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Does Isaiah Predict the Virgin Birth?

Against the modern consensus, a close study of Isaiah 7:14 suggests the prophet directly predicted a virgin birth in the distant future.

When Christians celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating the miraculous birth of a child to a young woman who was a virgin—according to the New Testament (Matthew 1:18–25, Luke 1:26–38). The Gospel of Matthew specifically connects this birth with a prophecy given by Isaiah (7:14) that “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matt. 1:23).

But debates have raged for centuries over the details in Isaiah 7, especially around the translation of the key term “virgin.” This translation debate goes back at least to the second century with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr (Dialogue 68.7; 84.3) and remains with us today. It was a flashpoint when the RSV came out in 1952 because it printed “young woman” in the main text and relegated “virgin” to a footnote. Conservatives at the time panned the translation for this and other issues, accusing it of liberalism. But, by the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators that the Hebrew word ʿalmâ in v. 14 does, in fact, mean “young woman” and does not necessarily indicate a virgin.

By the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators.

The firm position of modern scholarship raises real questions. If the consensus is correct, then why did the Greek translator in the second century BC employ a Greek word that clearly means virgin (parthenos) in Hellenistic Greek? And was Matthew misled in thinking that this text predicted the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth?

The spectrum of views

For a commentator such as Hans Wildberger—at one end of the spectrum—a contradiction between the Old and New Testaments is no problem:

the traditional interpretation of the church, based upon Matt. 1:23, takes the עָלְמָה/ παρθένος [ʿalmâ/parthenos] to be Mary and Immanuel to be Jesus. In some quarters, it is still considered correct today, even if there are certain reservations and an awareness that Isaiah would have not been able to anticipate the specific way in which the predictions would be fulfilled.¹

For an interpreter such as James M. Hamilton, Jr.—a conservative at the other end of the spectrum from Wildberger—one must find a satisfactory way to hold to the unity of the Old and New Testaments. He correlates Immanuel with the son born in Isaiah 8:1–4 and believes that the text of Matthew can be explained satisfactorily as a typological fulfillment.²

The consensus, however, has been challenged recently by the linguist Christophe Rico who has applied modern semantic theory to the study of ʿalmâ.³ Exhaustive analysis from modern linguistic methodology reveals that the word can only mean “young virgin.” But, before exploring that, we first need to appreciate the context of Isaiah’s prophecy.

Isaiah’s context

The brief conversation recorded between King Ahaz of Judah and Isaiah is a pivotal point in the narrative plot-structure of the Old Testament that causes the tree of the Davidic dynasty to be cut down. In the Old Testament, kings and kingdoms are portrayed as stately trees.⁴ The Assyrians are pictured as lofty trees in Isaiah 10:33–34 and in Isaiah 11:1, we come to the first reference of the stump of Jesse.⁵ This text employs an identical metaphor to show that the kingdom of the House of David is a tree cut down; all that remains is a stump.

Characteristic of Hebrew literature is to treat topics recursively. An opening section may go around a topic followed by a second section on the same topic, from a different angle or perspective or point of view. Although the sections are presented sequentially, they function like the left and right speakers of a stereo system, giving full Dolby Surround Sound, so to speak. Thus, “the whole truth” is presented in a full-orbed and three-dimensional way.

The prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 comes from the third repetitive section of Isaiah where he promises judgement for covenant breaking (idolatry and social injustice) and looks beyond the judgement of exile to a coming king who would restore a righteous Zion. There are three panels that portray the coming king: (1) Immanuel Section (Isa. 7:1–8:18); (2) Mighty God Section (Isa. 8:19–10:19); and (3) Shoot from Stump of Jesse Section (Isa. 10:20–11:16). In these three sections prediction of a coming king in the distant future is contrasted with imminent destruction and exile brought by the Assyrians as the Lord’s instrument of judgement. In Isaiah 10:5 Yahweh calls Assyria the rod of his anger that is employed against Judah.

“The Prophecy of Isaiah” (1778 –1779) by Francisco Bayeu. Museo Nacional del Prado

The background of the Immanuel Section is the awakening of the Assyrian giant and the beginning of Neo-Assyrian domination in the ancient Near East (744–612 BC). Syria with its capital in Damascus joined forces with the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital in Samaria to create an anti-Assyrian coalition. They wanted Ahaz, King of Judah to join them, but he refused. The plan was to eliminate him and put a puppet in his place. It looked like the end of the Davidic Dynasty! The paragraph in Isaiah 7:10–16 comes as Isaiah meets Ahaz while he is out inspecting his city’s source of water and preparing for a siege. Isaiah promises him deliverance if he will rely on Yahweh alone and ask for a sign: anything at all in the universe.

The answer given by Ahaz appears pious, but is insincere and completely lacking in covenant loyalty to Yahweh. He declares that he will not put the Lord to the test (Isa. 7:12). It may seem that Ahaz is acting very piously by refusing to put God to the test, but in reality, he is demonstrating that he is a willfully unbelieving man. He has already decided what he will do. He is going to hold out against a siege from Syria and Israel and become a vassal of the King of Assyria in order to get the alliance of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria (Syro-Ephraimite Coalition) off his back.

In view of Ahaz’s refusal to trust the Lord, Isaiah announces in vv. 17–25 that Judah will soon be overrun and devastated by that very Assyria which Ahaz has foolishly decided to turn to for help. Set in between the Threat to the Davidic House in vv. 1–9 and the Announcement of Desolation by Attacking Armies in vv. 17–25 is the paragraph in vv. 10–16 where Isaiah presents the Immanuel Sign.

The Immanuel sign

We come now to Isaiah 7:13–16 which speak of the Immanuel Sign. These verses are the heart of the section. Verses 1–12 lead up to them and vv. 17–25 which follow indicate the results of Ahaz’s decision. From the New Testament, we know that this prophecy finds fulfillment ultimately in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:21–23), but what is the meaning of the prophecy according to the Book of Isaiah and in the time of Ahaz?

When Matthew and the other writers of the New Testament say that a particular prophecy in the Old Testament is fulfilled, they do not discuss how to interpret the text in the Old Testament. Some prophecies are what we might call direct prediction, and some involve typological prediction, which means that events or people in the Old Testament serve as a model or pattern for what will happen in a greater event or person at a later time and so are said to foreshadow or predict the later event or person.⁶ When an Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled, the authors in the New Testament do not pause to say explicitly whether it is a direct prediction or a typological prediction.

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

It is impossible in a brief space to describe and assess all explanations given in the history of interpretation for Isaiah 7:14, but some of the most common ones are as follows:

Immanuel is Hezekiah and it is simply a wife of Ahaz who will bear a son.
Immanuel is Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz mentioned in Isaiah 8:1 and so it is a wife of Isaiah who will bear a son.
Immanuel is a son born to an unknown woman who was a contemporary of Isaiah.
Immanuel is the Messiah born to a virgin in the (distant) future.
A birth contemporary with Isaiah is a model or type of the future birth of the Messiah.

Each interpretation depends heavily on how certain issues are handled. The first three options can be firmly rejected and the reader is referred to the excellent critique of Gary Smith in his Isaiah commentary.⁷ Furthermore, careful analysis shows many differences between Immanuel and 8:1–4. These differences mean that the child born to Isaiah’s wife is best considered a harbinger of the future miraculous birth announced in 7:14.

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

It is not always possible from a modern English translation to track the pronominal references in Hebrew throughout the brief segment of vv. 10–16. Verse 10 begins, “And Yahweh continued to speak to Ahaz saying…” This introduction clearly marks the beginning of a new segment of conversation or discourse. The conversation partners are clearly identified as Yahweh and King Ahaz. From the context, the mediator of the message is Isaiah the prophet; he is the one through whom these words are presented to Ahaz.

Verse 11 continues, “Ask for yourself a sign from Yahweh your God. Make it deep to Sheol or make it high above / upwards.” These three clauses contain imperative verbs—all second person masculine singular in form, as well as two pronouns, also both second masculine singular. Clearly, these commands are issued directly and specifically to Ahaz. It is Ahaz who is to ask for a sign.

Verse 12 contains the brief response of King Ahaz: And Ahaz said, “I will not ask nor will I test Yahweh.” The verbs are first person common singular in form and Yahweh is referred to in the third person since the medium between him and God is the prophet.

Verse 13 continues the conversation by the simple verb “And he said.” This is obviously Yahweh / Isaiah speaking and giving a response to the answer given by Ahaz. The quoted speech begins as follows: “Hear, O House of David, Is it too trivial for you to weary humans that you must also weary my God?” The two verbs, “hear” (שִׁמְעוּ) and “you must weary” (תַּלְאוּ) are second person plural in form. The one pronoun employed with the infinitive “to weary” is also second person plural. Yahweh/Isaiah is no longer addressing Ahaz directly or specifically; he is addressing the entire dynasty of David: past, present, and future—the whole family line or House of David.

“King Ahaz sacrifices his son to Moloch” by Rombout van Troyen. Image source

The pronoun in verse 14 is also second masculine plural in form. The sign in verse 11 was offered specifically to Ahaz. Ahaz declined. In spite of Ahaz’s response, Yahweh gave a sign. The sign he gave was for the entire family line of David and is therefore not at all tied to the time of Ahaz.

