Apologetics: How We Got the Bible, Part 2 (the Codices)

When the translators of the King James Version did their work, the oldest manuscripts available to them were from the Eleventh Century. In fact, they worked from an edited version of the Greek text assembled by the Catholic scholar Eramus — a contemporary of Luther and Calvin.

Erasmus worked from only seven Greek texts, and most of them were very incomplete.

In fact, he had access to only seven Greek manuscripts, and none of these contained the entire NT. The seven included three copies of the Gospels and Acts, four of the Pauline Epistles, and one incomplete copy (missing the last page) of the book of Revelation. The earliest of any of these is from the 11th century—1000 years later than the original writings.

Today we have over 5,800 manuscripts. Some are only fragments and some are complete New Testaments. Some date back to the Second Century or perhaps even the First Century. Obviously, the knowledge we have of the original autographs has dramatically changed in the last 400 years.

And yet the text on which modern translations are built and the text used by the KJV translators aren’t that greatly different — as you can tell by reading the footnotes of a modern translation where differences are often noted.

Most differences aren’t big enough to even show up in the translation, such as misspellings and skipped lines. There are a few disagreements between “Jesus Christ” and “Christ Jesus” here and there.

There are some significant differences, but none is significant enough to affect any of the great creeds of the early church or the doctrines of nearly any denomination (other than snake handlers, I suppose). We’ll cover some of these in more detail later.

The 400 years include some historic efforts to discover older and better manuscripts. For example,

[Codex Alexandrinus] derives its name from Alexandria where it resided for a number of years before it was brought by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris from Alexandria to Constantinople. Then it was given to Charles I of England in the 17th century. … Today, it rests along with Codex Sinaiticus in one of the showcases in the Ritblat Gallery of the British Library. … As the text came from several different traditions, different parts of the codex are not of equal textual value.

I was blessed to see this vellum manuscript at the British Library. It was an amazing, emotional experience to see one of the oldest Bibles in the world.

Because the text was held by the Eastern Orthodox church, it was not available to the KJV translators, even though it’s a Fifth Century codex that contains nearly the entire Septuagint (Greek Old Testament translated centuries before Jesus) and New Testament. It is also known a Codex A, because for many years, it was considered the oldest nearly complete codex.

Likely more important is the Codex Vaticanus, now dated to the Fourth Century, perhaps to the reign of Constantine.

It was known to Vatican officials for centuries, but not considered important because they relied on the Vulgate (a Latin translation by Jerome, in the Fifth Century) and because the codex (known as Codex B) often differed from the Vulgate. But this began to change with work of Erasmus to compile a Greek New Testament —

The manuscript became known to Western scholars as a result of correspondence between Erasmus and the prefects of the Vatican Library. Portions of the codex were collated by several scholars, but numerous errors were made during this process. The Codex’s relationship to the Latin Vulgate was unclear and scholars were initially unaware of the Codex’s value. This changed in the 19th century when transcriptions of the full codex were completed. It was at that point that scholars realised the text differed significantly from the Vulgate and the Textus Receptus.

Current scholarship considers the Codex Vaticanus to be one of the best Greek texts of the New Testament, with the Codex Sinaiticus as its only competitor. Until the discovery by Tischendorf of the Sinaiticus text, the Codex was unrivaled. It was extensively used by Westcott and Hort in their edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881. The most widely sold editions of the Greek New Testament are largely based on the text of the Codex Vaticanus.

Codex B contains nearly the entire Septuagint and all the New Testament other than  1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation.

Perhaps of even greater value is the Codex Sinaiticus, which has by far the coolest history. It was discovered by Conrad Tischendorf, a German biblical scholar who visited a Russian Orthodox monastery on Mt. Sinai in 1844.

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”, 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 [all capital letters] 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. These leaves contained portions of 1 Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther. After his return they were deposited in the Leipzig University Library, where they still remain. 

Later on, through negotiations with the Russian Czar, most of the manuscript (all the rest that could be found) was delivered to St. Petersburg.

In the early 20th century Vladimir N. Beneshevich (1874–1938) discovered parts of three more leaves of the codex in the bindings of other manuscripts in the library of Mount Sinai. Beneshevich went on three occasions to the monastery (1907, 1908, 1911) but does not tell when or from which book he recovered [these leaves]. These leaves were also acquired for St. Petersburg, where they remain to the present day.

Russian National Library

For many decades, the Codex was preserved in the Russian National Library. In 1933, the Soviet Union sold the codex to the British Museum (after 1973 British Library) for £100,000 raised by public subscription (worth £6 million in 2014). 

In May 1975, during restoration work, the monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery discovered a room beneath the St. George Chapel which contained many parchment fragments. Among these fragments were twelve complete leaves from the Sinaiticus, 11 leaves of the Pentateuch and 1 leaf of the Shepherd of Hermas.

St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai is no  easy trip. No airport is nearby and it’s very cold at night and very hot during the day. And it took nearly a century of searching to find all the pages of the Codex we have today.

Fortunately, scholars can now view electronic copies of all three uncial codices (and many more). But until the advent of the Internet and Bible-study software, viewing a codex required a trip to England, Russia, or the Vatican. I’ve been blessed to see all three codices (other than the portions of Codex Sinaiticus that remain in Russia or Leipzig). I’ll never forget the experience.

Codex Sinaiticus is named Codex Aleph (after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) because of its probable priority over both Codex A and Codex B. In fact, because Sinaiticus is older (and thus closer to the apostles) than the others, and because its readings tend to agree with the readings that the critics had already come to based on comparison of older manuscripts, Codex Aleph’s readings are typically preferred by scholars.

However, there is a contrary school of thought, which prefers the so-called Received Text or Textus Receptus. We’ll address this position in a bit. But we have to cover more material before we get there.