(CODEX B), a Greek manuscript, the most important of all the manuscripts of Holy Scripture. It is so called because it belongs to the VaticanLibrary (Codex Vaticanus, 1209).
This codex is a quarto volume written in uncial letters of the fourth century, on folios of fine parchment bound in quinterns. Each page is divided into three columns of forty lines each, with from sixteen to eighteen letters to a line, except in the poetical books, where, owing to the stichometric division of the lines, there are but two columns to a page. There are no capital letters, but at times the first letter of a section extends over the margin. Several hands worked at the manuscript; the first writer inserted neither pauses nor accents, and made use but rarely of a simple punctuation. Unfortunately, the codex is mutilated; at a later date the missing folios were replaced by others. Thus, the first twenty original folios are missing; a part of folio 178, and ten folios after fol. 348; also the final quinterns, whose number it is impossible to establish. There are extant in all 759 original folios.
The Old Testament (Septuagint Version, except Daniel, which is taken from the version of Theodotion) takes up 617 folios. On account of the aforementioned lacunae, the Old Testament text lacks the following passages: Genesis 1-46:28; 2 Samuel 2:5-7, 10-13; Pss. cv,27-cxxxvii, 6. The order of the books of the Old Testament is as follows: Genesis to Second Paralipomenon, First and second Esdras, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticle of Canticles, Job, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Esther, Judith, Tobias, the Minor Prophets from Osee to Malachi, Isaias, Jeremias, Baruch, Lamentations and Epistle of Jeremias, Ezechiel, Daniel; the Vatican Codex does not contain the Prayer of Manasses or the Books of Machabees.The New Testament begins at fol. 618. Owing to the loss of the final quinterns, a portion of the Pauline Epistles is missing: Hebrews 9:14-13:25, the Pastoral Letters, Epistle to Philemon; also the Apocalypse. It is possible that there may also be some extra-canonical writings missing, like the Epistle of Clement. The order of the New Testament books is as follows: Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, St. Paul to the Romans, Corinthians (I-II), Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Thessalonians (I-II), Hebrews.
In the Vatican Codex we find neither the Ammonian Sections nor the Eusebian Canons. It is, however, divided into sections, after a manner that is common to it with the Codex Zacynthius (Cod. 'Zeta'), an eighth-century Scriptural manuscript of St. Luke. The Acts of the Apostles exhibits a special division into thirty-six chapters. The Catholic Epistles bear traces of a double division, in the first and earlier of which some believe that the Second Epistle of Peter was wanting. The division of the Pauline Epistles is quite peculiar: they are treated as one book, and numbered continuously. It is clear from this enumeration that in the copy of the Scriptures reproduced by the Vatican Codex the Epistle to the Hebrews was placed between the Epistle to the Galatians and the Epistle to the Ephesians.
The Vatican Codex, in spite of the views of Tischendorf, who held for the priority of the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered by him, is rightly considered to be the oldest extant copy of the Bible. Like the Codex Sinaiticus it represents what Westcott and Hort call a 'neutral text', i.e. a text that antedates the modifications found in all later manuscripts, not only the modifications found in the less ancient Antiochene recensions, but also those met with in the Eastern and Alexandrine recensions. It may be said that the Vatican Codex, written in the first half of the fourth century, represents the text of one of those recensions of the Bible which were current in the third century, and that it belongs to the family of manuscripts made use of by Origen in the composition of his Hexapla.
Some think the coronavirus is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Many people on Twitter have been saying that they believe the virus is a sign that the apocalypse is coming, claiming. This Website features The Holy Aramaic Scriptures, as preserved in the ancient Eastern Aramaic Text of The New Testament, in manuscripts such as The Yonan Codex, The Khabouris Codex, The 1199 Houghton Codex, and The Mingana 148 Codex, for you to read and study; giving as literal as possible a rendering of this Holy Biblical Text, in a fresh, accurate, and literal, English Translation.
The original home of the Vatican Codex is uncertain. Hort thinks it was written at Rome; Rendel Harris, Armitage Robinson, and others attribute it to Asia Minor. A more common opinion maintains that it was written in Egypt. Armitage Robinson believes that both the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus were originally together in some ancient library. His opinion is based on the fact that in the margins of both manuscripts is found the same special system of chapters for the Acts of the Apostles, taken from the division of Euthalius, and found in two other important codices (Amiatinus and Fuldensis) of the Latin Vulgate. Tischendorf believed that three hands had worked at the transcription of the Vatican Codex. He identified (?) the first hand (B1), or transcriber, of the Old Testament with the transcriber of a part of the Old Testament and some folios of the New Testament in the Codex Sinaiticus. This primitive text was revised, shortly after its original transcription, with the aid of a new manuscript, by a corrector (B2 — For the Old Testament B2 is quoted by Swete as Ba). Six centuries after (according to some), a third hand (B3,Bb) retraced the faded letters, leaving but very little of the original untouched. According to Fabiani, however, this retracing was done early in the fifteenth century by the monk Clemens (qui saeculo XV ineunte floruisse videtur). In modern times (fifteenth-sixteenth century) the missing folios were added to the codex, in order, as Tregelles conjectures, to prepare it for use in the Vatican Library. Old catalogues show that it was there in the fifteenth century. The addition to the New Testament was listed by Scrivener as Cod. 263 (in Gregory, 293) for the Epistle to the Hebrews, and Cod. 91 for the Apocalypse. Napoleon I had the codex brought to Paris (where Hug was enabled to study it), but it was afterwards returned to the Holy See, with some other remnants of Roman booty, and replaced in the Vatican Library. There are various collations, editions, and studies of the Vatican Codex. The collations are:
- that of Bartolocci (Giulio di S. Anastasia), formerly librarian of the Vatican; it was done in 1669 and is preserved in manuscript — Gr. Suppl. 53 of the Bibliothèque Nationale — at Paris (quoted under the sigla: Blc);
- that of Birch (Bch) published at Copenhagen in 1798 for the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, in 1800 for the Apocalypse, in 1801 for the Gospels;
- that executed for Bentley (Btly) by the Abbate Mico about 1720 on the margin of a copy of the Greek New Testament which was published at Strasburg, 1524, by Cephalaeus; this copy is among Bentley's books in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge — the collation itself was published in Ford's appendix to Woide's edition of the Codex Alexandrinus in 1799;
- a list of the alterations executed by the original copyist or by his correctors, edited at the request of Bentley by the Abbate Rulotta with the aid of the Abbate de Stosch (Rlt); this list was supposed to have perished, but it is extant among the Bentley papers in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, under the sigla: B. 17.20;
- in 1860 Alford, and in 1862 Cure, examined a select number of the readings of the Vatican Codex, and published the results of their labours in the first volume of Alford's Greek Testament.
