Codex Vaticanus

Introduction

Codex Vaticanus is one of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Greek Bible. It was copied in the fourth century, probably a little before or at about the same time as Codex Sinaiticus, and it contains most of the Greek Old Testament and most of the New Testament. It has been kept in the Vatican Library in Rome since at least the fifteenth century, where its shelfmark is Vat. gr. 1209. In lists of New Testament manuscripts it is designated by the letter B or the number 03.¹

For most of the modern period Vaticanus has been regarded as the single most valuable manuscript of the New Testament. The great critical edition of Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, published in 1881, relied on it more than on any other witness, and the editions in use today still give its readings special weight. Its text agrees closely with the early papyrus P75, which shows that its form of the text was already established in Egypt around the year 200.²

Unlike Sinaiticus, Vaticanus was never lost or rediscovered. Its story is one of slow access. For several centuries it was known to be in the Vatican, and scholars heard of its value, but they could not study it freely. Collations were made in secret or under restriction, editions were delayed, and the first reliable printed text appeared only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today the whole manuscript can be viewed online in high-resolution colour images on the Vatican Library's digital platform.³

This essay describes the physical manuscript, its scribes and its later restoration, its contents and its text, and the history of its study from the Renaissance to the present. It is one of four companion pages, with Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. The general history of textual criticism, the work of Westcott and Hort and the history of the biblical canon are treated on their own pages.

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Chapter 1. Date and Origin

Like Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus carries no record of when or where it was made. Its date is inferred from its script, layout and contents. The script is a fine biblical majuscule, very regular and somewhat smaller and more delicate than that of Sinaiticus. There are no ornamental initials at the beginnings of books, and the text is written continuously without division between words. The manuscript lacks the Eusebian canon numbers in the Gospels, which appear in Sinaiticus, and it uses an older and independent system of chapter divisions. These features point to the first half or middle of the fourth century. Most scholars date it to about 300–350, and many regard it as slightly older than Sinaiticus.¹

Egypt or Caesarea?

Two places are usually proposed for its origin. The first is Egypt, probably Alexandria. The text of Vaticanus agrees closely with Egyptian papyri, and certain features of its spelling and its arrangement of books resemble Egyptian practice. In particular, the order of the books of the New Testament in Vaticanus, with the Catholic Epistles after Acts and before Paul, and the place of Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians, corresponds closely to the list in the Easter letter written by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367.²

The second suggestion is Caesarea in Palestine, or more generally a centre connected with the library of Origen and Eusebius. Some scholars have argued that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were produced in the same scriptorium, partly because the hand of one of the scribes of Vaticanus has been identified by some with that of Scribe D of Sinaiticus. This identification, proposed by Milne and Skeat in 1938, has not won general agreement, and the two manuscripts differ in many ways.³

As with Sinaiticus, some have connected Vaticanus with the fifty copies of the Scriptures that the emperor Constantine ordered from Eusebius around 331 for the churches of Constantinople. T. C. Skeat argued in 1999 that Vaticanus might be a copy that was rejected for that commission because of its incompleteness or errors. The suggestion remains speculative.⁴

Later history before Rome

Nothing certain is known of the codex between its production and its arrival in the Vatican Library. The restoration of its text, described in a later chapter, was carried out by a scribe working in the tenth or eleventh century, probably in the Byzantine world. Some scholars think it reached Italy from Constantinople with Greek scholars of the fifteenth century, perhaps in connection with the Council of Florence (1438–39). This is a plausible conjecture, but there is no document to prove it.⁵

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Chapter 2. Physical Description

Codex Vaticanus is written on fine, thin parchment. Its leaves measure about 27 by 27 centimetres, so that its pages are nearly square, like those of Sinaiticus but smaller. The manuscript now has 759 leaves: 617 in the Old Testament and 142 in the New. It was originally a larger book. Estimates suggest that it once had about 820 leaves.¹

Layout

Each page has three columns of 40 to 44 lines. When the book is opened, the reader sees six columns side by side, an arrangement that, like the four columns of Sinaiticus, recalls the columns of a scroll. The poetic books of the Old Testament (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom and Sirach) are written in two columns, with the lines divided according to the sense.²

The quires are mostly of ten leaves (five sheets), rather than the eight-leaf quires usual in Sinaiticus. Quire numbers appear in the margins in some places. The text is laid out with great care, and the scribes left a blank space where a book ended before the end of a column.³

Script and marks

The original script is an elegant, rather small biblical majuscule, without accents or breathings. A few original marks of punctuation can be seen. Nomina sacra are written in the usual abbreviated forms. The original ink was brown, and the letters were fine and light.⁴

The famous blank column

At the end of the Gospel of Mark, which ends at 16:8, the scribe left the rest of the column blank, and also the whole of the following column, before beginning Luke on the next page. This is the only completely blank column in the New Testament of the manuscript. Many scholars think that the scribe knew of a longer ending to Mark and left room for it, though it would not have fitted into the space. The space has been much discussed in debates on the ending of Mark.⁵

Losses and supplements

Vaticanus has lost its beginning and end. The first 31 leaves, which contained Genesis 1:1–46:28, are missing. A group of leaves in the Psalms is lost (Psalms 105:27–137:6 in the Greek numbering). At the end, the text breaks off at Hebrews 9:14, so that the rest of Hebrews, the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), Philemon and Revelation are missing. In the fifteenth century the missing parts of Genesis and the Psalms were supplied on new leaves in minuscule script, and the end of Hebrews and Revelation were added in a separate minuscule manuscript now catalogued as Gregory–Aland 1957.⁶

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Chapter 3. The Scribes and the Medieval Restoration

Two scribes

Most scholars now agree that two scribes wrote Codex Vaticanus. The first, often called Scribe A, wrote the Old Testament from the beginning to 1 Kingdoms 19:11 and from Psalms to Tobit. The second, Scribe B, wrote the rest of the Old Testament and the whole of the New Testament. Their hands are similar, but they differ in small details of letter forms, spelling and the way they ended books. Tischendorf and earlier scholars had proposed other divisions, and some later scholars have suggested a third scribe, but the two-scribe view is widely accepted.¹

