Sinaiticus & Mark's Ending (Pt 7): James Snapp (cont.)

Continuing our discussion of Codex Sinaiticus, we turn our attention again to the numbers of letters in each column of the 'cancel sheet(s)' (Scribe D),  and the counts in the surrounding area by the original Scribe A.

Here is a wonderful chart composed by Mr. Scrivener diagramming the details of the current picture.   The letter-counts are based on the text as transcribed on the Codex Sinaiticus Homepage (British Museum), but we have subtracted all marginal notes (which were added independently later), and also the peculiar symbols of Scribe D (the ">" arrow used to fill rows to make the page look fuller.).   Still counted as a character was the "dots" indicating verse and paragraph divisions, because these are assumed to have been copied from the original master-copy, and are not the invention of either scribe.

Now lets turn to the chart:

Click to Enlarge: Backbutton to return

The behavior of Scribe D (the person who substituted the pages) is fairly straightforward.    For the first three columns, he simply copies the pages he has removed, rightly noting that the previous Scribe A (author of the rest of the NT minus a couple of pages) has already done some of the work of compressing the text for the purpose of creating nearly a whole blank column of space.


He has already carefully calculated that the best course for handling Luke's verses will be to squeeze them into SIX of the last columns on the 'cancel-sheet' (folio 77-5 recto last 2 columns, and the 4 columns of the other side, 77-5 verso).  This will gain him about a half a column.


Now he calculates the remaining approximately SIX columns of Mark, and to leave the last column nearly empty (but avoiding leaving a whole column), he crams about 60 letters into the last column of folio 77-4 recto.  He has actually been too extreme here, and now must write the final FIVE columns of Mark rather sparsely to make sure he spills over a little into the last blank column before Luke.


A glance at the column heights explains why he chose this route.  He did not have enough material to stretch Luke to fill an entire SEVENTH column, and even if he had done this by some real spreading,  He would have only had just enough space for Mark, filling all the previous columns, without the Long Ending (Mark 16:9-20).   This may indeed have been exactly what Scribe A had originally done.


However, Scribe D, likely the Overseer and Corrector of the scriptorium, knew this would be highly unsatisfactory, and wished to at least leave a nearly blank column to tip off future users and enable them to copy in the Ending if they chose to.   Scribe D then, was aware of the Long Ending.  Even though he did not allow sufficient space for it, due to his desire to keep the look of the manuscript professional and standardize the book-seams, he did feel compelled to make sure that at least the option was available and the problem highlighted.


In this strategy, Scribe D mimicks almost exactly the behavior of the scribe of Codex Vaticanus, who also leaves just enough space to allow for Mark's Ending, but in that case he also left a rather awkward completely blank column between Mark and Luke.  It seems clear that our Scribe D had seen that solution before and wanted to improve it by extending Mark into the blank column, and give the appearance of a normal manuscript.

We only need try to reconstruct what the original Scribe A had done on the pages now lost, which ought to explain how the 'need' for a substitution arose.

Sinaiticus & Mark's Ending (Pt 6): James Snapp (cont.)

Now lets continue again with more of James Snapp Jr.'s article, in which he gets into some more detail about these pages and in particular the compression and expansion of text in the columns.  Again we give the diagram to help readers locate the columns under discussion:

James goes on:

The Last Two Columns of Mark in Codex Sinaiticus

"[James' diagram] shows the arrangement of the text in columns 9 and 10 of the four-page (16-column) cancel-sheet at the end of Mark in Sinaiticus.  [here we have inserted below a good photo of this page with columns 9 - 12:]

Folio 77 - 5 (recto): Mark ends & Luke begins

James now jumps back to discuss the previous two pages, namely folio 77 -4 (recto/verso):

77-4 recto: columns 1-4

77-4 verso: columns 5-8

The text of Mark from 15:19 (which appears earlier in the cancel-sheet, at column 5, line 11) onward has been stretched so as to fill more space than it normally would. However, from column 4, line 1 to column 5, line 10, the text was written in a compressed script, with the result that column 4 contains 707 letters. If the copyist had continued to write compactly, the cancel-sheet would have had plenty of room for the Long Ending. (However, if the copyist had continued to write so as to average 635 letters per column, if he had tried to write the Long Ending he would have reached the end of column 10 with 206 letters to go. Thus it is practically certain that the original pages of the end of Mark in Sinaiticus did not contain the Long Ending.)