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APA citation.Benigni, U.(1908).Codex Vaticanus. In The Catholic Encyclopedia.New York: Robert Appleton Company.http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04086a.htm
MLA citation.Benigni, Umberto.'Codex Vaticanus.'The Catholic Encyclopedia.Vol. 4.New York: Robert Appleton Company,1908.<http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04086a.htm>.
Transcription.This article was transcribed for New Advent by Sean Hyland.
Ecclesiastical approbation.Nihil Obstat. Remy Lafort, Censor.Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York.
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaScripture, also called sacred scripture, the revered texts, or Holy Writ, of the world’s religions. Scriptures comprise a large part of the literature of the world. They vary greatly in form, volume, age, and degree of sacredness, but their common attribute is that their words are regarded by the devout as sacred. Sacred words differ from ordinary words in that they are believed either to possess and convey spiritual and magical powers or to be the means through which a divine being or other sacred reality is revealed in phrases and sentences full of power and truth.
Characteristics
Most sacred scriptures were originally oral and were passed down through memorization from generation to generation until they were finally committed to writing. A few are still preserved orally, such as the hymns of Native Americans. Many bear the unmistakable marks of their oral origin and can best be understood when recited aloud; in fact, it is still held by many Hindus and Buddhists that their scriptures lack, when read silently, the meaning and significance they have when recited aloud, for the human voice is believed to add to the recited texts dimensions of truth and power not readily grasped by the solitary reader.
Not all scriptures, however, were originally oral, nor were they in all parts directly effectual in rituals that sought the granting of magical and spiritual powers. The greater part of recorded scripture has either a narrative or an expository character. The types of sacred and semisacred texts are, in fact, many and varied. Besides magical runes (ancient Germanic alphabet characters) and spells from primitive and ancient sources, they include hymns, prayers, chants, myths, stories about gods and heroes, epics, fables, sacred laws, directions for the conduct of rituals, the original teachings of major religious figures, expositions of these teachings, moralanecdotes, dialogues of seers and sages, and philosophical discussions. In fact, scriptures include every form of literature capable of expressing religious feeling or conviction.
Types of sacred literature vary in authority and degree of sacredness. The centrally important and most holy of the sacred texts have in many instances been gathered into canons (standard works of the faith), which, after being determined either by general agreement or by official religious bodies, become fixed—i.e., limited to certain works that are alone viewed as fully authoritative and truly beyond all further change or alteration. The works not admitted to the canons (those of a semisacred or semicanonical character) may still be quite valuable as supplementary texts.
Scriptures in non-Western religions
A striking instance of making a distinction between canonical and semicanonical scriptures occurs in Hinduism. The Hindu sacred literature is voluminous and varied; it contains ancient elements and every type of religious literature that has been listed, except historical details on the lives of the seers and sages who produced it. Its earliest portions, namely the four ancient Vedas (hymns), seem to have been provided by Indo-European families in northwestern India in the 2nd millennium bce. These and the supplements to them composed after 1000 bce—the Brahmanas (commentaries and instruction in ritual), the Aranyakas (forest books of ascetics), and the Upanishads (philosophical treatises)—are considered more sacred than any later writings. They are collectively referred to as Shruti (“Heard”; i.e., communicated by revelation), whereas the later writings are labeled Smriti (“Remembered”; i.e., recollected and reinterpreted at some distance in time from the original revelations). The former are canonical and completed, not to be added to nor altered, but the latter are semicanonical and semisacred.
Buddhist sacred literature recollects Gautama Buddha’s life and teaching in the 6th century bce and first appeared in the dialect called Pali, allied to the Magadhi that he spoke. As time passed and his movement spread beyond India, Buddhism adopted as its medium Sanskrit, the Indian classical language that was widely used in ancient Asia. A distinction arose between the Theravada (“Way of the Elders”), preserved in Pali and regarded as canonical, and the vast number of works written in Sanskrit within the more widely dispersed Buddhism called by its adherents Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”). The Mahayana works were later translated and further expanded in Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese.
Whether the basic texts of indigenous Chinese religion should be called sacred, in the sense of Holy Writ, is open to question. Neither classical Daoism nor Confucianism can be said to have been based on revelation; the texts of these faiths were originally viewed as human wisdom, books written by humans for humans. They acquired authority, actually a canonical status, however, that caused them to be regarded with profound reverence and thus, in effect, as sacred. This certainly was true of the revered Daoist book, the Daodejing (“Classic of the Way of Power”), and of the Wujing (“Five Classics”) and the Sishu (“Four Books”) of Confucianism.
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