Early corrections

The original scribes corrected their own work in places, and a corrector of about the same period, usually designated B², made a number of further corrections. These corrections are much fewer than in Sinaiticus. Vaticanus is one of the most carefully written of the ancient codices, and its scribes made comparatively few errors of omission.²

The reinking

The most striking later change to Vaticanus is the retracing of its text. In the tenth or eleventh century a scribe went over almost every letter of the faded original with fresh, darker ink. He also added accents and breathings and some punctuation. This restorer did not retrace letters or words that he thought were incorrect, such as repeated words or letters written by mistake, so that these can still be seen in their original faint form. He thus combined restoration with a kind of textual correction.³

The reinking has a double effect. It has preserved the text, which might otherwise have faded beyond reading, but it has also obscured the elegance of the original hand. Many readers of the manuscript have noted that the letters look heavier and less refined than those of Sinaiticus because of the medieval retracing. In places where the restorer omitted letters, the original light brown script can still be compared with his work.⁴

Ornament

The restorer, or another scribe of the same period, also added decorated initials at the beginnings of some books and simple headpieces in coloured inks. These additions are characteristic of Byzantine manuscripts of the period and contrast with the plain style of the original.⁵

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Chapter 4. The Fifteenth-Century Supplements

When Codex Vaticanus reached the Vatican Library, it was already damaged. It had lost its opening quires, a group of leaves in the Psalms, and its final quires. In the fifteenth century the library had these losses repaired, in the manner of the time, by adding new text written in a contemporary hand.¹

Genesis and the Psalms

New leaves were written in Greek minuscule script to supply Genesis 1:1–46:28 and the missing portion of the Psalms. The scribe did not imitate the ancient script, so the supplements are immediately visible. T. C. Skeat studied these leaves. He showed that they were written in a fifteenth-century hand and suggested that they were added after the manuscript arrived in Rome, perhaps in the time of Nicholas V or shortly after. The text of the supplements was taken from a later manuscript and has no special authority.²

Hebrews and Revelation in GA 1957

The end of Hebrews (from 9:14) and the book of Revelation were added in a separate supplement, also in minuscule script. This supplement is now bound with the codex but has its own identity in the register of New Testament manuscripts as GA 1957. Its text of Revelation is a late Byzantine text and is unrelated to the ancient manuscript. The Pastoral Epistles and Philemon were not supplied. It is possible that the person who commissioned the supplement used a manuscript in which these letters were placed elsewhere, or simply chose not to add them.³

Why the supplements matter

The supplements are of little value for the text of the Bible, but they are of interest for the history of the codex. They show that by the fifteenth century the book was regarded as worth completing, and that it was used as a whole Bible rather than as a curiosity. They also help to date the arrival of the codex in the Vatican and to reconstruct its condition at that time.⁴

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Chapter 5. The Distigmai and the Marginal Note at Hebrews 1:3

The distigmai

In the margins of the New Testament in Vaticanus there are about 800 small pairs of dots, arranged horizontally, known as distigmai (singular distigme) or "umlauts." They were first studied systematically by Philip B. Payne in the 1990s. Payne argued that these marks indicate places where the writer of the marks knew of a variant reading in another manuscript.¹

The date of these marks is disputed. Some scholars, including Payne, think that many of them are in the original ink and so date from the fourth century, while others are in the darker ink of the medieval restorer. Others argue that most or all of them were added much later, perhaps in the sixteenth century, when scholars in the Vatican Library were comparing the manuscript with printed editions. A study by Peter M. Head and further work by Jan Krans and others have shown that many distigmai correspond to places where the text of Vaticanus differs from the printed text of Erasmus. The question remains open, but it shows how much can be learned from small marks in the margins.²

One of the most discussed distigmai stands beside 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, the passage instructing women to keep silent in the churches. Payne argued that it marks the knowledge of a manuscript tradition in which these verses were placed elsewhere or absent. Other scholars dispute this reading of the evidence.³

The note at Hebrews 1:3

In the margin of Hebrews 1:3 there is a note in a medieval hand. The original text of Vaticanus has the unusual reading φανερῶν ("manifesting all things by the word of his power") instead of the common φέρων ("upholding all things"). A first corrector changed the word to the usual reading. A later reader then changed it back and wrote in the margin: "Most ignorant and wicked man, leave the old reading and do not change it!"⁴

The note is one of the most quoted marginalia in any biblical manuscript. It shows a medieval reader who valued the reading of the old manuscript even when it differed from the text in common use, and it illustrates the long history of debate about the readings of the codex.⁵

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Chapter 6. Contents of the Old Testament

The Old Testament in Codex Vaticanus is the Septuagint, and the manuscript is of the highest importance for its text. In many books Vaticanus is regarded as the best surviving witness to the old Greek translation, and it was the basis of the influential Cambridge editions of the Septuagint by Henry Barclay Swete (1887–94) and by Brooke, McLean and Thackeray (1906–40), and of Alfred Rahlfs's handbook edition of 1935.¹

Order and contents

The books are arranged in this order: the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kingdoms (1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings), 1–2 Chronicles, 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras (Ezra–Nehemiah), Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the twelve Minor Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, the Letter of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.²

This arrangement places the poetic and wisdom books before the Prophets, and it places the Minor Prophets before Isaiah. It differs from both Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. The variety of arrangements shows that in the fourth century there was no single fixed order of the books of the Old Testament in Greek.³

No books of Maccabees

Vaticanus contains no books of Maccabees. This is unusual among the great codices, since Sinaiticus contains 1 and 4 Maccabees and Alexandrinus contains all four. The omission may reflect a view of the canon close to that of Athanasius, who in his letter of 367 did not include the Maccabees among the books to be read. It may also be that the copy from which Vaticanus was made did not contain them. The page on the canon discusses the place of these books in different traditions.⁴