As you can see, column 9 [folio 77-5 recto at top] contains only 552 letters (significantly less than the typical amount of about 635). Columns 11-16 [including folio 77-5 verso below] (containing Luke 1:1-56) are all written in compressed script; in those six columns the average column contains 691 letters. This suggests that the cancel-sheet was made because the original pages featured an accidental omission of text in Luke 1.

Folio 77-5 verso (back): columns 13-16

That still does not explain why the text is compacted in column 4 and in the first 10 lines of column 5. 

One theory is that the person who made the cancel-sheet began by using an exemplar which contained the Long Ending, and as he was writing column 4, he sensed that something was amiss, so he began to compact the text so that the Long Ending would fit, but then (at the beginning of Mark 15:19) he consulted the exemplar used by the original copyist, and realized that it did not contain the Long Ending. He had to stretch the text of Mark from that point on, in order to avoid leaving a blank column between Mark and Luke.

Another theory is that the cancel-sheet's maker initially planned to begin the text of Luke in column 10, and compressed the text of Mark for that reason (i.e., so as to end Mark's text in column 9). Then he changed his mind, preferring to compress Luke's text within six columns rather than to stretch it for seven columns, with the result that he had to stretch the text of Mark from 15:19 onward (especially in column 9) to avoid leaving a blank column between Mark and Luke. However, this does not explain why, if the cancel-sheet's maker initially planned to begin the text of Luke in column 10, he did not start the text-compression immediately in columns 1-3."

Our first observation is this: James writes in brackets above, 

(However, if the [original scribe A] had continued [at] 635 letters per column, he would have [had] 206 letters to go [for the Long Ending]. Thus it is practically certain that the original pages ... did not contain the Long Ending.)

This statement, while technically true, is however misleading.  All it amounts to is that the original scribe A didn't have room to fit it in, and stopped his work, which begs the question.  

One fact that is simply not taken into account in various of James' options is this:  Elsewhere, scribe D always inserts single cancel-leaves, not double-sheets of four pages (i.e., folio 10, 15, 88, 91).   Why recopy four whole pages here?   The small amount of text in the Lukan variant (proposed originally by Tischendorf, for which there is no textual support at all)  cannot justify a four-page replacement, nor can such a small factor explain why the original scribe A would have needed to turn to scribe D for help. 

Given this most remarkable extra feature, the replacement of four whole pages, with obvious attempts at adjusting all the columns preceding Mark's ending, it seems far more plausible that the problem was Mark's ending;  Scribe A appealed to Scribe D,  and Scribe A's work was taken over, removed and replaced by Scribe D.

James' "Theory 1" above is inadequate, because it mixes up the roles of the two scribes.  It was in fact Scribe A who was copying from an exemplar having Mark's ending (as suggested by all other MSS everywhere, except B).  He was the one who noticed the problem (the inadequate space of the pre-allocated  pages), and therefore the 2nd Scribe D's subsequent waffling attempts at adjusting the pace were done with the problem already perceived.   This is evident because at this time the pages were already being replaced.  

The fact that Scribe D may have changed his mind, or received new (but ultimately unrealistic) orders on how to proceed while in the middle of the task, is hardly surprising, nor is the fact that the pages were not replaced yet again, given the cost of vellum.

Peace

Nazaroo

Sinaiticus & Mark's Ending (Pt 5): James Snapp Jr.

Since we need to get into the details, a quick orientation involving some terminology won't hurt here.  In this discussion, a "Quire" means a grouping of sheets, usually folded like a booklet, and meant to be stitched together, then attached to other such groups, to make a large book of many pages.  Quires are a sensible approach to large books, and prevent problems when too many pages are folded together in a single clump.