Verses 15–16a go on to speak about the promised child. Then remarkably, verse 16b switches back to second masculine singular in form. The translation of this sentence is problematic, but it clearly is addressed specifically to Ahaz.

This analysis of the pronouns resolves one very important issue: the sign given in vv. 14–15 is not necessarily for Isaiah’s contemporaries or time. It is a sign that spans the entire history of the remaining Davidic family tree, an issue to be clarified in the prophecy in Isaiah 11:1.

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Having addressed who Isaiah’s audience is, we must consider the difficulties in the second half of v. 14. The first five words form a verbless clause: “Look! A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” The verbs “conceive” and “bear” are in fact participles. The helping verb “to be” required by English has to be supplied from the context. One could translate the clause with present progressive tenses in English: “A virgin is conceiving and bearing a son.” Or one could construe the participles as describing a future, as is normal syntax in Hebrew: “A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Both options are grammatically possible.⁸ It is the nature of Hebrew prophecy, however, for a prophet to describe what he has seen in his vision using a past or a present, even though the vision applies to the future. Here since the following finite verb is future, a future tense is probable. And it is a young virgin who conceives.

The next verb is wəqara’t (“and you will call”). First this is a waw-consecutive Perfect and must be translated as a future tense. Thus, construing the preceding participles as future is also highly probable. Second, the verb could be second person feminine singular or third person feminine singular: “You shall call,” addressing the virgin, or “She will call,” where the referent is the virgin. The former seems contextually out of place and the latter is contrary to practice in a patriarchal society. There is, moreover, a problem in the transmission of the text which we must discuss.⁹

The Masoretic Text, best witnessed by the Aleppo and Cairo Codices, is supported by the Jewish Revisers Aquila and Symmachus and the Aramaic Targum.

The opening of Numbers in the Yonah Pentateuch (14th c.), showing its ornate micrography. BL Add MS 21160. Public domain
The Extraordinary Hebrew Text behind Your English Bible
The Masoretic Text is the fruit of the genius of Jewish textual scholars who codified the pronunciation of the Hebrew text.
Kim Phillips

Yet the Great Isaiah Scroll from about 100 BC attests wqr’ (וקרא). This is a third masculine singular verb either Qal or Pual. If the former, it is an indefinite subject verb functioning as a passive; if the latter, it is automatically passive. Variation plagues the witness of the Septuagint and Old Latin. The critical edition by Ziegler gives second person singular but the manuscript support is largely hexaplaric which suggests influence from Aquila and Symmachus. Some Greek manuscripts have kalesetai (καλέσεται “he/she will call”) which could be a translation of a text exactly like the Isaiah Scroll. There are also manuscripts which have a second person plural, but this might be a spelling variant. Finally, some manuscripts have a third person plural, but may be influenced by the New Testament.

The reading that best explains how the others arose is the third person singular passive. Similarly in the Old Latin, the oldest strand of text has the third person singular passive but some later manuscripts attest second person singular or plural as in manuscripts of the LXX. Jerome’s Vulgate is plagued by the same variants. The Syriac Peshitta clearly supports the Great Isaiah Scroll. There is, therefore, very early witness for a text with an indefinite subject like the translation in Matthew and this is supported by the Isaiah Scroll and Syriac and possibly Septuagint (and Old Latin).

The reading in the Masoretic Text could be an error of adding a tau from the previous verb and could have occurred equally in the Paleo-Hebrew script or the later Aramaic Square script. In any case, as noted, a second person singular or third person singular is not contextually suitable. The reading best attested is that of the Dead Sea Scroll supported by the LXX (and Old Latin), Syriac Peshitta and Matthew’s Gospel, while the reading of Aquila, Symmachus (= Jerome), Masoretic Text, and Targum is most likely secondary.

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

There is a consensus among scholars today (regardless of whether one is conservative or liberal) that the word ʿalmâ (עַלְמָה) means only “young girl” or perhaps “young woman” and does not necessarily entail virginity. Four arguments are normally used to support this view: (1) an argument based on etymology; (2) an argument that there already exists in Hebrew a word for virgin in the word bĕtûlâ (בְּתוּלָה); (3) an argument that assumes the word ʿalmâ in Proverbs 30:19 refers to a girl who is not a virgin; and (4) an argument from Jewish tradition—both ancient and reliable—that does not permit an equation between ʿalmâ and parthenos, the Greek word for virgin.

But, as mentioned, the consensus has recently been challenged by Christophe Rico. His work represents the first comprehensive and exhaustive research done on the basis of modern linguistic semantic principles.

The consensus has recently been challenged.

The first argument that has been used to support that ʿalmâ does not imply virginity is based on the etymological background of this word. Rico’s analysis, particularly of Ugaritic, shows that the argument of the consensus is faulty in etymology. At any rate, arguments from etymology are at best secondary and do not necessarily determine meaning. (The English word “nice” comes from Latin nescius and means “ignorant.” This is no indication of its meaning today.)

The second argument that has been given as an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin relates to the Hebrew word bĕtûlâ. The fact that there is already a word in Hebrew for virgin is an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin. Study of usage shows that the word bĕtûlâ indicates a virgin regardless of age, whereas the word ʿalmâ denotes specifically a young virgin.¹⁰ The following evidence from Rico shows that it is common to have both words in many languages and that it is possible also in Semitic languages.¹¹

	“Young girl”	“Young virgin”	“Virgin”
Russian	devuška	devica	devstevenica
Classical English	girl	maid	virgin
Classical French	jeune fille	pucelle	vierge
Classical Spanish	muchacha	doncella	virgen
Catalan	noia	poncella	verge
Classical Italian	giovinetta	pulzèlla	vergine
Japanese	shōjo	otome	shŏjo
Arabic	fatâ’ah	bikr	‘adra’

Languages like Hebrew that lexically distinguish “young girl,” “young virgin,” and “virgin”

The third argument that scholars have regularly used against the view that ʿalmâ means “virgin” rests on the interpretation of Proverbs 30:19. This is the only instance of the word where “young woman” and not virgin is either the necessary or best suitable meaning. Yet it is unwise to rely on this verse since it contains a problem in the history of the transmission of the text.¹² The textual evidence is summarized as follows.¹³

30,19 cor בעלמיו [C] G Syh Th Aq Syriac Vulg T // err-graph: Sym M בעלמה

This can be simplified into the following table:

“in a maid” (בעלמה)	Symmachus, Masoretic Text
“in his youth” (בעלמיו)	Greek, Theodotion, Aquila, Syriac, Origen’s Hexapla, Latin Vulgate

What this means is that the following manuscripts support the reading “in his youth” (בעלמיו): the Septuagint (G), the Jewish revisions of the Septuagint by Theodotion (Th) and Aquila (A) made before 120 AD, the Syro-Hexapla, the Syriac translation (S) coming from the Second Century, the Latin Vulgate (Vulg), based on a Hebrew Text from the Fourth Century AD, and even the Aramaic Targum. Alternately, only two witnesses support the reading “in an ʿalmâ” (בעלמה): the Masoretic Text attested from about 900 AD and Symmachus (S), a Jewish revisor from perhaps 200 AD. The difference between the readings is a hē for ʿalmâ at the end of the word while a combination of waw and yodh ends the word reading “in his youth.”

Anyone familiar with the Herodian script of the Dead Sea Scrolls would know how easy it is to confuse these two paleographically. The reading that has the earliest support widespread among six witnesses and also best explains how the less meaningful reading in Masoretic Text arose is “in his youth.” In any case, it is unwise to claim a text that is uncertain in textual transmission as a strong argument against ʿalmâ as “young virgin.”

The following image shows how easily hē (ח) and a combination of waw (ו) and yodh (י) could be confused in the Herodian script.

From column 1, line 18 of “The Community Rule” (Serekh Hayahad, 1QS). Image source

There are other problems with the Masoretic Text. The preposition bə (בְּ) meaning “in” is not normal with the word derek (דֶּ֫רֶךְ “way”).¹⁴ Moreover, the clause in Proverbs 30:19d in the Masoretic Text breaks the obvious poetic pattern as pointed out by Rico:¹⁵

Eagle               Aerial Pathway
Snake             Terrestrial Pathway
Ship                 Aquatic Pathway
Youth             Developmental Pathway
Adulteress      Ethical Pathway

The “way of a man in a young woman” as in Masoretic Text does not fit this sequence.

The fourth argument that scholars have often used to argue against interpreting ʿalmâ as “virgin” has been based on Rabbinic tradition. Rico shows, however, that because the phonological difference between the consonants ʿayin and ġayin was lost in Hebrew already in the Second Century BC, analysis of the word ʿalmâ in both Rabbinic and Christian circles is frequently based on a popular etymology (the hidden young girl) and is erroneous. Before the coming of Jesus of Nazareth whom the Jewish tradition rejects as fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, the Septuagint got the translation of Isaiah right. Nonetheless, roughly one-third of medieval rabbis, including Rashi and Ben Gershon, do ascribe the meaning virgin to the word ʿalmâ.¹⁶

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

Two verbs are crucial to our understanding of the entire passage from 7:1–25. They are in 7:6 and 7:16. Most lexica derive these forms from the root qwṣ (קוץ) meaning “to be disgusted, feel loathing.”¹⁷ The form in v. 6 is usually analysed as a Hiphil Imperfect and the form in v. 16 as a Qal Participle. The lexica argue that “be in dread” (Qal) or “frighten, terrify” (Hiphil) is an appropriate secondary sense for these two texts. The ESV is a good example of translations that illustrate this:

6. Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it,”
16. … the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.