The text of particular books

The text of Vaticanus varies in character from book to book. In Judges it has a form of the text that differs considerably from that of Alexandrinus, and modern editions of the Septuagint sometimes print the two forms side by side. In the books of Kingdoms, parts of the text in Vaticanus reflect the revision known as kaige, a Jewish revision of the Greek made to bring it closer to the Hebrew. In Isaiah, Vaticanus is less highly regarded than Alexandrinus and other witnesses, because it has been affected by Hexaplaric readings.⁵

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Chapter 7. Vaticanus and the Editions of the Septuagint

For the study of the Septuagint, the importance of Codex Vaticanus was recognized long before that of its New Testament. Several major editions have taken it as their base.¹

The Sixtine edition

The Roman edition of 1587, described in a later chapter, printed the text of Vaticanus with relatively few changes, though the editors supplied the missing books and passages from other sources. For nearly three hundred years most printed Septuagints were reprints of this edition. Its text, therefore, became the Septuagint known to Western scholars.²

Holmes and Parsons

Between 1798 and 1827 Robert Holmes and James Parsons published at Oxford a large edition of the Septuagint with an apparatus of variant readings from many manuscripts. They printed the Sixtine text and gave the variants in notes. Their edition remained the fullest collection of evidence for a century.³

The Cambridge editions

Henry Barclay Swete's The Old Testament in Greek (1887–94) printed the text of Vaticanus wherever it survived, with variants from a few other major uncials, including Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. It was designed as a manual edition. The larger Cambridge Septuagint, edited by Alan England Brooke, Norman McLean and Henry St John Thackeray between 1906 and 1940, also printed the text of Vaticanus with a full apparatus. It covered the books from Genesis to Tobit.⁴

Rahlfs and Göttingen

Alfred Rahlfs's two-volume edition of 1935 did not print Vaticanus alone but reconstructed a critical text mainly from Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. The Göttingen Septuagint, begun by Rahlfs and still in progress, aims to reconstruct the earliest recoverable Greek text of each book using all the evidence. In the Göttingen volumes, Vaticanus is one witness among many, but often a very important one.⁵

The position today

Septuagint scholars today no longer treat any single manuscript as the best text throughout. The value of Vaticanus varies from book to book. In some books, such as Judges and parts of Kingdoms, its text represents a revision rather than the oldest Greek. In others it remains among the best witnesses. The page on the Septuagint gives a wider account of the translation and its history.⁶

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Chapter 8. The Order of Books and the Canon Lists of the Fourth Century

The order in which books are arranged in a large codex can reveal how its makers understood the collection of scripture. In Vaticanus, the order of the New Testament books corresponds closely to lists of the fourth century.¹

The New Testament order

In Vaticanus the Gospels are followed by Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles, and the letters of Paul, with Hebrews placed after 2 Thessalonians. This order, with the Catholic Epistles before Paul, was common in the Greek East. It is the order given by Athanasius of Alexandria in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter of 367, which lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in this sequence. It differs from the order familiar from later Latin and printed Bibles, where Paul comes immediately after Acts.²

The Old Testament order

In the Old Testament, Vaticanus contains no books of the Maccabees. Athanasius likewise did not include them in his list. The absence of Maccabees, together with the order of the New Testament, has led some scholars to suggest a connection between Vaticanus and the Alexandrian tradition represented by Athanasius. The correspondence is not exact, however, and the absence of Maccabees could also reflect the contents of the exemplars available to the scribes.³

What the order can and cannot show

The order of books in a codex is evidence for how the scribes and their patrons arranged scripture, but it does not prove that they held a particular view of the canon. Large codices sometimes included books that were not regarded as canonical, as Sinaiticus included Barnabas and Hermas, and they could omit books for practical reasons. For a full account of the formation of the canon, see the page on the biblical canon.⁴

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Chapter 9. Contents of the New Testament

The New Testament in Vaticanus begins with the four Gospels in the usual order: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are followed by Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles (James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John and Jude), and the letters of Paul. Hebrews stands after 2 Thessalonians, before the Pastoral Epistles. Because the manuscript breaks off at Hebrews 9:14, the Pastorals, Philemon and Revelation are lost. It is not known whether Revelation was ever part of the codex.¹

The order of the books

The placing of the Catholic Epistles immediately after Acts is the usual Greek order, found also in Alexandrinus and in most Byzantine manuscripts, though not in Sinaiticus, where Paul follows the Gospels. The placing of Hebrews among the letters of Paul, before the Pastorals, follows the Alexandrian tradition, which regarded Hebrews as Pauline. Latin and later English Bibles place Hebrews after Philemon.²

Chapter divisions

Vaticanus has its own system of chapter numbers in the margins of the New Testament. In the Gospels these divisions are short, with 170 sections in Matthew, 62 in Mark, 152 in Luke and 80 in John. This system is older than the Eusebian sections and is found in only a few other manuscripts.³

In the letters of Paul there is a particularly revealing feature. The chapter numbers run continuously through the letters, as if they formed a single book. But Hebrews, which stands after 2 Thessalonians in the codex, begins with the number 59, while Galatians ends at 58 and Ephesians begins at 70. This shows that in the manuscript from which these numbers were taken, Hebrews stood after Galatians. The chapter numbering therefore preserves the trace of an earlier order of Paul's letters that differs from the order of the codex itself.⁴

No Eusebian apparatus

Unlike Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, Vaticanus does not have the Eusebian canons and sections in the Gospels. This is one of the reasons why some scholars date it earlier than Sinaiticus, or at least regard it as reflecting an older pattern of book production.⁵

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Chapter 10. Reading Aids, Paragraphs and Spelling

Paragraphs

The scribes of Vaticanus marked the divisions of the text in several ways. A new section often begins with a letter that projects slightly into the left margin, a practice called ekthesis. In other places a short stroke in the margin, the paragraphos, marks the break. Small spaces within the line also indicate pauses. These divisions are not identical with the later chapter and verse divisions, and they give evidence of how ancient readers understood the structure of the text.¹

Nomina sacra

Like other early Christian manuscripts, Vaticanus writes certain sacred names in abbreviated form with a line above them: God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Spirit, and some others. The system is consistent with that of Sinaiticus and the papyri and is one of the distinctive features of Christian book culture in the first centuries.²

