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Eight Complete Manuscripts Behind the Greek, Hebrew and Coptic Bibles and One Illuminated Haggadah

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Eight Complete Manuscripts Behind the Greek, Hebrew and Coptic Bibles and One Illuminated Haggadah

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Codices gathers eight substantially complete bound manuscripts, the surviving book as a whole rather than a leaf or a scrap of one, spanning Greek Christian Bibles, the Hebrew Bible, a Gnostic library volume and an illuminated Jewish festival text.

Three are the great parchment Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two oldest substantially complete Greek Bibles, and Codex Alexandrinus, later and textually mixed, Byzantine in the Gospels and Alexandrian in Acts and the Epistles. Codex Bezae stands apart from all three as the principal witness to the Western text, bilingual in Greek and Latin, its version of Acts running a tenth longer than the standard text.

The Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex carry the Hebrew Bible through the Tiberian masoretic tradition, one written by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher himself and later badly damaged, the other a careful copy of his work that survives whole and became the base text of the printed scholarly Bibles still used today.

Nag Hammadi Codex II is the outlier by both language and content, a mid-fourth-century Coptic papyrus book holding the only complete text of the Gospel of Thomas alongside six other works, the single volume that let Gnostic Christianity be read in its own words rather than only through its critics.

The Sarajevo Haggadah closes the group, an illuminated Sephardic Passover text made around 1350 in Aragon, carried out of Spain in 1492 and twice hidden in the twentieth century to save it from destruction, in Nazi confiscation and again in the siege of Sarajevo.

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Codices, Subcategories
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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