Codex Bezae

Codex Bezae is laid out for a reader working in two languages at once. The Greek stands on the left-hand page and the Latin on the right, one column to a page, and the lines are broken where the sense breaks rather than run out to the margin, so the two versions can be followed against each other line for line. It was made around the year 400, on vellum, by a scribe who understood both texts well enough to keep them in step, and the discipline that took is easy to underestimate: a bilingual page has to be planned before it is written, because a line that runs long on one side has nowhere to go on the other.

Four hundred and six leaves survive of perhaps five hundred and thirty. It contains the four Gospels in the order Matthew, John, Luke, Mark, an order found in some other early western books and not in the later standard, then a fragment of 3 John, then Acts. The losses are substantial and fall throughout, and one leaf that had been given up as gone was recovered in the twenty-first century by imaging the ink that had offset onto the page it once faced.

Where the codex was made is genuinely unsettled. Southern France, north Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Beirut have all been argued, from its script, from the quality of its Latin, from its spellings and from the particular kinds of mistake its scribe makes. No proposal has become consensus. That uncertainty matters more here than it would for another book, because what makes Bezae important is how unlike every other early manuscript it is, and knowing where an unlike thing came from would go a long way towards explaining why.

The reason Codex Bezae is argued about is its text of Acts, which runs roughly a tenth longer than the version in every other early manuscript. The additions are not padding. They supply names for people the standard text leaves anonymous, motives for actions it leaves unexplained, and circumstantial detail of a kind that reads like someone who knew more, or like someone who wanted the story to be fuller. Where the standard text says the disciples argued, Bezae can say who argued and why.

Two readings of that have been on the table since the seventeenth century. One holds that these are old, that an early and independent line of transmission preserved material the mainstream lost, and that the shorter text is the abbreviation rather than the longer text the expansion. The other holds that a second-century editor with a taste for clarity worked the book over, and that Bezae preserves his edition faithfully. The manuscript cannot settle the question, because it is the only substantial Greek witness to what it contains, which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly what makes it hard to test.

Theodore Beza, who gave the codex to Cambridge in 1581, was himself wary of its readings and said so in the letter that accompanied it. It is an unusual thing for a donor to write, and four centuries of scholarship have not resolved the doubt he registered.