Spelling

The spelling of Vaticanus shows many features typical of Greek in Egypt in the Roman period. Vowels and diphthongs that had come to be pronounced the same, such as ει and ι, are often interchanged. Some of these spellings were once taken as errors and corrected by editors. Today they are studied as evidence of the pronunciation and dialect of the scribes, and as a clue to the place of origin of the manuscript.³

The Septuagint headings and titles

The titles of the books are given at the beginning and end, the latter in a simple form called a colophon or subscription. These titles are short, such as "According to Matthew" and "To the Romans." Some later manuscripts have longer and more elaborate titles. The short titles of Vaticanus are generally regarded as the earliest form.⁴

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Chapter 11. Vaticanus in Acts and the Question of the Western Text

The text of Acts presents one of the most difficult problems in New Testament textual criticism, and Vaticanus stands at the centre of it.¹

Two forms of Acts

Acts survives in two main forms. The shorter form is found in Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and the papyri P45 and P74. The longer form, often called the Western text, is represented above all by Codex Bezae, together with parts of the Old Latin, the Harclean Syriac and some papyri. The longer form is roughly eight and a half per cent longer than the shorter. It contains additional details of names, places and circumstances, and in some passages a different emphasis.²

Which came first?

Scholars have debated whether the two forms go back to two editions by the author himself, whether the longer form is an expansion of the shorter, or whether the shorter is an abbreviation of the longer. The majority view, adopted by the editors of the Nestle-Aland text, is that the shorter text represented by Vaticanus is closer to the original, and that the Western text is the result of revision in the second century. A minority of scholars continues to argue for the priority of the longer text or for a two-edition theory.³

The role of Vaticanus

Because Vaticanus is the oldest complete witness to the shorter form, it plays a decisive part in this debate. Its text of Acts is generally regarded as carefully transmitted and free from the expansions characteristic of the Western text. Where Vaticanus and Sinaiticus agree against Bezae, editors have usually followed them. Recent work on the Editio Critica Maior of Acts, published in 2017, has confirmed the importance of Vaticanus while reviewing each variant afresh.⁴

A caution

The agreement of Vaticanus with the shorter form does not mean that every one of its readings in Acts is original. In a number of passages it contains singular readings or small omissions that editors have rejected. The case for the shorter text rests on the agreement of several early witnesses, not on Vaticanus alone.⁵

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Chapter 12. Vaticanus in the Letters of Paul

In the Gospels Vaticanus is generally regarded as the most important single witness. In the letters of Paul its position is more complicated.¹

Hort's view

Westcott and Hort were aware that Vaticanus did not preserve the same quality of text throughout. In the Pauline letters they noted that it contained a number of readings shared with the Western witnesses, such as Codex Claromontanus and the Old Latin. They therefore did not follow Vaticanus in Paul with the same confidence that they showed in the Gospels.²

The papyrus P46

The publication of the Chester Beatty papyrus P46 in the 1930s transformed the study of the Pauline text. P46, usually dated around 200, contains most of the letters of Paul and Hebrews. Günther Zuntz, in his study The Text of the Epistles (1953), showed that P46 and Vaticanus are closely related and that together they represent an early form of the text that can be traced back to the second century. He argued that this text was neither purely Alexandrian nor purely Western, but older than both.³

The section numbers

The section numbers in the Pauline letters of Vaticanus show that its exemplar placed Hebrews between Galatians and Ephesians, although in Vaticanus itself Hebrews follows 2 Thessalonians. This evidence, discussed in the chapter on the physical description, shows that the scribes copied the numbering from an older manuscript with a different order.⁴

The loss at the end

Vaticanus breaks off at Hebrews 9:14. The rest of Hebrews, the Pastoral Epistles and Philemon are therefore missing. For these books editors must rely on other witnesses, and the absence of Vaticanus is felt particularly in the Pastoral Epistles, where the early evidence is thin.⁵

Comparing Vaticanus with Sinaiticus in Paul

In the Pauline letters Vaticanus and Sinaiticus agree less often than they do in the Gospels. Each has readings that the other lacks, and each occasionally sides with the Western witnesses against the other. Editors therefore treat the two codices as separate witnesses in Paul and look for support from P46, Alexandrinus, Ephraemi and the early versions. In many places the decisive evidence comes from the agreement of Vaticanus with P46, since the two manuscripts together reach back to a text of about the year 200. This combination has become one of the most respected groupings of witnesses in the study of the Pauline letters, and it is frequently cited in the textual commentaries that explain the choices of the modern editions.⁶

Romans and its endings

Vaticanus is also important for the much-discussed question of the ending of Romans. In some manuscripts the doxology of Romans 16:25–27 appears after chapter 14, in others after chapter 15, and in others at the end of chapter 16. Vaticanus places it at the end of chapter 16, together with Sinaiticus and Ephraemi. P46, by contrast, places it after chapter 15. These differences suggest that the letter circulated in more than one form at an early date.⁷

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Chapter 13. Vaticanus in the Catholic Epistles

The seven Catholic Epistles, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John and Jude, were the first part of the New Testament to be published in the Editio Critica Maior. The study that accompanied this edition gave a new picture of the place of Vaticanus in these letters.¹

The Editio Critica Maior

The edition of the Catholic Epistles appeared in parts between 1997 and 2005, and a revised edition was published in 2013. Its editors examined a large selection of manuscripts at every point of variation. Using the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, they compared the texts of the manuscripts with one another and with the reconstructed initial text, the form of the text from which the surviving tradition is judged to descend.²

The result for Vaticanus

Among all the manuscripts examined, Vaticanus was found to agree most closely with the reconstructed initial text. This result is partly a consequence of the method, since the initial text was reconstructed with reference to the best witnesses. But the method also tests the coherence of each reading, and Vaticanus passed this test more consistently than any other manuscript. Its text of the Catholic Epistles therefore appears to be a remarkably careful copy.³

Changes to the printed text

The work on the Catholic Epistles led to a small number of changes in the printed text of the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies editions, published in the twenty-eighth edition of Nestle-Aland in 2012. In some of these places the editors decided against the reading of Vaticanus, showing that even the closest witness is not followed automatically.⁴