According to the Official website, Codex Sinaiticus was originally stitched together in Quires of four double-sheets.  A double-sheet makes up two "Folios", or single sheets, each having two sides or page-surfaces.  Typically it is folios that are numbered in this context, and the sides of a folio are called "recto" (front or right-side), and "verso" (back or left-side).  Thus the pages are not numbered like a modern book.

Here is an illustration of what we are talking about:

Click to Enlarge, backbutton to return

In the illustration, the Quire is open to the innermost double-sheet, showing us folio #4 and folio #5, which would have originally been attached, being made from a single large double-sheet.  In the discussion which follows, James Snapp Jr. will be referring to the columns, starting with the columns (not shown) on folio #4 (columns 1 - 4), then as we have numbered them above (5 - 12), and finally, finishing with columns 13 - 16 (other side of folio # 5).

The folios themselves were numbered by an unknown hand as 227 and 228, but are referred to by Tischendorf and Scrivener in the previous posts as folios #28 and #29, or #29 and #30 by Kirsopp Lake  (of the New Testament portion).

The official website for Codex Sinaiticus (British Museum) numbers these relatively in relation to the Quires, so they are respectively now Quire 77 - 4 and Quire 77 - 5.   All clear?  Not to worry.  For now all we need pay attention to are the columns.

James Snapp Jr. tells us on his webpage the following:

"In Codex Sinaiticus, the four pages on which the last part of Mark (14:54-16:8) and the first part of Luke (1:1-56) are written constitute a cancel-leaf (to picture this, think of a four-page church bulletin, folded in the middle). That is, they are not the pages written by the copyist who wrote the surrounding text of Mark and Luke. Someone (probably the scriptorium-supervisor who oversaw the production of the codex) removed the original pages, re-wrote the text they contained, and then inserted the new, re-written pages.

Why? It was NOT to remove Mark 16:9-20. A statistical analysis of the capacity of the 16 columns on these pages shows that they did not have room for the contents of Mark 16:9-20 (unless the copyist "compacted" the text).

Possibly the main copyist accidentally skipped from the end of Luke 1:4 to the beginning of Luke 1:8, omitting Luke 1:5-7, and the supervisor decided that the best way to fix this mistake was to replace the entire four-page sheet. But whatever the reason was, the relevant implication is that when we look at Sinaiticus we are probably not looking at the text that was in the main copyist's exemplar; we are probably looking at the text that was in an exemplar used by the supervisor.

Furthermore, the text in the 4th column of the replacement-page (and the first 10 lines of the 5th column) is "compacted," which may suggest that the supervisor accessed -- but abandoned at 15:19 -- an exemplar which contained Mark 16:9-20. If the supervisor had continued to write the cancel-leaf the way he wrote column 4, [i.e., compressed] the full text of Mark 14:54-16:20 could fit on the replacement-page with room to spare, along with the text from Luke 1:1-56. "

Everyone seems to be in agreement that the two folios containing Mark 14:64 - Luke 1:56 (by whatever number) are 'cancel-leaves' or 'replacement-folios' written by Scribe D.  It is also apparent by Mr. Snapp's description, that the text is alternately compressed and stretched, in the process of fitting it into the required space.   This is certainly odd, and even Mr. Snapp's explanation is not entirely satisfactory, although its a reasonable account of the phenomena.

To help us better picture the discussion, here are the two relevant pages, from folio 77-4 (recto and verso) containing columns 1 - 8 inclusive.  The Ending of Mark is on the following page, but we will examine that later:

Folio 4 (recto): columns 1-4:  click to enlarge

 One can see that column 4 is compressed, while 1 to 3 are expanded, with plenty of white-space too.

Folio 4 (verso) columns 5 - 8: Click to Enlarge

Similarly, the top of column 5 is compressed, while the remaining columns are expanded.

One thing must be noted.  The concept of compressing text to fit is no stranger to Scribe D, nor is it merely a theoretical possibility.  It is clearly used by him for some purpose as yet undetermined with certainty.



peace
Nazaroo