An exhaustive analysis shows a better solution: the root is probably qyṣ as in Old South Arabic and not qwṣ.¹⁸ Therefore, both the form in v. 6 and the form in v. 16 are Qal and mean “cut” or better “break, split,” hence “tear apart, demolish, destroy.” (This resolves the problem of a form in the Hiphil that is apparently not causative.) As some lexicographers have already realised, this meaning fits better in v. 6. It also fits better in v. 16, as Zorell recognised,¹⁹ depending on how we render the relative sentence. The meaning is to break or destroy in both passages. This proposal is supported in antiquity because for Isaiah 7:6 Symmachus uses klaō (κλάω “break”) and Theodotion has koptō (κόπτω “cut down” » “destroy”). Thus, the meaning of break » destroy for qyṣ was known in antiquity. We will see next how a better meaning for this verb affects interpretation of Isaiah 7:16.

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

The last half of Isaiah 7:16 is translated in the NRSV as

For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted (תֵּעָזֵ֤ב הָאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר אַתָּ֣ה קָ֔ץ מִפְּנֵ֖י שְׁנֵ֥י מְלָכֶֽיהָ)

Instead, we propose, along with Murray Adamthwaite,²⁰ “the land which you (Ahaz) are tearing apart (by your unbelieving policies) will be ridden of the presence of her two kings.”

The pronoun “her” on the suffixed noun, “her kings” must refer to “land” since the pronoun is feminine singular. So, the two kings are the king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the king of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The two kings cannot be the King of Israel and the King of Aram, the two kings in the Syro-Ephraimite coalition, because they are not the kings of one country. This could only be said of the territory known as Israel after the time of Solomon. Thus, the interpretation of the NRSV is highly unlikely because it contradicts the grammar of the text.

6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

Insufficient thought has been given by interpreters to the statement that the child born to the virgin will “eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” First, refusing evil and choosing good is connected to the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:9, 16. It refers to making moral choices on one’s own and hence refers to the age of accountability.²¹ In biblical culture, this is around 13 years old, the time of a boy’s Bar Mitzvah in later Judaism.

Nogah Hareuveni has best explained “eating curds and honey.”²² Curds are a product of pastoralists, those who herd flocks of goats or sheep and cattle. Honey comes from bees and refers to the forests as opposed to cultivated land because honey bees flourished in the wild. In the land of Canaan there was always a struggle over the use of land. Pastoralists, those who grazed animals, would look for uncultivated areas for pasturage. Farmers, on the other hand, were terracing the hillsides and turning areas that grew wild into cultivated fields and vineyards. What Isaiah is saying is that the region will be so devastated by the Assyrians that there will be few farmers and the cultivated fields will return to regions left to grow wild. This would allow bees and pastoralists more territory.

So, eating curds and honey is not a statement of blessing, but rather a sign of devastation and judgement in the land. The fact that the child will eat curds and honey means that the land will be dominated by pastoralists and not farmers. This is an indication of the devastation and destruction resulting in exile and the conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Therefore, a person reduced to eating curds and honey is a person in exile, not a person enjoying the good life. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.²³

In the case of Jesus, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.

The larger literary structure

The interpretation proposed fits the larger literary structure better since Isaiah 7:14 is construed as a prediction of the distant future.²⁴ First, it is the normal pattern of the author to place predictions of events to be fulfilled in the far future side by side with predictions of events to be fulfilled in the near future. There are three panels or sections announcing the coming king: (1) the birth of Immanuel in 7:10–17, (2) the gift of the son El-Gibbor (Mighty God) in 9:1–7, and (3) the future reign of a shoot from the stump of Jesse in 11:1–9.²⁵ In each case, these predictions of the far future are placed side by side with predictions relating to the near future, such as the invasion of the Assyrians in 8:5–8. Note that in Isaiah 8:8, the country of Judah is designated as Immanuel’s land. Such a designation would be appropriate for a king or even Yahweh himself—El Gibbor! Also note that the third section on the coming king predicts a shoot from the stump of Jesse. The shoot comes from the stump of Jesse because what is needed is not another David, but a new David!

Conclusion

Textual analysis has shown the original text of Isaiah 7:14 may be even closer to the citation of Matthew than what we have in the Masoretic Text. Moreover, Proverbs 30:19 does not support the view that ʿalmâ is only a young woman and not necessarily a virgin. Semantic analysis of all instances demonstrates the meaning “young virgin.” In the larger structure of Isaiah, we see a switching back and forth between promises for the distant future and promises for the near future. The exegesis points to an interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 as a direct prediction for the distant future.

The coming king predicted in Isaiah 7–12 is associated with the end of exile. In Isaiah, this end of exile is also clearly correlated with the forgiveness of sins, the renewing of the covenant, the rebuilding of the temple, and the return of Yahweh to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people. This is a great harbinger of the birth of the child that first Christmas.

Notes

1
Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1–12: A Commentary, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 308 (italics his).
2
James M. Hamilton, Jr., “ ‘The Virgin Will Conceive’: Typological Fulfillment in Matthew 1:18–23,” in Built Upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew edited by Daniel M. Gurtner and John Nolland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 228–247.
3
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14: « ‛Almâ » et « Parthenos » dans l’universe biblique: un point de vue linguistique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2013). English Translation and Updated Version: Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020)
4
See William R. Osborne, “Trees and Kings: A Comparative Analysis of Tree Imagery in Israel’s Prophetic Tradition and the Ancient Near East,” Ph.D. diss. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015.
5
Isaiah 6:13 is difficult to interpret but may contain an earlier reference to the cutting down of the tree of the Davidic dynasty/kingdom.
6
See discussion in Peter J. Gentry, How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017).
7
Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39 (NAC; Nashville: B&H, 2007), 201–211.
8
See P. Joüon, Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1923), § 121e and Christo H. J. van der Merwe, Jackie A. Naudé and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (Second Edition; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 187–88.
9
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ‘almâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 189–196.
10
For the evidence, and analysis of that evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14.
11
The charts are adapted from Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 45–46.
12
This problem is not treated in Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. Tome 5: Job, Proverbes, Qohélet et Cantique des Cantiques. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en cooperation avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, Hans Peter Rüger et James A. Sanders. Edited by Clemens Locher, Stephen D. Ryan and Adrian Schenker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2015).
13
This codification and nomenclature is derived from Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de L’ancien Testament. 1. Josué, Juges, Ruth, Samuel, Rois, Chroniques, Esdras, Néhémie, Esther. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en coopération avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, H. Peter Rüger, coéditeur, James A. Sanders, coéditeur (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982).
14
Jenni, in his magisterial research on the prepositions, classifies Proverbs 30:19 as a locative use of beth. Nonetheless, he finds only one other occurrence similar to Proverbs 30:19 and it is not a precise parallel. See E. Jenni, Die hebräischen Präpositionen, Band 1: Die Präposition Beth (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1992), 52–69, 171–174, 195–197, # 2315.
15
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 57.
16
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 66–82.
17
So BDB, KB3, DCH, Ges18. BDB = Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1907); KB3 = L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1997); DCH = Clines, David J. A., ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 9 vols. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993–2016); Ges18 = R. Meyer, H. Donner, and J. Renz, Wilhelm Gesenius Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18^th Edition (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
18
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 209–212.
19
F. Zorell, ed., Lexicon Hebraicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989).
20
Murray R. Adamthwaite, “Isaiah 7:16 – Key to the Immanuel Prophecy,” The Reformed Theological Review 59.2 (2000), 65–83.
21
W. M. Clark, “A Legal Background to the Yahwist’s Use of ‘Good and Evil’ in Genesis 2–3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969): 266–278. See also H. Blocher, In the Beginning (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), 126–133.
22
Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage (Kiryat Ono, Israel: Neot Kedumim, 1980), 11–22.
23
In the New Testament, when Jesus reached the age of accountability, he informed his parents, Joseph and Mary, “Do you not know that I must be concerned with the affairs of my Father?” (Luke 2:49). Three panels or sections in Isaiah 7–12 focus on the coming king. If Isaiah 7:14 is a prediction of the distant future and the birth of a future king, then the age of accountability is fitting and relevant in this prophecy.
24
See Peter J. Gentry, “The Literary Macrostructures of the Book of Isaiah and Authorial Intent,” in Bind up the Testimony: Explorations in the Genesis of the Book of Isaiah, edited by Daniel I. Block and Richard L. Schultz (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2015), 227–254.
25
See Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 136–156.

B. H. Streeter’s Four Gospels at One Hundred

How does the Oxford don’s influential argument for ‘local texts’ of the Gospels hold up after 100 years?

