Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 69:2 (NA 2018)
Article: The Gospel Of Matthew In A Sixth-Century Manuscript Family Scribal Habits In The Purple Codices 022, 023 And 042
Author: Elijah Hixson

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The Gospel Of Matthew In A Sixth-Century Manuscript Family Scribal Habits In The Purple Codices 022, 023 And 0421

Elijah Hixson

([email protected])

The past fifty years have seen a number of studies devoted to scribal habits. This line of research begins with E. C. Colwell, who proposed a method to determine scribal habits in the 1960s in order to attempt to quantify the types of claims Westcott and Hort made about what scribes would have been more likely or less likely to do. James R. Royse refined the method in his 1981 dissertation on P⁴⁵, P⁴⁶, P⁴⁷, P⁶⁶, P⁷², and P⁷⁵, finally published in 2008. A number of other studies in scribal habits have appeared along the way, mainly focused on manuscripts dated to the third, fourth, and fifth centuries.

At this point, the sixth-century Greek purple codices of the gospels become directly relevant for New Testament textual criticism. The purpose of my dissertation was to determine whether or not the singular readings method is able to determine reliably the scribal habits in Greek New Testament manuscripts by using the close relationship of three sixth-century codices of Matthew’s Gospel. The three manuscripts are all luxury copies of the gospels – purple codices, so named because they are written in silver and gold ink on parchment that has been dyed purple. The manuscripts, Codex Purpureus Petropolitanus (N 022), Codex Sinopensis (O 023), and Codex Rossanensis (Σ 042), were all copied in the sixth century from a common exemplar. Although their common exemplar has not survived, its text can be reconstructed from its three direct copies. From the reconstructed exemplar one can know exactly what changes each of the

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three scribes introduced into his or her copy. If one knows what changes a scribe made, we can compare those changes to the unique readings as a way to test the singular reading method.

The singular reading method operates with two assumptions. 1) The unique readings in a manuscript – the places where that manuscript is the only known manuscript to have a particular reading – are for the most part changes introduced by the scribe who produced that manuscript. 2) Collectively, these ‘singular readings’ (readings found in a single manuscript) provide a picture of what kinds of changes the scribe made to the text. The problem with the method is that it relies on these two unproven assumptions. Without knowing the text that a scribe was looking at when he or she produced a copy, there is no way to know what changes he or she introduced in...