The placing of the letters

In Vaticanus, as in most early Greek manuscripts, the Catholic Epistles follow immediately after Acts. This arrangement reflects the close association of Acts with the letters of the apostles James, Peter and John, whose activity Acts describes. It is preserved in the editions of the Editio Critica Maior, which publish Acts and the Catholic Epistles in adjacent volumes.⁵

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Chapter 14. The Vatican Library and the Earliest Records

The Vatican Library was founded as a public institution by Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) and reorganized under Sixtus IV, who in 1475 appointed Bartolomeo Platina as its librarian. The earliest secure reference to Codex Vaticanus is its appearance in a catalogue of the library made in 1475, where it is listed among the Greek manuscripts as a Bible in three columns on parchment. It also appears in the catalogue of 1481. Its presence in Rome before 1475 cannot be proved, though some scholars think it was already there under Nicholas V.¹

Erasmus and Sepúlveda

In the early sixteenth century, the codex attracted the attention of the scholars who were preparing the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus, whose edition appeared in 1516, did not see Vaticanus himself, but he obtained information about some of its readings through correspondents. In 1521 Paulus Bombasius, at Erasmus's request, sent him the readings of the codex at 1 John 4:1–3 and 5:7–11. These showed that Vaticanus did not contain the Comma Johanneum, the Trinitarian addition to 1 John 5:7–8 found only in a few late manuscripts.²

In 1533 the Spanish scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda wrote to Erasmus about the codex and told him that it differed from the Latin Vulgate in hundreds of places and agreed with it in many others. He sent Erasmus 365 readings. Erasmus, who distrusted manuscripts that agreed with the Vulgate, suspected that the Greek had been altered to match the Latin. The suspicion was unfounded, but it prevented Vaticanus from influencing the printed text for nearly three centuries. The page on Erasmus and the page on the Textus Receptus describe the editions.³

The Sixtine Septuagint

The first major use of Vaticanus in print came in the Old Testament. In 1587, under Pope Sixtus V, a new edition of the Septuagint was published in Rome, prepared by a commission led by Cardinal Antonio Carafa. It was based mainly on Vaticanus, with the missing parts supplied from other manuscripts. The Sixtine edition was reprinted many times and was the standard text of the Septuagint in the West until the nineteenth century. Through it, Vaticanus influenced the Old Testament of many printed Bibles long before its New Testament text was properly known.⁴

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Chapter 15. Collations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

For two hundred years after Erasmus, scholars who wished to use Vaticanus in their editions of the New Testament depended on partial collations. A collation is a list of the places where a manuscript differs from a printed text. Making one requires long access to the manuscript, and access to Vaticanus was carefully controlled.¹

Bartolocci and the first full collation

In 1669 Giulio Bartolocci, librarian of the Vatican, made a collation of the New Testament of the codex. It was not published, but it was later deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. It was found to be incomplete and inaccurate in many places.²

Bentley's collation

In the 1720s the English classical scholar Richard Bentley planned a new edition of the Greek New Testament that would restore the text current in the fourth century. He believed that by combining the oldest Greek manuscripts with the oldest Latin manuscripts he could recover the text with great precision. Vaticanus was central to his plan. He obtained a collation made by the Italian scholar Mico in 1720, and later sent his assistant John Walker to Rome. Bentley's edition was never completed, but his collations survive at Trinity College, Cambridge, and they were published in 1799.³

Birch

In the 1780s the Danish scholar Andreas Birch was allowed to examine the codex as part of a large survey of Greek manuscripts. He published a description and some readings in 1788 and 1798–1801, but he was not able to make a complete collation, especially of Luke and John.⁴

The general situation

By the end of the eighteenth century, the New Testament text of Vaticanus was known only in fragments and through collations of uneven quality. Scholars knew it was very old and important, but they could not use it with confidence. Johann Jakob Griesbach, the leading textual critic of the period, grouped manuscripts into families and recognized the value of the Alexandrian group, but he had little direct knowledge of Vaticanus.⁵

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Chapter 16. Paris and Leonhard Hug

In 1797, after the French invasion of the Papal States, the Treaty of Tolentino required the Pope to surrender many works of art and manuscripts to France. In 1809 Napoleon annexed Rome. Codex Vaticanus was among the treasures taken to Paris, where it remained in the Bibliothèque impériale (now the Bibliothèque nationale de France) until 1815.¹

Hug's examination

In 1810 the German Catholic scholar Johann Leonhard Hug, professor at Freiburg, examined the codex in Paris. Hug was the first scholar to describe the manuscript in detail as an object. He studied its script, its layout, the absence of accents and of the Eusebian sections, and the character of its corrections. In his study, published in 1810 under the title De antiquitate codicis Vaticani commentatio, he argued that it was written in the fourth century, in Egypt, and that it was the oldest surviving manuscript of the Greek Bible.²

Hug's study was a turning point. Until then, the date of the codex had been uncertain, and some scholars had placed it as late as the sixth or seventh century. After Hug, its fourth-century date was accepted by most scholars. He did not, however, make a full collation of its text, and his analysis of the textual history of the New Testament, which proposed a "common edition" revised by different editors, did not win acceptance.³

Return to Rome

After the fall of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 provided for the return of works taken from Italy. The codex was sent back to Rome in that year and resumed its place in the Vatican Library. The years in Paris had brought it to the attention of a wider circle of scholars, but access to it in Rome remained restricted.⁴

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Chapter 17. Tischendorf, Tregelles, Mai and the Struggle for Access

In the 1840s, two Protestant scholars who were dedicated to finding the oldest text of the New Testament went to Rome to study Codex Vaticanus. Both found that they could look at the manuscript only under strict conditions.¹

Tischendorf in 1843

Constantin von Tischendorf visited Rome in 1843. He was allowed to examine the codex for a total of six hours. He used the time to check a number of disputed readings, but he could not make a full collation.²