Peter R. Rodgers

This year, 2024, marks an important centennial for the study of the New Testament text. In 1924, the Oxford scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter published his important book, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins. Concerning this book Bishop Stephen Neill wrote,

In 1924 Streeter published a large book of over 600 pages, called The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins, a comprehensive gathering together of the results of the scientific study of The Gospels up till that time. That this is a great book, will not, I think, be doubted by anyone who has ever used it.¹

A theory of Gospel origins

In this book Streeter laid out what became the primary theory of Synoptic Gospel origins: The four-source hypothesis. The four sources were (1) the Gospel of Mark; (2) a source of material common to Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark—referred to as Q, from the German Quelle (“source”); (3) M, which was material unique to Matthew; and (4) L, containing material only in Luke. Although there have been alternate views, such as Matthean priority, in the century since Streeter published this book, most scholars have followed some form of Streeter’s four-source hypothesis.

In the course of his treatment of Gospel origins, Streeter advanced several theories which have not fared well.

In the course of his treatment of Gospel origins, Streeter advanced several theories which have not fared well among scholars. One was the proposal of a document prior to our Gospel of Luke, which he called “Proto-Luke.” Another was the proposal of a Caesarean textual group or text type, based on several recent manuscript discoveries. Both of these proposals were subjected to careful analysis and have been largely abandoned. A third proposal, positing “local texts” of the great ecclesiastical jurisdictions or sees in the second century, has also been largely ignored by scholars. This brief review will focus on Streeter’s “local texts” in light of recent discoveries and refined research methods.

A theory of local texts of the Gospels

Streeter advanced a theory of “local texts” which developed in the great sees of the church in the second century. The five sees that developed their distinctive local texts, according to Streeter, were

Alexandria
Antioch
Caesarea
Italy and Gaul
Carthage

For each of these local texts Streeter gave as the primary witness one of the major manuscripts known to him in 1924. Thus for Alexandria he presented Codex Vaticanus (B), for Italy and Gaul Codex Bezae (D), for Carthage the Latin manuscript k, etc. Streeter also explored an “Ephesian text” for the period of the late second century. But that text was not included in his summary chart because no major manuscript could be found to represent that text.

Streeter’s chart summarizing his local texts and their witnesses. Source

What Streeter did not have when he wrote The Four Gospels in 1924 is the wealth of New Testament papyri which we now possess (some 141 at latest count). Several of these are assigned to the second century, the era of the great sees of which Streeter wrote. Although some of these papyri are fragmentary, there are several larger papyri such as P46 (Pauline Epistles) P66 (John) and P75 (Luke and John). These three papyri, dated to around the year 200 have been very important for textual criticism in considering the early text of the New Testament. But it is important to be clear about how secure their dating is.² It also must be remembered that, although the early papyri were all found in Egypt, it does not follow that any one of them originated there.³

What follows is a comparison of two churches in the late second century, and a proposal about their “local texts,” based on recent research on these two churches.

A tale of two churches

Alexandria

Egypt was “behindhand in welcoming Christianity,” Streeter wrote in the book. That cryptic remark has been confirmed by subsequent study of the subject. In his landmark work entitled Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, Colin Roberts wrote,

The obscurity that veils the early history of the Church in Egypt and that does not lift until the beginning of the third century constitutes a conspicuous challenge to the historian of primitive Christianity.⁴

More recently, noted papyrologist Roger Bagnall has pointed out that the evidence for Christianity in Egypt is non-existent in the documentary papyri until the beginning of the third century AD.⁵

The obscurity of the church in second century Egypt is best explained by the observation that the early Christian community there was largely Jewish. We know that the Jewish community in Egypt did not fare well under the Romans. Especially the Jewish revolt from AD 115–117 led to much death and destruction and had long lasting effects.⁶

But toward the end of the second century the fortunes of the church in Egypt began to change. The founding of the Alexandrian Catechetical school under Pantaenus and Clement, and the long episcopate of Demetrius (AD 192–232) transformed a small and struggling church into the leading intellectual center of the third century church. Now it was a church capable of producing carefully copied texts, and faithfully preserving the New Testament.

Ephesus

The church in Ephesus had almost the opposite career. With regard to this church and its local text, we may begin by quoting the important observations made by Paul Treblico. In his significant study, he writes that Ephesus was

the capital of the province of Asia and the leading city of Asia Minor, where the church grew very rapidly. There is no doubting the importance of the Church in Asia Minor in the first two centuries. Paul spent a considerable period of time in Asia Minor, and Luke devotes a significant amount of Acts to Paul’s travels in this region. That the early Church grew very quickly in Asia Minor is shown by the number of centers in which, according to our evidence, the early church became established by the end of the second century… In the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem following the first Jewish revolt of AD 66–73 Anatolia had become perhaps the most important geographical center of Christianity in the ancient world.

The remains of the library at ancient Ephesus. Source

But before the end of the second century, things began to change, and Ephesus would lose its prominence. Perhaps the most important factor was the the debate over the date of Easter known as the Quartodeciman controversy. The long standing tradition in Asia was to celebrate Easter on the fourteenth Nisan, the day of the Passover, whatever day of the week it fell. The church of Rome saw the matter differently and believed that Easter must always be celebrated on a Sunday.

For a long time, the churches agreed to disagree and respect each other’s tradition. But when the tolerant and pastoral Eleutherus, Bishop of Rome, died in AD 189, he was replaced by Victor, a north African who insisted that all churches celebrate the great feast on a Sunday. Polycrates, the Bishop of Ephesus, wrote to Victor pleading for toleration. Victor replied by insisting on the Roman way and excommunicating Ephesus and the Asian churches. From AD 190 onward, Asia in general, and Ephesus in particular, seems to have lost its premier position. We do not find in the third-century Asian church the strong cast of leaders such as one finds in the second century: Papias of Hierapolis, Polycarp of Smyrna, Melito of Sardis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, Polycrates of Ephesus, and others.

To his credit, Streeter knew that such an important local church in Asia, with its great see at Ephesus, must have had its own distinctive local text. He therefore sets out to discover “the text of Ephesus” on the basis of the available evidence. His conclusion was that the evidence was far too scanty to draw any definite conclusions. Further he remarked that text of Ephesus would have succumbed at an early date to the standard text found in the two dominant patriarchates, Antioch and Constantinople so that it “was swamped at an early date and has left no trace on the manuscript tradition.”

This comparative study of two second-century churches presents us with an anomaly. In Egypt, we find several early and carefully copied New Testament papyri, but we also find the profile of a small and struggling church hardly capable of producing strict and careful manuscripts. On the other hand, the church in Asia/Ephesus was well developed with strong leadership but has left us no trace of its local text. What do we make of this tale of two churches?

A home for a homeless text

In 1881, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort published their influential edition of the Greek New Testament. This critical edition dominated the landscape in New Testament studies for decades thereafter. A distinctive feature of Hort’s rationale in the introduction to their New Testament is his proposal of the “neutral text.” This was the text of Codex Vaticanus (B) and Codex Sinaiticus (א) where they agree. Concerning Hort’s “neutral text” Streeter wrote, “Hort declined to recognize any connection of B א with Alexandria … and assigned it to no definite locality.”

Hort’s neutral text was homeless and needed a home.

Hort’s neutral text was homeless and needed a home. Most scholars of the text in the generations following the publication of the Westcott-Hort text assigned that text to Alexandria, and Streeter followed suit. It remains exactly there in twenty-first-century presentations of how the New Testament text developed.⁷

However, in light of the history sketched briefly above, it seems unlikely that the “neutral text” began its life in Alexandria.⁸ The chief city of Asia, with its strong church of the second century, provides an appropriate home for the “neutral text.” Toward the end of the century, when the church of Ephesus began to struggle and the church in Alexandria was gaining strength, that text migrated to the place that was to become the intellectual capital of the whole church from the third century. The neutral text was given new life in its new home.

So, what is the final analysis of Streeter’s important work a century later? Streeter was Dean Ireland’s Professor of Biblical Exegesis in Oxford, where he did most of his work. It’s a place Matthew Arnold famously called “the home of lost causes.” And while this may sometimes be the case, for the reasons stated above, a fresh pursuit of the local texts of the great sees in the second century, far from being a lost cause, may turn out to be a very promising and fruitful exercise. Perhaps the century after Streeter will finally answer the question.

A larger version of this paper may be found in Filologia Neotestamentaria, 37 (2024): 65–74 which is online here.

Notes

1
Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, New Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 132.
2
See Brent Nongbri, God’s library: The Archeology of the early Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For challenges to traditional dating of early papyri.
3
Eldon Jay Epp, Perspectives in New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962–2004 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 408, 419.
4
Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy for 1977 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1. So also Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 99 who writes, “The origins of the church in Egypt are enveloped in deep obscurity.”
5
Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.
6
For an account of the Jewish revolt and its aftermath see Victor A. Techerikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judicarum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, 225–60. And recently, Noah Hacham, Tal Ilan (eds.). Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum Volume 5: The Early Roman Period (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg; Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University Press, 2022).
7
Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 312–313.
8
I have recently argued that the “Alexandrian text” did not originate there but came originally from Ephesus. See Peter R. Rodgers, “The Origins of the Alexandrian Text of the New Testament,” Filologia Neotestamentaria, XXXV (2022), 61–65.

Dating Ancient Manuscripts with Help from Modern Software

Dating Greek manuscripts by handwriting can be precarious, but a new method may put the results on firmer ground.

