzy nature of the provenance for all these books - its always fuzzy. Now you can take the document at face value, and say it mentions this or that, the idiomatic language, the patina, etc - I am familiar with this sort of reasoning for guessing the age - and I agree it is totally fair.
My problem is that there is often this grand claim eg that the book is ancient ie '2nd half of the 12th century' (say 1175) but then the only actual traceable thread is from 1897 - ie for only 12% of the time do we know where it was. This is the same for every 'ancient' book I look at, its the same story. Yes the 'translators' justify the text, and then their embellishments as attempts to be faithful to the original.. but there is no original!
Perhaps you appreciate my outlandish theoretical possibility which I will now outline for you..
Could it be that much of history is 'edited'. I mean, that bits are changed according to whatever is expedient and 'the message' is redirected for the present? As crazy as this may sound, just a few hundreds years ago, very few had access to books. The super rich of the time, really could control history, most common folk could not read. They couldn't even understand the Latin mass. So, the possibility is that perhaps control of history is a governance tool, and this tool itself has an ancient pedigree.
I want to suggest that the idea is entirely preposterous and ridiculous, which it probably is, but where I would agree with your caution lies mostly in the time frame from which this manuscript originates. It's possible (although unlikely) it's been faked in some capacity since human history (and literacy) somewhat undulate over time and the period this originates was a bit more hostile to free interchange of information (even the article mentions that many of the source texts could have been destroyed as heretical). In such a case, the Hebrew texts have a substantially more solid provenance simply by virtue of their volume and because we have significantly older witnesses at our disposal from the discoveries in Qumran. For something that dates from the 12th or 13th centuries this becomes a little more difficult as, perhaps ironically, fewer witnesses to the material actually exist.
But, again, my argument against it being a significantly later fabrication is in the volume of physical materials used in construction: The binding, the number of leaves, etc., conspire toward the earlier dating since it would be virtually impossible to source that many original pieces of parchment or vellum that hadn't seen prior use (I'm saying this without any knowledge of this manuscript, but I'd imagine if the individual leaves showed signs of prior use they'd have mentioned it). These were expensive to produce when new.
The other piece of evidence in this case is that this appears to be a compilation of other works, specifically commentaries, on the text of the LXX. The article mentions that the Koine Greek used in the LXX was somewhat difficult for later audiences to read due to its grammatical peculiarities, derived from its nature as a word-for-word translation of (now lost) earlier Hebrew texts. Hence why in my lay-estimation the earlier dating is most probably correct. The probable destruction of source texts support this claim, but also raises the question as to how (or why) this text managed to survive.
You do raise a great point: Virtually every manuscript we have available is a copy of an earlier manuscript. No originals, to our knowledge, have survived into the present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#Listings
List of New Testament papyri
List of New Testament uncials
List of New Testament minuscules
List of New Testament lectionaries
List of New Testament Latin manuscripts
Of the papyri, we read:
> Before 1900, only 9 papyri manuscripts were known, and only one had been cited in a critical apparatus (đ11 by Constantin von Tischendorf). These 9 papyri were just single fragments, except for đ15, which consisted of a single whole leaf.[3]
So we only have 9 fragments from before 1900 - and we are talking about fragments - not even whole pages! Is that not amazing?
> Among the most important are the Chester Beatty Papyri
When I look at that page I read:
> The papyri were most likely first obtained by dealers in illegal antiquities. Because of this, the exact circumstances of the find are not clear. One account states that the manuscripts were in jars in a Coptic graveyard near the ruins of the ancient city of Aphroditopolis. Other theories have proposed that the collection was found near the Fayum instead of Aphroditopolis, or that the location was a Christian church or monastery instead of a graveyard.[4] Most of the papyri were bought from a dealer by Alfred Chester Beatty, after whom the manuscripts are named, although some leaves and fragments were acquired by the University of Michigan and a few other collectors and institutions.[3]: 118
That's hardly a solid provenance. And then:
> The papyri were first announced on November 19, 1931,
1931 is when we actually hear about these papyri.
If work down the lists of sources, perhaps the uncials ("written on parchment or vellum") will be better...
> New Testament uncials are distinct from other ancient texts based on the following differences:
> New Testament papyri â written on papyrus and generally more ancient
"More ancient"?? Good god! We have just read that there were only 9 fragments before 1900!
> In 1751, New Testament theologian Johann Jakob Wettstein knew of only 23 uncial codices of the New Testament.[1] By 1859, Constantin von Tischendorf had increased that number to 64 uncials, and in 1909 Caspar René Gregory enumerated 161 uncial codices. By 1963, Kurt Aland, in his Kurzgefasste Liste, had enumerated 250, then in 1989, finally, 299 uncials.
