Codex Sinaiticus Online

[All-American]

Now THIS is some interesting stuff.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Here's the opening text of St. John:

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=36

[JohnnyLingo]

Very cool. John used some awkward language in that first chapter, eh?

[All-American]

Very cool. John used some awkward language in that first chapter, eh?

Awkward or transcendental, depending on how you interpret it.

Some of the things there are really interesting. You can see typos, shorthand, scribbles in the margin, and all sorts of other things you'd expect when you don't have a printing press. The script itself is also very interesting; no spaces, all capital letters, with a mark to separate sentences.

Back in my class on the Pauline Epistles, the professor had us do a little exercise so we could appreciate the transcription process. He gave us about a paragraph of a random text with similar formatting (caps, no spaces) and had us copy it. Not one of us made a perfect copy.

That we have the bible in as pure a transmission as we do is fairly miraculous.

[SeattleUte]

Now THIS is some interesting stuff.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Here's the opening text of St. John:

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/ma...t.aspx?book=36

yes, this is one of the best things anyone has posted here. But I predict this thread will shortly wither and die. People are much more interested in origins of LDS polygamy.

[All-American]

yes, this is one of the best things anyone has posted here. But I predict this thread will shortly wither and die. People are much more interested in origins of LDS polygamy.

To be fair, it's hard to be very excited about this stuff if you haven't at least learned the Greek script, much less the language. It's not that it isn't significant. It's just in a different language.

If I had my way, I'd get everybody here to at least learn the alphabet. It takes maybe a few hours, and from there, you can at least read an interlinear edition.

I'd also like a pony.

[SoCalCoug]

I think someone over on CB said that because it's heavily edited, and because there's some speculation that the transcriber didn't even know how to read, even though it's the oldest transcript, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best.

Is there any credibility to those criticisms?

[Fiyero]

there's some speculation that the transcriber didn't even know how to read

Yeah that makes perfect sense. That's who I would put in charge of it.

[All-American]

I think someone over on CB said that because it's heavily edited, and because there's some speculation that the transcriber didn't even know how to read, even though it's the oldest transcript, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best.

Is there any credibility to those criticisms?

All of them. Some scribes not only didn't know how to read, but probably didn't know greek either. They knew how to copy greek letters, though, and that was often as good as you could get. I've seen some manuscripts where an entire line was simply copied over again, right in the an entire line was simply copied over again, right in the middle of a sentence.

Even the oldest manuscripts are several hundred years older than the autographs (the "originals"). Scholars are able to sort different texts into groups and even trace their family tree, showing what text they copied, which texts used that text as a source, show influence from other texts on that particular text, etc. The Sinaiticus is important not only because of its age, but because it is the head of an entire family branch of New Testament scripts.

There was, of course, editing in the sense of which books were accepted as authentic and which were not, but also editing in the sense of trying to decide which of the variant readings were the "correct" one.

This example, noted in "Misquoting Jesus" and other books, is from the Codex Vaticanus:



A scribe, seeing what appeared to him as an error in the original text, made a "correction" in his text. A supervisor apparently read his change and wrote in the margin, "Fool and knave, leave the old reading, don’t change it!"

I am charitable enough to concede that most "editing" of the New Testament texts was done in an effort to present the text as it was in the original (with the Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7-8 as probably the most blatant exception), but yes, by the time we get any texts that have survived to the present, they have all been heavily edited.

In that respect, "age" is not necessarily the best measure of the value of a manuscript. You have to go in and see what has changed, when it changed, how it changed, and try to evaluate the differences on their own merit. A newer manuscript may be "better" (id est, more likely to read as the original read) if it is a part of a certain branch of manuscripts, among other reasons.

[Sleeping in EQ]

I think someone over on CB said that because it's heavily edited, and because there's some speculation that the transcriber didn't even know how to read, even though it's the oldest transcript, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best.

Is there any credibility to those criticisms?

Yes, but that's only half the story.