In the Library Since 1475, and Unknown Before It

The first securely dated fact about the Codex Vaticanus is that it is listed in the earliest surviving catalogue of the Vatican Library, compiled in 1475. Everything before that is missing. Where it was made, who paid for it, how it came to Rome and by what route are all open, and the manuscript volunteers nothing: it has no colophon, no ownership note from antiquity, no dated marginal hand that fixes it anywhere. For a book this important that blank is conspicuous, and it is honest to call it a blank rather than to fill it with the likeliest guess.

Its modern history is better recorded and less creditable. Napoleon had the codex taken to Paris in 1809 and it came back in 1815. Through most of the nineteenth century the library allowed scholars only short, supervised sittings with it, which produced a long and bitter argument about whether the text was being withheld; Tischendorf, permitted to look but not to transcribe at length, copied more than he had been allowed and was expelled in 1866. A photographic facsimile was finally issued in 1889 and 1890, and the whole manuscript is now digitised and open.

The result is a book that shaped every modern critical edition of the Greek New Testament while its own first thousand years remain entirely unknown.