Tregelles in 1845

The English scholar Samuel Prideaux Tregelles came to Rome in 1845 with a letter of introduction from Cardinal Wiseman. He was allowed to see the codex, but he was searched before entering the room, his pen and paper were taken away, and two prelates stayed with him and distracted him if he looked at any passage too long. Tregelles nevertheless memorized many readings and wrote them down afterward. His account of the visit became well known and was widely cited as an example of the difficulty of access.³

Mai's edition

Meanwhile the Vatican had begun its own edition. Cardinal Angelo Mai, a famous discoverer of palimpsests and a former prefect of the Vatican Library, prepared an edition of the whole codex. It was printed in five volumes between 1828 and 1838 but was not published until 1857, three years after Mai's death, under the editorship of Carlo Vercellone. The edition was a disappointment. Mai had supplied gaps from other sources, corrected the text in many places without saying so, and did not distinguish the hands of the scribes and correctors. A smaller edition of the New Testament, published in 1859, was only somewhat better. Scholars regarded neither as a reliable reproduction of the manuscript.⁴

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Chapter 18. Tischendorf in 1866 and the Vatican Facsimiles

Tischendorf's second visit

In 1866 Tischendorf returned to Rome, now famous for his discovery of Codex Sinaiticus. He was given permission to study the codex for the purpose of collating difficult passages, for three hours a day. After eight days he was found to have copied out twenty pages in full. Permission was withdrawn. Through the intervention of Vercellone, he was allowed six more days of access. In fourteen days, totalling about forty-two hours, he made a detailed study of the New Testament.¹

In 1867 Tischendorf published his Novum Testamentum Vaticanum, which gave the text of the New Testament as he read it. It was the most accurate edition yet produced and became the basis for the use of Vaticanus in his eighth major edition of the Greek New Testament (1869–72).²

The facsimile editions

After Tischendorf's work, the Vatican itself produced better editions. Between 1868 and 1881 Vercellone, Giuseppe Cozza-Luzi and others published a type facsimile of the whole codex in six volumes. Then in 1889–90 a photographic facsimile was published, the first of its kind for a great biblical manuscript. A second photographic edition appeared in 1904–07.³

These editions made the text available to all scholars, and Westcott and Hort, whose edition appeared in 1881, were able to use the type facsimile. In 1999 the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato of Italy published a colour facsimile of the whole manuscript with an introduction by Paul Canart, and in the twenty-first century the codex was digitized and placed online by the Vatican Library.⁴

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Chapter 19. Westcott, Hort and the Neutral Text

The modern reputation of Codex Vaticanus owes most to the work of two Cambridge scholars, Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. In 1881 they published The New Testament in the Original Greek, with a second volume containing Hort's introduction to their method. Their text was based above all on Vaticanus.¹

Genealogical method

Westcott and Hort classified the manuscripts of the New Testament into four groups: the Syrian (now usually called Byzantine), the Western, the Alexandrian, and the Neutral. They argued that the Syrian text, found in most later manuscripts and in the Textus Receptus, was a later revision that combined readings from earlier texts. They described the Western text as early but uncontrolled, full of paraphrase and addition, and the Alexandrian as a polished form of the earlier text.²

The Neutral text was, in their view, the purest surviving form of the original. Its chief representatives were Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, and when the two agreed they considered the reading almost always original. Vaticanus alone they regarded as the single best manuscript. Hort wrote that its readings should be accepted unless there was strong internal evidence against them.³

Western non-interpolations

Westcott and Hort made one important exception. In a small number of places near the end of Luke, the Western text, represented by Codex Bezae and the Old Latin, has a shorter reading than Vaticanus. They considered these shorter readings original and called the longer readings "Western non-interpolations," a phrase that signalled their reluctance to depart from Vaticanus. Later critics, especially after the discovery of P75, which agrees with Vaticanus in these places, have generally accepted the longer readings.⁴

Later assessments

Later scholarship modified Westcott and Hort's scheme. The term "Neutral" was abandoned, and the Neutral and Alexandrian texts were merged into a single Alexandrian text-type. But their high estimate of Vaticanus has largely been confirmed. The page on Westcott and Hort and the page on modern critical editions give a fuller account.⁵

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Chapter 20. Critics of Vaticanus

The high estimate of Vaticanus did not go unchallenged. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of scholars defended the traditional text of the New Testament and criticized the reliance of Westcott and Hort on the two oldest codices.¹

Burgon

The most vigorous of these critics was John William Burgon, Dean of Chichester. In 1883 he published The Revision Revised, a collection of articles attacking the Revised Version of 1881 and the Greek text on which it was based. Burgon argued that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were not the best manuscripts but among the most corrupt, and that their survival was due precisely to the fact that they had been set aside as faulty. He held that the text found in the great majority of manuscripts was more likely to preserve the original, because it had been read and copied by the Greek-speaking communities over many centuries.²

Scrivener and Miller

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, the most experienced English collator of manuscripts of the period, took a more moderate position. He respected the age of Vaticanus but warned against following any single manuscript too closely. Edward Miller continued Burgon's work after his death and published several volumes defending the traditional text.³

Hoskier

Herman Charles Hoskier, a banker and amateur scholar of great industry, devoted his book Codex B and Its Allies (1914) to a detailed criticism of Vaticanus. He listed thousands of readings in which, he argued, the codex had departed from the true text through Egyptian revision, harmonization or error.⁴

Later positions

The view that the majority of manuscripts preserves the original text, often called the Majority Text or Byzantine priority position, has continued to find defenders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most textual critics do not accept it, and the discovery of the early papyri has strengthened the position of Vaticanus. But the debate has encouraged critics to test their judgments and to avoid treating any single manuscript as infallible. The page on the Textus Receptus and the page on reliability consider these questions further.⁵

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Chapter 21. Vaticanus and the English Bible

The readings of Vaticanus reached English readers chiefly through translations made after 1881. The King James Version of 1611 was made from printed Greek texts based on late manuscripts. Its translators had no direct knowledge of Vaticanus.¹