The uncials page references the Codex Sinaiticus. Ok, what of its provenance?
> The Codex may have been seen in 1761 by the Italian traveller Vitaliano Donati, when he visited the Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai in Egypt. His diary was published in 1879
"may have been seen". Then we read:
> German Biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf wrote about his visit to the monastery in Reise in den Orient in 1846 (translated as Travels in the East in 1847), without mentioning the manuscript. Later, in 1860, in his writings about the Sinaiticus discovery, Tischendorf wrote a narrative about the monastery and the manuscript that spanned from 1844 to 1859. He wrote that in 1844, during his first visit to the Saint Catherine's Monastery, he saw some leaves of parchment in a waste-basket. They were "rubbish which was to be destroyed by burning it in the ovens of the monastery",[15]: 313 although this is firmly denied by the Monastery. After examination he realized that they were part of the Septuagint, written in an early Greek uncial script. He retrieved from the basket 129 leaves in Greek which he identified as coming from a manuscript of the Septuagint. He asked if he might keep them, but at this point the attitude of the monks changed. They realized how valuable these old leaves were, and Tischendorf was permitted to take only one-third of the whole, i.e. 43 leaves.
So, in 1846 he does NOT mention this document. Then in 1860 he "wrote a narrative about the monastery and the manuscript" and his 1844 discovery! So in 1860 we get some story about finding the document in a waste basket in 1844.
BTW, papyrus oxyrunchus - another foundational biblical document - is also found in a rubbish dump - in 1897 - by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Hunt
> Since 1898, academics have collated and transcribed over 5,000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes.
"cornflakes".
On Grenfell's wiki page, we can read:
> His mother, Alice Grenfell, was living with him after his father died in 1897. She took a great interest in Egyptian Scarab shaped artifacts. She taught herself to read hieroglyphics. She published her own papers and a catalogue of the scarab collection belonging to Queen's College.[1]
> In 1908, he became professor of papyrology at Oxford and was part of the editing team of The Oxyrynchus Papyri and other similar works. However he was ill for four years and during that time the professorship lapsed. Grenfell was cared for by his mother and he had recovered by 1913.[1] In 1920 he travelled to Egypt for the last time in his life and bought P.Ryl. III 457 (đ52), the earliest surviving witness of the Greek New Testament.
His mother was self-taught, he then "finds" the papyri. Is it possible he himself placed them there? Or even created them with his mother while at Oxford? On Hunt's page we read:
> In 1913 he became Professor of Papyrology at Oxford succeeding to his lifelong friend and colleague Grenfell, whose professorship lapsed due to the latterâs breakdowns and depression.
So, Grenfell was depressed.... perhaps he had a guilty conscience?
Anyway - ignoring my impossible to verify suppositions, my main point is that you can go on and on, and round and round attempting to find a real source. Its like a game of Chinese whispers, but you can never break out of the chain. Eg uncials are useful, but papyri are more ancient. Except that the papyri were found in the last 150 years. And are foundational. Except that uncials are older.
I'll leave it there - but I have done this before. Yes, I can imagine that some document materials were re-used. But it surely can't be that there are no ancient sources of the bible at all!! That the oldest we can go to is to late 19th century and cornflake sized fragments. But that is the provenance!
If you read this differently, feel free to correct me!
I do think you're at risk of reading into some of this "evidence" for foul play. Ken Thompson's lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" comes to mind for reasons that escape me.
Presently, I don't have the mental energy (or time) to parse through everything you have copied here (sorry, I just don't), but I can assure you that it likely has been considered by the translation boards of modern translations (I'm sure you could contact them for further inquiries, however).
Specifically the NET translators did, IMO, a fantastic job with the NT and are quite transparent about it:
https://bible.org/article/abbreviations-and-introduction-pri...
I absolutely understand - no need at all to look through all the links etc. I was really just trying to show enough to illustrate my difficulties when personally trying to verify this info. I hate that the only option is to trust - I want to check for myself!
> I do think you're at risk of reading into some of this "evidence" for foul play. Ken Thompson's lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" comes to mind for reasons that escape me.
Absolutely fair enough too. I now have very low levels of trust. But then that is because I bear in mind that people really do play tricks. I mean there are so many examples... do you remember weapons of mass distraction, Hans Blix, etc? Or Snowden? Did you know Zelensky is referenced in the Panama papers? Etc.
My low trust levels are based on my research. Eg the sort of historical research I presented above. There is always scope to doubt a story.. and perhaps, if you do not 'default to trust' there are hints at how the tricks may be being played. Perhaps such is the nature of power - ie that is it is a series of deeply considered, well-executed trickery to manage the masses. Perhaps the idea of faking commonly perceived truths is something that has a long pedigree - perhaps 'power' has used tricks to manage people from the very beginning. Perhaps trickery is actually to world's oldest profession :)
All the best, thanks for your thoughts.