Pat Sanders

Paleographers perform an important initial step in the textual criticism of the Bible, from studying the development of ancient Greek handwriting to determining the date and provenance of undated manuscripts. One maxim of textual criticism is that, all things being equal, the earliest readings are preferred. However, ancient literary manuscripts often were not dated by their scribes, so how are we to determine the date of undated biblical manuscripts?

Traditional dating methods

Aside from using modern scientific methods that may damage a manuscript, sometimes there are clues that we can use to determine a date. For example:

Some manuscripts have a colophon. This is a note appended to the end of the manuscript by a scribe. It may provide a date and other information, yet sometimes colophons have been forged, even in antiquity, to make a manuscript appear older.
The archeological context may produce a relative date for dating some manuscripts.
Sometimes a documentary manuscript like a deed or will was reused, usually by writing on the opposite side of the document that is dated, which also produces a relative date.
Some manuscripts have none of these “helps” for dating. In that case, paleographers traditionally date a manuscript by its writing style. This is the most common method.

In this last procedure, paleographers classify the handwriting of dated manuscripts into various handwriting styles, which have been ordered chronologically by century. Then, to determine a date for an undated manuscript, they compare the script of the undated manuscript to these chronologically ordered styles.

Paleography is often considered more of an art than a science.

Having begun in the eighteenth century, the field of paleography is relatively young, and yet a surprising number of issues have developed with this methodology. For example, the definitions of the various handwriting styles can lack clarity, since the same adjectives, like upright and round, are used to describe multiple styles. Furthermore, scribes employed multiple styles during the same time period, so a clear linear progression from one style to the other does not always occur. These two issues alone can make a comparison of parallel writing styles difficult, so scholars spend many years developing their expertise. Thus, paleography is often considered more of an art than a science.

Traces of subjectivity

Over the years, some manuscripts have been wrongly dated. Ernest Colwell highlighted one case: “There is in Leningrad one folio of a Greek Gospel for which [Caspar Rene] Gregory accepted the date AD 1247. Yet he assigned the manuscript on Mount Sinai from which it was taken to the fourteenth century.”¹ Pasquale Orsini confirmed the difficulty in dating manuscripts using the examples of P.Kellis Lit. II 97 and the Codex Tchacos, for which paleographic dating contradicts the scientific data, and even the historical and archaeological contexts relating to these manuscripts.² In a recent example, Georgi Parpulov redated the important New Testament manuscript GA 35 from the eleventh century to the fourteenth century. This manuscript is considered a prime representative of the Byzantine text and so was the base text for The Gospel According to John in the Byzantine Tradition published in 2007.

A picture of the John Rylands John fragment or Gregory-Aland P52 — Papyrus 52 (2nd c.) on display at the John Rylands Library. Source

Perhaps problems, such as these, stem from the subjective nature of the methodology traditionally employed. Brent Nongbri has highlighted several issues with the use of handwriting styles, such as circularity and potential bias toward early manuscripts. In his study of manuscript P75, Nongbri cautioned against dating papyri too early. He was concerned that most parallels chosen for dating P75 were themselves paleographically dated, and therefore, they were not independent witnesses for a second-century date for P75.³

In another case, according to Nongbri, leading scholars use the widely accepted, second-century dating of manuscript P52 in assessing the date of the Gospel of John, yet Nongbri maintained that P52 has the same attributes as third-century papyri, which should broaden the acceptable date range for this manuscript.⁴ Not all have accepted Nongbri’s results, but his work is a reminder that paleographically dating manuscripts has been subject to controversy and debate among scholars regarding the accuracy actually obtained by this process.

Using computational modeling

The need for a more objective approach is apparent. Models are key to discovering patterns, testing predictions, communicating explanations from the known to the unknown, and ultimately, gaining objectivity. Furthermore, employing a graphical modeling and analysis tool, like decision tree ensembling, allows a user to see the results of an analysis easily. Another benefit of a decision tree model is that it is appropriate to use when a series of decisions need to be made to determine an answer, which corresponds nicely to the procedure for dating a manuscript. Therefore, the purpose of my research is to determine whether computational modeling may be used to provide a more objective basis for dating ancient Greek manuscripts.

The research for this project proceeded in three broad steps. First, a group, or domain, of similar manuscripts was chosen, which included Greek minuscule literary manuscripts for the initial project. In other words, manuscripts selected to be modeled had to be written in the Greek language in the minuscule hand, which is a script having lower-case letters that are sometimes connected. Furthermore, the contents of the manuscripts had to be literary in nature rather than the every-day type of documents known as documentary. In addition, only internally dated manuscripts were used, rather than manuscripts dated paleographically to a century or range of centuries. These manuscripts were chosen from the collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the BNF in Paris, and the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. Additional manuscripts for the model were selected from the online collection at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

Second, the structure of the model had to be devised and the manuscripts analyzed against it. To devise the model, secondary literature on paleography at the Tyndale House Library in Cambridge was reviewed to accumulate a list of over 100 attributes of Greek minuscule literary manuscripts. These attributes are “omnitextual,” meaning they are not only about the shapes of letters and ligatures, but also include codicological and orthographical attributes, such as the material of the manuscript and the shapes of breathing marks.

In order to work with the attributes programmatically, the attributes are also discrete, or granular, rather than a combination of various characteristics like handwriting styles would be. The chosen dated manuscripts were compared against this list of attributes to record evidence for the existence of these attributes in each century in which the manuscripts were written. Thus, the corresponding attributes were noted for each dated manuscript in order to build a model of the Greek minuscule literary domain. This procedure is called training the model.

Third, a second set of dated Greek minuscule literary manuscripts was selected in order to test, or validate, the accuracy of the model, which has been named Omnitext™. In blind tests, these manuscripts were compared to the model and computations made for each century in which a corresponding attribute was found. This procedure is called ensembling.

Greek letter — Each script attribute gets a “vote” for each century in which it is used.

Attribute	9th c.	10th	11th	12th	13th	14th	15th	16th	17th
	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
					✔	✔	✔	✔	✔

For example, if a matching attribute from a manuscript appeared in the model throughout the minuscule period, from the ninth through the seventeenth centuries, every century receives a point, also called a vote. However, if the next matching attribute only appeared in the model from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, then only those centuries receive a vote. In this example, the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries rise in importance, and the ninth through twelfth centuries fall in importance. The matching of corresponding attributes continues for approximately 100 attributes, and the plausible date further narrows.

When all attributes have been examined, the votes for each century are aggregated to produce a secure date based on the evidence in the model. The century with the most votes is the predicted “winner.” If there is a tie, a date-range between the centuries is predicted. For each test, the model predicted the correct date, either to the century or to a range of centuries including the correct date. The test results indicate that a decision tree model using ensembling can provide a more objective means to determine a secure date range for those manuscripts that are undated.

The future

From Omnitext, which is software with a patent pending with international license based on this methodology, three reports may be obtained about the manuscript examined. First, and most importantly, is the date prediction. Second is a report of the most impactful attributes for dating the manuscript, in other words, the attributes that helped narrow the date range. Third is a report of the dated manuscript in the model that most closely matches the undated manuscript that was compared to the model, based on their corresponding attributes. Thus, Omnitext is providing evidence for paleographical decisions and, in this way, commending the field as more of a science than an art.

Omnitext is providing evidence for paleographical decisions and, in this way, commending the field as more of a science than an art.

Recently, Omnitext has been integrated with the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster. The goal is to include other researchers in the paleographical analyses of manuscripts by comparing manuscripts to the model. This procedure is called a correlation.

Recently, a graduate student has tested the process and students at Birmingham Theological Seminary, Samford University, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary are making Omnitext correlations. If you would like a demonstration of the process or want to analyze a manuscript against the Omnitext model (or have your students do so), please see Omnitext.org and contact Dr. Pat Sanders. With the development of this new tool, a more secure and objective date range based on evidence may be obtained in dating Greek minuscule manuscripts.

Notes

1
Ernest C. Colwell, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, NTTS 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 125.
2
Pasquale Orsini, Studies on Greek and Coptic Majuscule Scripts and Books, vol. 15 of Studies in Manuscript Cultures, eds. Michael Friedrich, Harunaga Issacson, and Jorg B. Quenzer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), xiii–xiv.
3
Brent Nongbri, “Reconsidering the Place of Papyrus Bodmer XIV–XV (P75) in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” JBL 135 (2016): 408.
4
Brent Nongbri, “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel,” HTR 98 (2005): 23–32.

The First Parallel Bible

Origen’s six-columned Old Testament, produced in the second century, was a monumental achievement in the Bible’s history.

John D. Meade

Last month, the papers from the Text & Canon Institute’s first academic colloquium were published as The Forerunners and Heirs of Origen’s Hexapla. Thanks to our supporters, the book is available open access. This article is written to introduce Origen’s work and to celebrate this milestone.

Sound Bible study often requires careful comparison of different translations. After strewing different translations over a desk and reading each one individually, one wishes for a more organized tool to ease comparison.

Parallel Bibles like this one remain popular with serious Bible readers. Image source

One could consult a volume like the NIV, KJV, NASB, Amplified, Parallel Bible for such a purpose. With each version in its own column to be read from top to bottom and the verses arranged in parallel fashion, one can simply compare the different translations. The bible software user can create their own parallel bible by opening and arranging windows however preferred. With so many translations, a vast amount of knowledge must be collected and organized so that it works for the user.