The Revised Version

In 1870 the Convocation of Canterbury appointed a committee to revise the King James Version. Westcott and Hort were both members of the New Testament company, and they gave their colleagues the text of their edition before it was published. The Revised New Testament of 1881 adopted many readings of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. The revisers placed the longer ending of Mark after a space with a note, put the woman taken in adultery in brackets, and adopted the shorter Lord's Prayer in Luke. These changes were widely discussed and sometimes criticized, as described in the previous chapter.²

Modern translations

Since the twentieth century, most English translations of the New Testament have been based on critical texts in which the readings of Vaticanus have great weight. The American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version (1946), the New International Version (1973), the New Revised Standard Version (1989), and the English Standard Version (2001) all reflect this tradition, though they differ in their judgments on particular passages. The New King James Version (1982) follows the traditional text but notes many of the readings of the older manuscripts in footnotes. The page on modern translations describes these versions.³

Other languages

The same pattern can be seen in other languages. Most modern Bible translations made for scholarly or general use in German, French, Spanish and other languages are based on the Nestle–Aland or United Bible Societies Greek texts, which give considerable weight to Vaticanus. In this way, a manuscript that few people have ever seen has shaped the Bible read by many millions.⁴

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Chapter 22. The Character of the Text

The New Testament text of Codex Vaticanus is the leading representative of the Alexandrian text-type throughout the books it contains. Kurt and Barbara Aland placed it in Category I, the group of manuscripts of the highest quality, and described it as by far the most important of the uncials.¹

Features

The text of Vaticanus is generally shorter than the Byzantine text. It lacks many of the phrases and clarifying additions that entered the text in later centuries. It often has the more difficult reading where other manuscripts have smoothed the grammar or the sense. These qualities are the reason why textual critics trust it. In the principles of textual criticism, shorter and more difficult readings are often regarded as more likely to be original, because scribes tended to add and to simplify rather than to shorten and to complicate. These principles are not absolute, and critics today weigh them more cautiously than in the nineteenth century.²

Accuracy

The scribe of the New Testament was careful. He made relatively few errors of the kind that arise from inattention, such as skipping from one occurrence of a word to the next. When Vaticanus has a singular reading, that is, a reading found in no other manuscript, it is more often an error than an ancient variant. But its singular readings are far fewer than those of Sinaiticus, and its text as a whole gives an impression of careful transmission over several generations of copying.³

Variation between books

The character of the text is not equally good in all books. In the Gospels and Acts it is of the highest quality. In the letters of Paul, scholars have noted a small Western element, with readings shared with Codex Claromontanus and the Old Latin. In the Catholic Epistles, Vaticanus is again among the best witnesses, and it agrees often with the papyrus P72 in 1 and 2 Peter.⁴

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Chapter 23. Vaticanus and the Papyrus P75

In 1961 the Bodmer Library in Geneva published Papyrus Bodmer XIV–XV, known as P75. This papyrus codex, copied about 200 or a little later, contains large parts of Luke and John. Its discovery changed the understanding of the history of the text of Vaticanus.¹

Close agreement

The text of P75 is remarkably close to that of Vaticanus. In the passages where both survive, they agree in about nine out of ten places where other manuscripts vary. They share many distinctive readings and many omissions. Carlo Martini, later cardinal and archbishop of Milan, studied the relationship in detail in 1966 and concluded that Vaticanus was not the product of a fourth-century revision but preserved a text that already existed in nearly the same form a century and a half earlier.²

Before P75, many scholars had followed a view of Hort's that the text of Vaticanus might have been formed by careful editing in Alexandria, perhaps in the third or fourth century. P75 showed that the text was not a late editorial creation. A scholar of the stature of Kurt Aland, who had once been sceptical of the value of Vaticanus, accepted that P75 confirmed its antiquity.³

What P75 does not prove

The agreement of P75 and Vaticanus shows that their text is very old, but it does not by itself prove that it is the original text. Some scholars argue that the text could have been shaped by a process of careful revision in the second century. Others argue that it reflects careful copying rather than revision. Gordon Fee, in an influential study, showed that P75 is not the product of a recension. He concluded that the text of P75 and Vaticanus represents a relatively pure line of transmission. The page on the earliest papyri describes P75 and its companions.⁴

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Chapter 24. Scribal Habits in Vaticanus

Modern studies of scribal habits try to describe the tendencies of an individual scribe by examining the readings that are found in no other manuscript. These singular readings are almost always errors, and they reveal the kinds of mistakes a scribe was inclined to make.¹

The method

The method was developed by Ernest Colwell in the 1960s and applied systematically by James Royse to the early papyri. It has since been extended to the great uncials. The principle is simple: if a reading is found in only one manuscript, it was probably created by the scribe of that manuscript, and its character shows how the scribe worked.²

The tendency to omit

Studies of Vaticanus have confirmed an observation made by Hort: its scribes were more inclined to omit than to add. Many of its singular readings are omissions of a word or short phrase, often of an article, a conjunction or a pronoun. This tendency matters because one of the traditional rules of textual criticism, that the shorter reading is to be preferred, has been questioned in the light of evidence that early scribes omitted more often than they expanded.³

Accuracy

In general, the singular readings of Vaticanus are fewer and less significant than those of Sinaiticus. Its scribes rarely harmonized one Gospel to another, rarely smoothed the grammar, and rarely introduced explanatory additions. This restraint is one of the main reasons why scholars regard its text as carefully transmitted.⁴

Limits

A study of singular readings shows only the habits of the scribe who copied Vaticanus itself. It cannot show what changes had already been made in the exemplars from which it was copied. The comparison with the papyrus P75 is therefore essential, because it demonstrates that the text of Vaticanus in Luke and John was already in existence about a century earlier.⁵

Comparison with other uncials

When the singular readings of Vaticanus are compared with those of Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Ephraemi, the differences in scribal habit become clear. Sinaiticus has more omissions and more errors of spelling; Alexandrinus more often adopts smoother readings; Ephraemi has been more heavily corrected. Vaticanus stands out for the restraint of its copying.⁶

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Chapter 25. Notable Readings

Many of the most familiar differences between older and newer translations of the New Testament can be traced to the readings of Vaticanus, often in agreement with Sinaiticus.¹

