Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Subcategories

Codices

8 of 33 entries in Textual Witnesses. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

The book form: leaves folded and gathered into quires, written on both faces, sewn along one edge and bound between covers. It displaced the roll across the Mediterranean world in the early Christian centuries, and the reason it won was practical rather than doctrinal, since a bound book opens at any point, holds far more text in one object, and can be consulted rather than only read through. Everything recorded here is about the object and not the work: how many columns stand on a page, what animal the parchment came from, the later hands that corrected it, and the marks of where it has been. One book of scripture can survive in several such copies, and the places where they differ from each other are the evidence textual scholars work from.

Facts
Directory
Category
Manuscripts 1
Learn More
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.

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.