Codex Vaticanus

Vaticanus is not a beautiful manuscript in the way the illuminated gospel books are beautiful. It is three columns of small, even Greek majuscule on parchment so fine it is often remarked on, with no illustration, no gold, and almost no decoration of any kind. The impression it gives is of a scriptorium that had money and used it on materials and accuracy rather than on display. For textual critics that plainness is the point: the book was made to be a reliable copy.

Centuries after it was written the ink had faded, and a later scribe went through the entire manuscript tracing over every letter. Where he judged a word to be wrong he left it untouched, and those skipped words are now among the most valuable things in the book, because they show the original hand exactly as it was, unretouched, beside the retouched text around them. A correction made by omission has preserved the evidence of what was corrected.

The codex is substantially complete but with real gaps. The beginning of Genesis is missing, part of the Psalms, and everything after Hebrews 9:14, which removes the Pastoral Epistles, Philemon and Revelation. Because the ending is lost, the manuscript cannot be asked whether it once contained Revelation, and that silence has been argued over for as long as the codex has been studied.

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.