The history of parallel bibles shows a human impulse for ordering textual knowledge. The late Renaissance Polyglots (multi-language Bibles) were products of this tendency. Biblical scholars produced monumental editions in international cooperation in Alcalá, Spain (Complutensian Polyglot; 1522); Antwerp, Belgium (The Antwerp Polyglot; 1572); Paris, France (The Paris Polyglot; 1645); and London, England (The London Polyglot; 1658). The culmination of these great Polyglots, Brian Walton’s London Polyglot, contained biblical texts in nine languages assembled in parallel: Hebrew, Samaritan, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian. But where did this idea to produce such Bibles come from?¹

There were Medieval precursors to these massive tomes, but even these appear to owe their inspiration to the work of a classically Greek trained catechetical instructor from Alexandria, Egypt named Origen.

Who is Origen?

Origen is best known today as a philosopher or theologian. But both his followers and detractors note that he was trained thoroughly in grammar or philology and devoted himself to this discipline. Origen did not just know his parts of speech. Rather, training in philology meant that he was a diorthōtēs (διορθωτής) or a corrector of copies of ancient books as well as an exegete of those same texts. Thus, he collected many copies of the scriptures and even evaluated whether they belonged to the accurate, old, or majority copies. Likewise, he collected the various translations of the Scriptures and evaluated their “expressiveness” and clarity or whether a version was enslaved to the Hebrew idiom.

As Origen studied the copies of the books of the Old Testament, he described his work in terms of classical Greek philology:

I found that the discord (between the copies) could be healed, if God grants, by using the rest of the editions as a criterion. For by making a judgment, based on the rest of the editions, concerning ambiguous texts in the Seventy [= the Septuagint] due to the discord between the copies, I kept the accord among them. I marked with an obelos some passages not in the Hebrew because I was not reckless to remove any of them. And I added some passages with asteriskoi in order that it might be clear that I added passages not in the Seventy from the rest of the editions agreeing with the Hebrew. (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14)

Elsewhere, Origen says the Greeks called the critical signs asterisk (※) and obelus (—) referring to the tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians who had accomplished similar textual work on the copies of Homer’s Iliad (Origen, Epistle to Africanus 7). Thus, Origen as a philologist created scholarly editions of the biblical books. Furthermore, just as the Alexandrian grammarians produced commentaries on their texts, in various places in his sermons and commentaries Origen also recorded variants or differences between copies and translations and offered his readers solutions. Perhaps Origen, but more probably his followers, began to use the margins of manuscripts to record valuable comments known as scholia on the texts.

Codex Marchalianus, showing the scholia in left margin for Aquila, Theodotian, and Symmachus. Vat.gr.2125 f. 184

Thus, although Origen is most known for his theological and philosophical work, he was first and foremost a philologist and textual critic. He, therefore, left copies of his critical editions for his followers to consult and use in the library at Caesarea. Eusebius, the fourth-century Church historian, informs his readers that Origen left behind copies of his Hexapla (HECK-suh-pluh) “six-fold” or “six-column” Bible and another edition which was later called the Tetrapla (te-TRUH-pluh) or “four-fold” edition.

What was the Hexapla?

Since a few church fathers described the Hexapla in some detail (Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus), Origen must have compiled (not authored) such a magnificent and complex text requiring his followers to explain and interpret it. The six-column work in Hebrew and Greek probably had no exact precedent, even though other bilingual (Greek and Latin), literary, multi-column texts probably existed around Origen’s time.

Interestingly, Origen nowhere calls his massive textual construct “the Hexapla.” The term comes from Eusebius. In the first mention of this text, Eusebius says, “Having collected all of these (editions), he divided them into sections, and placed them opposite each other, with the Hebrew text itself. He thus left us the copies of the so-called Hexapla.” Other church fathers describe the work similarly, and there are a few fragmentary manuscript remains of the Hexapla, mostly Psalms, which do afford some evidence to aid the reconstruction of the columnar layout of the Hexapla: (1) Hebrew, (2) Hebrew in Greek transcription, (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) Septuagint, (6) Theodotion.

A copy of Origen’s Hexapla in multiple columns in the undertext of a palimpsest in the Cairo Geniza. Cambridge Taylor-Schechter 12.182

This six-column text of the Old Testament would have granted Origen and his followers access to the Hebrew and to the most significant Greek translations of the day. A user of this text could read vertically any one version from top to bottom or all six versions from left to right across the entire spread of a folio in the codex.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. If one of those texts was shorter or longer (like in the case of the Book of Job), a reader of the Hexapla would be able to observe the additions and omissions plainly. Furthermore, at disputed places like Isaiah 7:14, the reader of the Hexapla would immediately grasp two different translations of the Hebrew: (1) the Septuagint’s “behold the virgin (parthenos)” and (2) the Jewish Revisers’ “behold the young woman (neanis),” a difference still reflected in Bible translations today.

Origen’s textual scholarship gave the church a real advance in knowledge of the biblical text in its several versions so that the reader of the Hexapla would know the similarities and differences between the church’s version and the Jewish versions used in the synagogue. But he probably had other reasons for producing this synopsis.

Illustration by Jordan Daniel Singer
The Legacy of the First Revised Bible Translations
The modern impulse to get the Bible right in translation has its roots in the Jews who revised the Septuagint.
John D. Meade

What was the Hexapla for?

Origen probably had many reasons for compiling the Hexapla. These include apologetics, textual criticism, exegesis, or perhaps even to learn the Hebrew language. A massive text like this cannot be reduced to any one purpose. But one significant reason for the Hexapla seems clear: it was a preliminary tool for a corrected text or diorthōsis. Origen used it to prepare a later, more accessible and economic critical text of the Old Testament with signs. This text was later called the Tetrapla, and it is probably the text that Origen described in his Matthew Commentary quoted above. This text contained only one column of text, but it would still give readers immediate access to the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek versions. A manuscript dated to soon after Origen’s death (P. Grenf. 1.5; 250–350 AD) containing a fragmentary text of Ezekiel 5:12–6:3 with asterisks furnishes the earliest material evidence for Origen’s second edition. This edition, or one based on it, must have circulated quite early, and it was still available to the Syriac Bishop, Paul of Tella, who translated it into Syriac in 616 AD (a text known as the “Syro-Hexapla”).

If Origen’s Septuagint version lacked text that was contained in the Hebrew, he would add Greek text from one of the Three Jewish revisers (normally Theodotion) to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew. These additional words or lines were marked with an asterisk (※). The ending of Job 42:16–17 illustrates the point. The original Greek translation of Job did not contain the text about Job’s death (“and Job saw his sons … and Job died old and full of days.”) found in the Hebrew. As the later manuscript below shows, Origen added those three lines from the Greek revision of Theodotion and marked them with asterisks so the reader would know the Hebrew was longer and the Greek had been augmented.

Asterisks in the left margin of Tyrnavos 25 (Rahlfs 788). Author’s image

Similarly, if the Hebrew lacked a word or verse that the Septuagint contained, Origen would not remove the Greek text, but would mark it with an obelus or a lance (— or ÷) to make the Hebrew omission known to Christian readers. Thus, the quantitative differences that would have been visually obvious in the columnar Hexapla would now be observed in a text that contained the critical signs. In this way, no text from either language was lost for the careful reader.

Furthermore, this Tetrapla or “four-fold” version contained exegetically and textually significant readings or scholia from the three Jewish revisers: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. This was important for the scholar who did not have access to these works independently, but now could access the more significant and interesting readings through the margins of Origen’s critical text. In this way, Origen and his followers could diffuse textual knowledge not only about the Hebrew text vis-à-vis the Greek but now also information about how contemporary Jews interpreted the Hebrew text in Greek, exegetical information that Christian interpreters also used and incorporated into their own commentaries.

The Hexapla, therefore, functioned as a necessary and preliminary tool for Origen’s later critical edition. Origen’s followers innovated and enhanced his critical edition, and they promulgated it in the early part of the fourth century.

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Origen’s philological work remains a reminder that early Christians adopted and innovated scholarly methods of their day for serious study of the biblical text. Part of the early Christian DNA, so to speak, was serious study of the manuscript copies of the Scriptures. This fact in itself justifies researching Origen’s textual work today and is a reminder that Christians should continue in this tradition of serious study of the biblical text.

Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament.

The papers from the TCI’s first colloquium were published in July and are available open access.

Besides this, Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament, giving us valuable knowledge of the state of the Hebrew text in Caesarea in the second and third centuries AD. There are precious few remains of Hebrew manuscripts from this period, but the remains of Origen’s textual work, even in Greek dress, provide us access to what form the Hebrew text had from this period. The Hexapla’s value on this point cannot be overstated.

Finally, the independent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are entirely lost to history. Almost all access to these works depends on the marginal readings that come from the Tetrapla or similar texts that were ultimately excerpted and quoted from the Hexapla. As such, retrieving and reconstructing Origen’s textual work gives us access to Jewish Greek exegesis of the Hebrew text from the 1st–2nd centuries AD. The readings of the Three give us significant textual information for reconstructing the text histories of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Greek translations.