I can understand that. I went through a similar period in my late teens/early 20s that caused me to reject my faith (among other things, but this was a contributing part of it). Ironically, I came back to Christianity and accepted Christ when I was ~22 because of a book written by a Jewish biblical scholar. For me, encountering Young Earth Creationism was the proverbial back-breaking straw more so than source trust, but both were certainly present in my mind and caused sufficient doubt to turn aside from the faith.
As I've gotten older, I've found that certain arguments feel less interesting. Some things, like this, have to be taken on faith. I mean, I don't even debate YECs anymore! The problem I have as of this writing is that I cannot decide if it's more a matter of my mental energies feel better invested elsewhere or if it's a lack of interest beyond a certain threshold. Manuscript sourcing is interesting to me, but I don't find it to be a make-or-break situation.
> do you remember weapons of mass distraction, Hans Blix, etc? Or Snowden? Did you know Zelensky is referenced in the Panama papers? Etc.
All of the above, in fact. I've gotten into trouble, ironically, from some people at church for having zero trust for Zelensky.
"But we need to support him because RUSSIA!"
Right. And where is the money going? I have very limited trust also, most especially for ANYONE in positions of power where it can be abused. I feel like just saying this makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, but the reality is that humans are intrinsically untrustworthy.
Admittedly, I feel much more charitable toward biblical manuscripts, but perhaps that's because I'm approaching the question from a different angle. That is, I'm inclined to read providential preservation into the text, which is how I parse things like a) the discovery of the DSS (and LXX fragments) in Qumran and b) the rather fortuitous discovery of large bodies of previously unknown Koine Greek in the 1900s giving us insight into the NT.
That isn't to say I don't have problems with parts of our translations. I do. But most of the problems I have fall into the category of stylistic choices by the translators. Maybe even a few unknowns that have crept into the text ("Lilith" in Isa 34:14 being a recent one I encountered while reading through the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible). The problem here is that I've become so fascinated by the ANE context that I honestly haven't spent quite as much time in the NT as of late as perhaps I should...
Anyway, thank you for the cordial conversation, friend. Much appreciated!
Now how might he have come to own this book? It turns out C.G.Aspiotis was the son of a N.Aspiotis [2] who was born in 1816 and died 1891 (thus years before the son sold the book to the British Library).
How could the father Aspiotis get into possessing such a treasure? (Assuming he indeed bequeathed it to his son?). It turns out N.Aspiotis was an important iconographer [3] (painter of religious icons in the Byzantine culture).
Again a search reveals that circa 1860 [4] he traveled to Montenegro on commission to paint a church. Which one? Here the trail becomes hazy if one only uses a web browser. There are quite a few Orthodox monasteries in Montenegro. Even a casual scan reveals that several of these go back to the 14th century. [5], [6]. One could visit them and ask about records of the N.Aspiotis commission etc.
So there you have it, a plausible trajectory: from Theodosius of Prinkipos living in the 13th century in the Constantinopolis area the book - of obvious religious significance to the Byzantines - was smuggled to the Montenegro area ahead of the advancing Ottoman invasion (which ended in 1453). The book remained in a monastery library for centuries. It was given to N.Aspiotis, possibly as payment for his painting work. Assuming the record of such a transaction can be found the likelihood that the book was faked feels negligible.
[1] https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91%CF%83%CF%80%CE%B9%CF%8E...
[2] https://www.corfu-museum.gr/index.php/el/ct-menu-item-27/57-...
[3] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_art
[4] https://www.corfuland.gr/el/istorika-kerkyra/corfu-history/n...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Serbian_Orthodox_mona...
More than half a million clay tablets have been found in the Middle East alone so far [1].
And there is serious interest in using LLM's to assist in translation work [2].
[1] Page 9: https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/d...
Tablet owners would presumably want to find valuable tablets, researchers can duplicate the data from the app; voilĂ ?
Except in the sense that everything is a benefit (including shooting heroin, where the benefit is the high, and so on) where the term becomes meaningless. But even so, it still wouldn't be "objectively perceived". More like "subjectively pursued and felt".
Sure, you're welcome to just stop examining thoughts at the surface level and not dig deeper. Other people here seem content with that. I'm not.
This is as interesting to me as any form of literature.
[1] Arabic: https://photos.app.goo.gl/jQw3QCdC5PrWQGkr9 [2] Chinese: https://photos.app.goo.gl/dXhsH7Xq6zpFS6Eq8 [3] Greek: https://photos.app.goo.gl/DBGWCDd8EhzuB2y67