If the papyri are the earliest witnesses to the New Testament, the two great parchment codices of the fourth century are the most complete. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus are the oldest surviving manuscripts that once contained the whole Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, in Greek. They have shaped every critical edition of the Greek New Testament since the nineteenth century, and with it almost every modern translation.

Codex Vaticanus

Codex Vaticanus is called “B” by textual critics. It has been in the Vatican Library in Rome at least since the library’s catalogue of 1475, where it appears, and its shelf mark is Vat. gr. 1209. How it came there is unknown. It is usually dated to the early or middle fourth century, around 300–350 CE, which makes it probably the oldest of the great codices.

It is written on fine parchment, in three columns per page, in a beautiful, simple capital script. About 759 leaves survive. It originally contained the whole Greek Bible, but has lost some parts: most of Genesis at the beginning, some Psalms, and, at the end, the New Testament from Hebrews 9:14 onwards, which means it lacks the end of Hebrews, the letters to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, and Revelation. A later hand, probably in the fifteenth century, supplied some of the missing parts.

Scholars knew of Vaticanus for centuries, but access was restricted. Erasmus received some readings from it through correspondence in the 1520s and 1530s. In the nineteenth century, Constantin von Tischendorf was allowed to study it for only a few hours a day, and was stopped when he was caught copying whole pages. Reliable editions appeared later in the century, and photographic facsimiles in 1889–1890. Today the entire manuscript can be viewed online through the Vatican Library’s digital collection.

Vaticanus is especially valued because its text is careful and, in the judgement of most textual critics, very close to the earliest recoverable text. As explained in The earliest New Testament papyri, its text of Luke and John agrees remarkably closely with P75, copied a century or more earlier. That shows that Vaticanus preserves an older text accurately, not a fourth-century revision.

Codex Sinaiticus

Codex Sinaiticus has a more dramatic history. It is usually designated by the Hebrew letter aleph, or by the number 01. It was written in the middle of the fourth century, probably a little later than Vaticanus, and was preserved for centuries at St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, in Egypt.

Tischendorf’s discovery

The German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–1874) spent his life searching for ancient manuscripts. In 1844 he visited St Catherine’s. According to his own account, he saw leaves of an ancient Greek manuscript in a basket, and was told that two similar basketfuls had already been used to light fires. Whatever the truth of that story, which the monks have always disputed, he was allowed to take away forty-three leaves, containing parts of the Old Testament. He took them to Leipzig, where they remain.

He returned in 1853 without success. In 1859, now with the backing of the Russian Tsar, he came again. On the last evening of his visit, the steward of the monastery showed him a manuscript wrapped in a red cloth: the rest of the codex, including the complete New Testament. Tischendorf spent the night copying, and eventually arranged for the manuscript to be taken to Russia, at first on loan for copying, and later presented to Tsar Alexander II. The monastery received payment and gifts in 1869, but the circumstances of the transfer have remained a matter of dispute between St Catherine’s and the other holders ever since.

In 1933 the Soviet government, needing foreign currency, sold the codex to the British Museum for £100,000, a huge sum raised partly by public appeal. It is now in the British Library in London. Smaller parts are in Leipzig and St Petersburg, and in 1975 a further cache of leaves and fragments was discovered at St Catherine’s itself, in a room sealed after a fire.

The digital reunion

In 2009, the four institutions that hold parts of the codex (the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia and St Catherine’s Monastery) completed the Codex Sinaiticus Project, which brought the whole manuscript together online, with high-resolution images and a full transcription. Anyone can now read it at codexsinaiticus.org.

What it contains

About 400 leaves survive, written in four columns per page (two in the poetic books), in a large, elegant capital script. Sinaiticus is the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. It also includes much of the Greek Old Testament and two other early Christian writings, the Letter of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas. Their presence shows that in some churches in the fourth century the boundaries of the New Testament were still a matter of discussion (see How the New Testament canon took shape).

Scholars have identified three, perhaps four, main scribes. The manuscript was then corrected extensively, by its own scribes and by later readers over several centuries. David Parker estimates that it contains around 27,000 corrections, making it one of the most heavily corrected manuscripts of antiquity. A note added at the end of the books of Ezra and Esther by one of the later correctors says that the text had been compared with a very old copy corrected by the martyr Pamphilus of Caesarea.

Were they made for Constantine?

Around 331 CE, the emperor Constantine asked Eusebius of Caesarea to have fifty copies of the scriptures made for the churches of Constantinople (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36). It is tempting to connect Sinaiticus and Vaticanus with this order. T. C. Skeat argued that they were indeed produced in Caesarea, perhaps in connection with it. Many scholars find the theory attractive but unproven; others suggest Egypt as the place of origin, at least for Vaticanus. What is clear is that they were expensive, carefully planned, professional productions from the period after Christianity became legal.

What they show

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus agree very often, and when they agree they are among the strongest witnesses to the early text. They also differ in thousands of places, which shows that they are independent copies, not copies of one another. In the Gospels alone, Herman Hoskier counted more than three thousand differences between them, most of them small. Their agreement, despite this independence, points back to an earlier common text.

Both manuscripts lack some passages that appear in later manuscripts and in the King James Version. The best known are:

  • Mark 16:9–20. Both end Mark’s Gospel at 16:8. In Vaticanus, the scribe left a blank column after 16:8, the only such gap in the New Testament part of the codex, perhaps aware that some copies had more.
  • John 7:53–8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery, is absent from both.
  • 1 John 5:7–8, the expanded wording about “the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit” known as the Comma Johanneum, is absent from both, and from all Greek manuscripts before the medieval period.

These passages are discussed in How much do the manuscripts differ?. Modern translations based on critical editions generally mark them as not part of the earliest text, and Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are two of the main reasons.

Why they matter

Westcott and Hort, whose Greek New Testament of 1881 marked a turning point in the field, relied heavily on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Later scholars have criticised them for leaning too heavily on Vaticanus in particular, and the discovery of the papyri has broadened the evidence. But the papyri have tended to confirm, rather than overturn, the high value placed on these two codices. The critical editions behind modern translations, including the SBL Greek New Testament that Open Word Bible translates, still treat them as leading witnesses.

Sources

  • Eusebius. Life of Constantine 4.36.
  • Milne, H. J. M., and T. C. Skeat. Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus. London: British Museum, 1938.
  • Parker, D. C. Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible. London: British Library; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010.
  • Hoskier, H. C. Codex B and Its Allies: A Study and an Indictment. 2 vols. London: Quaritch, 1914.
  • Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Skeat, T. C. “The Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and Constantine.” Journal of Theological Studies 50 (1999): 583–625.
  • Tischendorf, Constantin von. When Were Our Gospels Written? London: Religious Tract Society, 1866.
  • Codex Sinaiticus online: codexsinaiticus.org.
  • Codex Vaticanus online: digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1209.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.