The first parallel Bible in history witnesses to our desire to order textual knowledge. Although the methods for such organization change over time, the desire to know the Scriptures through intense study of their copies continues. Origen and his followers stand at the headwaters of this stream in which Christians still work today. As then, the goal today is to heal the discord between copies.

Notes

1
For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

The Changing Fortunes of Codex Vaticanus

Today, Codex Vaticanus is treated as a premier biblical manuscript. It was not always so.

An-Ting Yi

Among those precious treasures kept in the Vatican Library is a fourth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible, with the shelf-mark Vaticanus Graecus 1209. For many, this ancient manuscript is known as the “Codex Vaticanus.” Among biblical scholars, its standard reference is the Roman capital letter B or the two digits 03 (or a combination of these two). This manuscript is generally regarded as one of the pillar witnesses for reconstructing the Greek New Testament. Thanks to the digital era and the generosity and effort of the Vatican Library staff, since 2015, anyone can simply search online and see this elegant manuscript without leaving home.

Historically, however, these aspects were not taken for granted. In fact, this manuscript for a long time was not seen as an important witness, its dating was uncertain, its access was limited, and its name was not “Codex Vaticanus.” How can these changes be accounted for? In what follows, I will highlight several of the more interesting aspects of Vaticanus’s changing fortunes over the centuries.

From corrupted witness to crowned pillar

This manuscript was brought to the scholarly world’s attention by the famous Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). In 1521, he received a letter from his close friend in Rome, Paolo Bombace (1476–1527). He informed Erasmus that a Greek manuscript in the papal library, written in very ancient characters, did not contain the Comma Johanneum (the trinitarian passage at 1 John 5:7). Years later, Erasmus encountered the Spanish scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), who became one of his many opponents. Sepúlveda wrote against Erasmus’s project of the Greek New Testament by referring to an ancient manuscript in the Vatican Library that has hundreds of differences from Erasmus’s editions. We know today that he was referring to Codex Vaticanus.

The statue of Erasmus at the University Rotterdam is the oldest statue in the Netherlands. Photo from Flickr
Erasmus and the Search for the Original Text of the New Testament
Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was a monumental achievement, but left room for later scholars to improve it.
Martin Heide

Sepúlveda also pointed out that Vaticanus’s text is similar to the underlying Greek text of the Latin Vulgate, thereby supporting the authenticity of the Latin textual tradition against Erasmus’s new and controversial Latin translation that he had based on other Greek manuscripts. In response, Erasmus insisted that the Greek and Latin texts he edited were superior to the texts found in Vaticanus and the Vulgate. In defending his preferred text, Erasmus further came up with a hypothesis that Vaticanus, together with other witnesses like it, must have been corrected according to the Vulgate text, thus making it of little use for his edition.

Known as the “Latinization theory,” Erasmus’s proposal would become dominant in the coming two centuries. Consequently, Codex Vaticanus was dismissed by the majority of scholars following Erasmus. Despite its antiquity, it was seen as a “Latinized” and corrupted witness.

Such a label was retained all the way until the second half of the eighteenth century. Because of the developments in scholarship, especially the paradigm shift in terms of the way manuscripts were assessed, scholars started looking at this manuscript from another perspective. The German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) and his Greek New Testament, published in 1831, can be seen as a watershed in text-critical studies. Lachmann highly valued Codex Vaticanus and considered its similarity with the Latin tradition not as the result of corruption but as an indication of a commonly shared, ancient source. Combined with other insights from his contemporaries, Lachmann’s observation became the basis of modern critical scholarship.

One of the features that distinguishes Codex Vaticanus is that it contains the Old and New Testament. Facsimile photo by Chandler Nick

As a result, subsequent editions of the Greek New Testament were prepared by making heavy use of Vaticanus’s text. Notably, the Cambridge textual critics Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892) published their influential The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881, in which they were confident that our manuscript should be seen as the best witness among all the retainable sources. Through Westcott and Hort’s text, Codex Vaticanus bears a lasting impact on many contemporary vernacular New Testament translations.

From filtered data to full access

Erasmus’s Latinization theory was not the sole factor that caused subsequent scholars to be persuaded. Inaccessibility also played a decisive role. Before the internet and digitization became the norm, examining manuscripts was laborious and luxurious. One had to travel to where a certain manuscript was held, usually in a library or monastery, and stay there to study the manuscript. This came with various challenges, sometimes including a refusal to consult the material. The study of Codex Vaticanus was not an exception.

For a long time, Vaticanus was only seen by a few privileged individuals who could obtain the grant from the Vatican authorities. Under such restrictions, scholars outside Rome hardly knew of any readings from this manuscript. Particularly in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, they usually had to rely on a 1580 publication by Franciscus Lucas Brugensis (1548/9–1619), where some twenty notes about the manuscript’s New Testament text are found.

However, the information was not always precise, and more importantly, the data were selective. Lucas Brugensis aimed to illustrate the reliability of the Latin Vulgate, so his references to our manuscript mainly concerned those cases where they support the Latin rendering. His data certainly reflected this. They were chosen based on his particular interest in the resemblance between Codex Vaticanus and the Latin tradition.

As a result, even what was accessible to scholars from Vaticanus was a “filtered” dataset. By its nature, this filtered data only confirmed the hypothesis proposed by Erasmus that the manuscript was a poorly Latinized witness.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there were many attempts to produce collations of this manuscript, but the goal was seldom achieved. Fortunately, Andreas Birch (1758–1829) found success in examining the manuscript closely during his stay in Rome. He then published an elegant Greek New Testament edition of the Gospels, Quatuor Evangelia Graece, in 1788. Based on personal examination, it contained the first published collection of textual variants of Codex Vaticanus, alongside a lengthy introduction to the manuscript’s characteristics.

Birch’s contribution was significant to the critical study of the New Testament, as it allowed scholars to employ one of the ancient manuscripts known to the text-critical world. Moreover, he was the very first critic who made the public audience aware of the absence of the traditional Markan ending in the manuscript: Codex Vaticanus ended the Gospel of Mark at 16:8 (“for they [the women] were afraid”), followed by a subscription signifying the closure of the book.

Until that point, scholars had no hard evidence to support the patristic evidence that some manuscripts ended Mark at 16:8.

Until that point, scholars had no hard evidence from any Greek manuscript to support the patristic evidence that some manuscripts ended Mark at 16:8 (e.g., Eusebius, to Marinus 1). This abrupt ending would later be accepted as the critical text, thereby substantially changing our understanding of this Gospel’s narrative. But until Birch’s day, only very few scholars outside the Vatican Library knew about this important fourth-century witness to this ending, let alone considering it being the ending of this Gospel.

A miniature of Mark from GA 77 (11th c.). Illustration by Peter Gurry. Photo from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
A Case against the Longer Ending of Mark
An argument that Mark 16:9–20 is not original and so not inspired Scripture
Peter M. Head

From uncertain identity to the ‘Vatican manuscript’

The third and last aspect I want to address is the name “Codex Vaticanus” itself. Nowadays, it is regularly applied to this great Greek Bible manuscript. However, just like the evaluation of its text, this name has changed over time. For instance, when John Mill (1645–1707) was preparing his Greek New Testament edition, his references to our manuscript were not consistent. He variously called it “the Vatican manuscript,” “the Vatican Greek manuscript,” “the ancient manuscript,” or even “a certain manuscript in the Vatican Library.”

Since Mill had to depend on secondary sources, he was not entirely sure how many Vatican manuscripts he was referring to and was also uncertain whether only one single ancient manuscript was responsible for all the referenced data. In the era of inaccessibility, mistaken attributions were found here and there among scholarly works, which were hard to verify.

The title page to Wettstein’s first edition (1751). Photo credit

Later, knowledge about the manuscript gradually grew, and more and more pieces of information became available in the eighteenth century. In his 1751–1752 edition, Johann Jakob Wettstein (1693–1754) created a numbering system for all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. At that point, our manuscript was assigned the letter B, a convention that has lasted until today.

Wettstein’s designation also contributed to the formulation of this manuscript’s distinctness, making it the most famous codex of the Greek Bible in Rome. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Latin term “Codex Vaticanus” (its literal translation would be “a Vatican manuscript”) seems to have become the consistent reference to our manuscript in English scholarly literature. The exclusive use of this term for the manuscript reveals scholarly awareness of its significance and superiority. As noted, this would become the standard name of the manuscript from then on. Alongside the high estimation of its value and the greater use of its text, Codex Vaticanus eventually became the manuscript par excellence among all the New Testament witnesses. Today, it still holds that place for many.

Conclusion

Such an investigation prevents us from judging previous scholarship too quickly.

What can we learn from this unique history? you may ask. Tracing how a particular manuscript was used and perceived over the centuries makes us more aware of the ground and root of our present-day position. It provides us with important historical contexts. Such an investigation also prevents us from judging previous scholarship too quickly without understanding the historical backgrounds and limitations the critics of the past had to face. In this case, it helps us understand why past scholars dismissed Codex Vaticanus as unimportant.

In a way, the changing perceptions of Codex Vaticanus showcase the developments in the discipline of New Testament textual criticism. The study of this multifaceted change also makes us aware of the privilege we have in the digital era. It is a great gift to have full and unrestricted access to this crowned witness, from everywhere, at any time.

