Codex Washingtonianus Pdf
Lorin Mandaloniz
The codex is currently located in the Smithsonian Institution at the Freer Gallery of Art (06. 274) in Washington, D.C., United States. Complete image replicas of the codex are available from the Rights and Reproductions office at the Freer Gallery of Art.
The Codex Washingtonianus or Codex Washingtonensis, also called the Washington Manuscript of the Gospels and The Freer Gospels, dating from the fourth or fifth century CE, is the third earliest surviving manuscript the four biblical gospels in Greek, and one of the earliest codices preserved in North America. It consists of 187 leaves written in Koine Greek in a single column, 30 lines per column, and is also the only ancient codex of the Greek gospels for which at least a partial provenance is known. The codex also has two very distinctive painted wooden covers, encaustic on panels, probably dating from the seventh century, with portraits of the Four Evangelists. The covers are presently separated from the codex.
The codex was purchased by industrialist and art collector Charles Lang Freer "from an Arab dealer named Ali in Giza (Gizah), near Cairo, on December 19th 1906.... The only hint as to origin or former owner... is the prayer for a certain Timothy in the subscription to Mark, p. 372 in the Facsimile. I have already given my reasons for connecting this with the Church of Timothy in the Monastery of the Vinedresser, which was located near the third pyramid (Abu Salih's Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, trans. by Evertts and Butler, p. 190)...." (Sanders, The New Testament Manuscripts in the Freer Collection [1918] 1-2).
The manuscript is preserved in the Freer Gallery, Sackler Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. In 1912 Henry A Sanders edited Facsimile of the Washington Manuscript of the Four Gospels in the Freer Collection. This color facsimile was published in an edition limited to 435 copies by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The text is written in one column per page, 30 lines per page. There are numerous corrections made by the original scribe and a few corrections dating to the late 5th or 6th century. John 1:1-5:11 is a replacement of a presumably damaged folio, and dates to around the seventh century. It is missing Mark 15:13-38 and John 14:26-16:7. The ink is dark brown. The words are written continuously without separation. Accents are absent. The rough breathing is used very rarely.
The Codex is cited as a "consistently cited witness of the first order" in the critical apparatus of the Novum Testamentum Graece. The codex was apparently copied from several different manuscripts and is the work of two scribes. The text-type is eclectic:
The codex was purchased by Charles Lang Freer on a trip to Egypt in November 1906. Metzger states: "It is only Greek Gospel manuscript of early date of which we know provenance. Though the exact spot in Egypt where it was found is not known, there are indications that it came from a monastery in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids." The writing is closely related to the Codex Panopolitanus (Papyrus Cairensis 10759), Henoch manuscript, found in Akhmim in 1886.
There is a subscription at the end of the Gospel of Mark, written in semi-cursive from the 5th century: "Holy Christ, be thou with thy servant Timothy and all of his." The similar note appears in Minuscule 579. Hermann von Soden cited a number of similar subscriptions in other manuscripts.
It is located in the Smithsonian Institution at the Freer Gallery of Art (06. 274) in Washington, D.C., United States of America, and some of it can be viewed on-line. Complete images of the codex are available from the Rights and Reproductions office at the Freer Gallery of Art.
A manuscript is a hand-written document. The word has its origin in Latin: manu (hand) and scriptum (written). There are approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in other languages. The New Testament autographa, the manuscripts written by the original authors, are unavailable, but manuscripts have been discovered that are dated as early as the 2nd century.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran Caves. The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected into a scroll. Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.
Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).
The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses. A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a textual apparatus to the Hebrew text. The version was finalized by Hebrew scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th century.
Manuscripts can be dated by the style of script used. The earliest New Testament manuscripts were in scripto continuo, a style of writing without spaces in between words. (continuous script). Uncial, a script with majuscule (capital) letters which was more curved than earlier Greek writing styles, was used during the 4th-8th centuries. Cursive is a script where the author was able to write with fewer lifts of the pen. Miniscule, script with smaller letters which take less space and time, began to be used in the 9th-10th centuries. There are over 2500 miniscule New Testament manuscripts.
Along with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important manuscripts of both the Greek Old and New Testaments. It was written by three different scribes and was corrected later thousands of times, making it one of the most corrected manuscripts in history. It is the earliest complete Greek New Testament as well as the only four-column New Testament manuscript that has survived.
There are four great uncial codices: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. Codex Alexandrinus was the first of the great uncial codices to be utilized for textual criticism and is considered one of the most reliable witnesses to Revelation. This edition was printed in 1860. The editor added spaces between words and verse numbers. Codex Alexandrinus was brought to England by Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucar in 1621, and is now in the British Library.
Printer Robert Estienne, known by his Latin name Stephanus, printed four editions of the Greek New Testament. This third edition became normative for most biblical translations into the twentieth century.
Daniel Mace was a Presbyterian minister who created the first English and Greek diglot Bible. His Greek New Testament is one of the first to depart in a significant way from the Textus Receptus and create a text-critical edition. His text-critical method of handling the biblical manuscripts anticipated modern scholarship by one hundred years. His English translation also departs from the traditional English translations and uses colloquial expressions like in Luke 7:40, which can be seen on display.
This is a Sahidic Coptic translation of the Septuagint on parchment. The Bible was being translated into Coptic as early as the second century. Coptic was the last stage of the Egyptian language dialect before the Islamic conquest. Though the word Coptic originally referred to Egyptians in general, after the Islamic conquest, the term came to refer specifically to Egyptian Christians, a minority in Egypt who often suffer persecution today.
Sahidic Coptic was the language of the southern part of Egypt. A translation of both the Greek Old Testament and the New Testament was created for the Jewish and Christian population that lived there. Today, about 10% of Egyptians identify themselves as Coptic Christians, and many still use the Coptic language for their liturgy.
The study of the Septuagint is important in that it is the primary Old Testament text from which many of the New Testament authors quote, and it is helpful in textual criticism in comparing with Hebrew manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Codex Leningradensis.
In the early stages of my theological training I felt that Textual Criticism was a very arid and uninviting pastime. The present contribution reflects, however, a more positive appreciation for the discipline.[1]
In my opinion, Hurtado, through his scholarship and activity has contributed not only to the general interest in the field, but to all five of these specific areas; he surely practiced what he preached. At the same time, however, there was a certain focus in his scholarship on the early text of the New Testament, corresponding to his interest in the earliest Christian artifacts, to the devotion of Jesus in earliest Christianity, and to the (presumably) earliest canonical Gospel.
In chapter two, Hurtado demonstrates with data from the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB; ) how the early Christian scribes preferred the codex over the bookroll, in contrast to the contemporary book culture. The preference was intentional to distinguish the writings they treated as scripture. Conversely, Hurtado argues that a fragment like P. Oxy. 655, with the Gospel of Thomas written on a roll, was not prepared for use as scripture.
Chapter four is concerned with the staurogram (formed by combining the Greek letters tau and rho) and its significance for Christian origins. Hurtado argues that the staurogram is the earliest visual representation of Jesus on the cross predating the Constantinian period. The final chapter treats briefly various other phenomena in the early Christian manuscripts (sizes of codices and margins, columns, various reader aids, corrections, etc.), providing more information about the scribes and communities who produced and used them. For example, reader aids like textual division provide insights into early Christian interpretation.
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