The ending of Mark

Vaticanus ends Mark at 16:8, with the women leaving the tomb in fear. It lacks the longer ending (16:9–20), which is found in most later manuscripts. As described above, the scribe left a blank column after 16:8. Most modern editions mark the longer ending as a later addition.²

The woman taken in adultery

Vaticanus does not contain the account of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The passage is also absent from Sinaiticus, P66 and P75. In Vaticanus there is no sign of a gap. The story is found in Codex Bezae and in many later manuscripts, where it is sometimes placed in other locations.³

The Lord's Prayer in Luke

In Luke 11:2–4, Vaticanus has a short form of the Lord's Prayer: "Father, hallowed be your name; your kingdom come; give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us; and do not bring us to the time of trial." The fuller wording, which corresponds to Matthew 6:9–13, is found in later manuscripts. Most scholars think scribes assimilated Luke's shorter version to the more familiar form in Matthew.⁴

Luke 22:43–44 and 23:34

Vaticanus omits the account of Jesus' sweat like drops of blood and the angel strengthening him (Luke 22:43–44). It also omits the prayer "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). The evidence for both passages is divided, and they are among the most discussed variants in the Gospels.⁵

Ephesians 1:1

In Ephesians 1:1 the original text of Vaticanus, like Sinaiticus and P46, lacks the words "in Ephesus." This has led many scholars to suggest that the letter was originally a circular letter to several congregations.⁶

The Comma Johanneum

Vaticanus does not have the Trinitarian passage in 1 John 5:7–8. As described above, this evidence was communicated to Erasmus in 1521.⁷

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Chapter 26. Vaticanus and Sinaiticus Compared

Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are almost always discussed together. They are the two oldest nearly complete Bibles, and they agree in many important readings. Yet they are very different in character.¹

Agreements

In the Gospels, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus share the short ending of Mark, the omission of the woman taken in adultery, and many other readings. Their combined testimony is regarded as very strong evidence. In the editions of Westcott and Hort, a reading supported by both was almost always printed in the text.²

Differences

Herman Hoskier, a strong critic of Westcott and Hort, counted more than 3,000 differences between the two codices in the Gospels alone. Many of these are minor, but the number shows that the two manuscripts are not copies of a common exemplar. In the first chapters of John, Sinaiticus has a text closer to the Western type, while Vaticanus remains Alexandrian.³

The two codices also differ in their physical features. Vaticanus has three columns, Sinaiticus four. Sinaiticus has the Eusebian apparatus and Vaticanus does not. Sinaiticus contains Barnabas and Hermas, while Vaticanus, as far as it survives, contains only the books of the later canon. Sinaiticus was heavily corrected; Vaticanus less so. Sinaiticus contains many more scribal errors.⁴

Relationship

Scholars agree that the two manuscripts are related in a broad sense: they belong to the same textual tradition and to the same period of book production. But most reject the idea that one was copied from the other or that they were made at the same scriptorium. The study of their relationship continues with the help of digital images and computer-assisted comparison of their texts.⁵

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Chapter 27. The Digital Codex and Recent Study

In the early twenty-first century, the Vatican Library began a major project to digitize its manuscripts. Codex Vaticanus was among the first to be made available. Its high-resolution colour images can now be consulted freely on the DigiVatLib platform. The images show not only the text but also the colours of ink, the structure of the parchment, and the marks in the margins, such as the distigmai.¹

New research

The images have encouraged new research. Scholars have studied the distigmai and other marginal signs, the work of the medieval restorer, the arrangement of the quires, and the relationship between the original text and the corrections. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) and the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF) in Münster have incorporated the codex in their digital resources.²

The Editio Critica Maior

The INTF's Editio Critica Maior, a new critical edition of the New Testament, uses a method called the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. It compares the texts of many manuscripts and calculates their relationships. In its results, the text of Vaticanus is consistently among those closest to the reconstructed initial text. This confirms, by a new method, the judgment of Westcott and Hort.³

Exhibitions

The codex is rarely exhibited. It is kept in the secure areas of the Vatican Library and shown only on special occasions. Most people who study it today do so through digital images. The 1999 colour facsimile, produced in a limited edition, remains an important resource for libraries.⁴

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Chapter 28. Significance

Codex Vaticanus is significant on several levels. As a physical object, it shows the transition from the scroll to the large codex. Its three-column pages, written in a regular and elegant hand on fine parchment, show the skill of fourth-century book production.¹

As a witness to the Old Testament, it is one of the best sources for the text of the Septuagint. It was the basis of the Sixtine edition of 1587 and of the Cambridge editions, and it remains central to Septuagint scholarship.²

As a witness to the New Testament, it is regarded by most textual critics as the single most important manuscript. Its text, confirmed by P75 to be much older than the codex itself, has shaped the critical editions on which modern translations are based.³

Its history illustrates the long road from the possession of a manuscript to its publication. For four centuries it was known to be important but was hard to consult. The work of Hug, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Mai, Vercellone and Cozza-Luzi brought its text into the open, and the facsimiles and digital images of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries made it available to all. The marginal note at Hebrews 1:3, with its plea to leave the old reading alone, could stand as a motto for the scholars who have studied it.⁴

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Further Study

Facsimiles and digital images

• DigiVatLib, Vat. gr. 1209: complete colour images of the codex.
• CSNTM, GA 03: images and data at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
• INTF, Liste: GA 03: the official register entry and images at Münster.
• Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecorum Codex Vaticanus B, introduction by Paul Canart (Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1999).

Books and articles

• Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 1989).
• Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).
• Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Oxford University Press, 1981).
• H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (British Museum, 1938).
• David C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• F. H. A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, 4th ed. (George Bell, 1894).
• T. C. Skeat, "The Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and Constantine," Journal of Theological Studies 50 (1999): 583–625.
• Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge University Press, 1900).
• B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1881).

Reference

• Codex Vaticanus
• Vatican Apostolic Library

Related pages on this site

• Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus
• The biblical canon
• Westcott and Hort and textual criticism
• Codex Vaticanus and the oldest large Bible
• Karl Lachmann

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