How the Two Testaments Became One Bible

When production of two-testament Bibles began in the fourth century, the notion already had centuries of precedent.

Michael Dormandy

I love asking long-established couples how they first met. From Ruth and Boaz on, such stories often reveal the kindness and sovereignty of God in sweet and sometimes unpredictable ways, especially if the union appeared on paper unlikely, but has gone on to be happy and fruitful.

There is one couple, whose union at first seemed extremely unlikely, but which has gone on to be happy and fruitful for two thousand years: the union of the two testaments in the Christian Bible. But how did our two testaments come together? How did those books, which first-century Christians were writing about Jesus, come to be included with the Jewish Scriptures in what we call the Bible?

Uniting the Bible’s two testaments

It’s an important question, because the unity of our Bibles matters more than many Christians today realize and effects many controversial questions. The unity of Scripture means that one of the most important contexts for interpreting any biblical passage is the rest of the Bible. By approaching the Bible as one united collection of books, the early Christians were saying that the context of a biblical book within the Bible is as or more important than its original historical context in ancient Judaism or Greco-Roman culture.

The unity of the Bible is also the basis for connecting themes and symbols across the Bible. This assumes that the Bible has a grand, overarching story, rather than being an assorted collection of anecdotes, moral teachings, and theological ideas. This assumption is basic to Christian preaching, theology, and ethical interpretation of the Bible, but it only makes sense if the two testaments actually do belong together.

This was far from obvious in the first century AD. Imagine how you would feel if someone suggested that some new books, from our own time, deserved to be bound into your Bible. That’s what the early Christians started to do to the Jewish Scriptures, from very soon after the death of Jesus. From as far back in the history of the church as we can trace, it seems to have been uncontroversial among Christians that these new books, about Jesus, had the same authority as the Jewish Scriptures, which Jews had been reading, revering, and seeking to obey for centuries.

Reading the two testaments as one book

We see beginnings of the story in the New Testament. First Timothy 5:18 appears to quote Deuteronomy and then something very similar to Matthew’s Gospel, and calls them both “Scripture.” Second Peter 3:16 unambiguously calls Paul’s letters “Scripture.” The Greek word translated “Scripture” (graphē), means anything written. But in religious contexts, it almost always meant authoritative Scriptures. When New Testament authors call other New Testament books “Scripture,” they are saying that these early Christian books have the same status as the Old Testament Scripture.

Similarly, the early-second-century Christian writer Polycarp quotes Ephesians and calls it “Scripture” (Polycarp, Philippians 12.) Justin Martyr, also in the second century, records what a worship service looked like in his church (Justin, First Apology 67). It included readings both from the Old Testament Scriptures and the “memoirs of the apostles,” which probably means the Gospels or related texts.

In contrast, the second-century heretic Marcion believed that Christians should not read the Old Testament. Marcion is interesting, because by the time he was active, only about a century after the death of Jesus, it was uncontroversial that books like the Gospels and the letters of Paul were at least as authoritative and at least as deserving of Scriptural status as the Old Testament.

Portraits of the four evangelists from GA 773 (10th c.)
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Despite tales of conspiracy, there are good historical and theological reasons why the Church recognized four—and only four—Gospels.
C. E. Hill

Marcion controversially tried to cut the Old Testament (and many parts of the New Testament which quote it or appear to agree with it) out of the Bible—but this means that by his time, the basic shape of a Bible with two testaments must have been well-established. In the mid-first century, Jesus’ followers were controversially writing new books and adding them to the Jewish Scriptures. In the mid-second century, Marcion was taking the old books out of the Christian Scriptures, which was only possible because no-one doubted the scriptural status of the new books.

Also in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon was constructing a theology that assumed the unity of both testaments. His book Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching summarizes the gospel by presenting the story of the whole Bible. His very approach assumes the unity of the Bible.

This evidence shows that from very early, Christians were treating the Bible as a single book.

Fitting the two testaments in one codex

But if the Bible was already being read as a single book, was it being physically produced as a single book? The technical name for a book containing the whole Bible is a “pandect.”

Pandects were rare in the ancient world, not least because books this size would have been difficult and expensive to produce.

Pandects were rare in the ancient world, not least because books this size would have been difficult and expensive to produce. We know of very few large books from the ancient world. There is Origen’s Hexapla, a copy of the Old Testament containing six different columns in multiple Greek translations. We also know of a manuscript containing all of the ancient Greek epic poem, the Odyssey (which runs to about four hundred pages in modern English editions).

When it comes to biblical manuscripts, there are four from prior to 600 AD that were probably originally pandects. They are Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi rescriptus. In the first three, substantial portions of both testaments still survive, so it is very likely they originally contained all of both testaments. In Codex Ephraemi, we have only the New Testament and large parts of the Old Testament wisdom literature. However, the New Testament and the wisdom literature seems such an unusual combination (of which we have no other evidence) that it is likely this manuscript originally contained all the books of both testaments.

The view of Ephraemi rescriptus from the bottom. Photo credit

These manuscripts all contain the Old Testament in Greek translation (often called the Septuagint), since few early Christians could read Hebrew. They also contain the Old Testament Apocrypha and some contain a few early Christian texts in addition to the New Testament books (but these are placed after Revelation, which may suggest the scribes thought they were in a lesser category).

Further hints from our manuscript evidence

Of course, many of our early biblical manuscripts are small fragments and so it is impossible to know for certain what else they contained. One of our earliest manuscripts, known to biblical scholars as P52, is a tiny scrap of John’s Gospel. It is impossible to know what was in the original, complete version—all of John, all of the Gospels, all of the New Testament, all of the Christian Bible or some more unusual combination of texts?

However, some of these early, small fragments include page numbers and these generally suggest that they contained only a single biblical book. It is likely therefore that manuscripts of the whole Bible were rare and the four we know of are not only important but unusual.

Book technology at the time means that, even with these manuscripts, it’s unlikely all the books of the Bible were physically bound into a single volume. However the presentation, arrangement of words on the page and column layout is the same in each of these manuscripts all through the Bible, so it is very likely that they were intended to be used as single books, rather like a modern book produced in multiple volumes, but always sold together and with such similar font and layout that they are obviously intended to be read as one (such as N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God or some editions of The Lord of the Rings).

The origins of the pandects

What led to the production of these pandects? As we have seen, the theological belief in the unity of the testaments existed from the late first century, so it is natural that scribes should start creating manuscripts with both testaments, but it is possible there was a specific reason to produce pandects in the early fourth century.

The early Christian writer, Eusebius, records a letter he received from the Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, requesting “fifty copies of the clearly sacred Scriptures” (Life of Constantine 4.36). Similarly, another early Christian writer, Athanasius, records that he made “copies of the divine Scriptures” for the Roman Emperor Constans (Defense before Constantius 4).

Are these ancient requests for pandects? Scholars disagree at this point. It is possible that “fifty copies of the clearly sacred Scriptures” means fifty copies of the Gospels, or even a combination like ten sets each containing five manuscripts, one of the Gospels, one of the Pentateuch, one of the Psalms, one the Prophets and one of the letters.

However, there is no indication in the context that this is what Constantine or Constans intended and the natural reading of the definite article in Eusebius’s account is that “the clearly sacred Scriptures” includes everything in the category of clearly sacred Scriptures (just as if one spouse says to another “I’ll collect the children from school” without further clarification, this means all their children and only their children). Fifty pandects would certainly be an exorbitant request, but Roman Emperors were hardly known for their modest tastes or restrained demands.

Were any of our four surviving pandects produced in response to these demands? It is impossible to be sure.

Were any of our four surviving pandects produced in response to these demands? It is impossible to be sure, but Sinaiticus and Vaticanus both probably come from about the right time and Sinaiticus, in particular, probably comes from about the right place. What is even more important than identifying individual manuscripts with Constantine’s or Constans’s order, is the simple fact that these Emperors were likely commissioning pandects at all. It seems that Constantine believed that a well-ordered and united Bible would help build a well-ordered and united church, which might even help create a well-ordered and united society.

Conclusion

The production of physically united Bibles began in the fourth century, quite possibly because this was the first time there were Christian emperors who could support the production of such large books. But even more important is the fact that, when these emperors requested such Bibles, the idea made sense—because Christians had been trusting and treasuring a unified Bible for centuries.

Topics

Levels

Text

The spectrum of views

Isaiah’s context

The Immanuel sign

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Related

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

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6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

The larger literary structure

Conclusion

Notes

A theory of Gospel origins

A theory of local texts of the Gospels

A tale of two churches

Alexandria

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Ephesus

A home for a homeless text

Notes

Traditional dating methods

Traces of subjectivity

Using computational modeling

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The future

Notes

Who is Origen?

What was the Hexapla?

Related

What was the Hexapla for?

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Notes

From corrupted witness to crowned pillar

Related

From filtered data to full access

Related

From uncertain identity to the ‘Vatican manuscript’

Conclusion

Uniting the Bible’s two testaments

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Reading the two testaments as one book

Related

Fitting the two testaments in one codex

Further hints from our manuscript evidence

The origins of the pandects

Conclusion

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