Palaeography and Paratextual Features of the Gospels

chapter 3 Palaeography and Paratextual Features of the Gospels

In this chapter the paratextual and palaeographical features of the Gospels in Alexandrinus are examined: the letter forms of the two hands writing the Gospels; the ruling practice used throughout the codex; the practice of divid- ing words across rows used by both Gospel scribes; the use of color in text and paratextual features; the implementation of subscriptions and tailpiece designs (in the Gospels and throughout the codex); the instantiation of the Eusebian Apparatus in the Gospels; and the use of kephalaia and titloi in the Gospels. For the most part, the way the paratextual features were produced was determined by the scribes themselves. For example, though there is an essential “template” for production of the Eusebian Apparatus (as described in the Epistle to Carpianus), execution of the elements from that template are likely to vary (if only slightly) from scribe to scribe. And such is the case in Alexandrinus. This chapter will demonstrate that there were two hands at work in the Gospels of Alexandrinus and a third hand at work in Revelation. The first scribe (NT Scribe 1) copied the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and the kephalaia list for the Gospel of Luke. The second scribe (NT Scribe 2) copied the Gospels of Luke and John. The remainder of the NT, excepting Revelation (which was copied by NT Scribe 3), is divided between the two (Acts through 1 Corinthians 10:8 by NT Scribe 2; 1 Corinthians 10:8 through Philemon by NT Scribe 1).

The Hands

The scribes of Codex Alexandrinus wrote in “biblical majuscule,” a “book hand”1 style that originated in the second century and was in use to the eighth century and beyond.2 Cavallo describes biblical majuscule as “sober and undecorated” and as a script

1 A “book hand” uses no ligatures; all letters are independently formed. 2 Guglielmo Cavallo, “Greek and Latin Handwriting in the Papyri,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger Bagnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128–129.

which reflects in its penmanship the base models of the letters and is carried out with a visible contrast between thin horizontal strokes and fatter vertical ones (particularly gamma, pi, tau), while oblique strokes appear in between (alpha, delta, lambda). Rho and upsilon project below the baseline, and the hastas of phi and psi project both up and down.3

In biblical majuscule, the individual characteristics of a scribe’s hand were suppressed to follow a model form.4 Thus, it is no surprise that there is great uniformity in the majuscule script found in the codex, enough that Skeat and Milne identified the Gospel of Matthew through Revelation as the work of a single scribe.5 The leaves of the codex are ruled and the script throughout is bilinear, with the following exceptions: the letters ρ, υ, φ, and ψ purposely extend outside of the horizontal ruling; characters undergoing ekthesis are written free of ruled boundaries; compressed characters at the ends of rows are of varying, reduced size. With regard to the strokes used to form the letters, Thompson observed:

The writing of the Codex Alexandrinus is more carefully finished than that of the Codex Sinaiticus. The letters are rather wide; horizontal strokes are very fine; and there is a general tendency to thicken or club the extremities of certain letters, as gamma, tau, epsilon, and sigma.6

Measurements made on the full-sized Facsimile provide an additional, quanti- tative description of the scribal hands. Excluding letters that project below the baseline (ρ and υ) or both above and below it (φ and ψ), on average the letter size across all four volumes is 2.0–2.5mm in height, with occasional variance of ±0.5mm. Where the scribes began reducing the character size to fit text at the end of a line (character compression), letters are down to approximately 1.0mm in height. Enlarged characters, which were written in the left margins at or near the start of a new section, range widely in size from slightly enlarged (e.g., a height of 3mm) to greatly enlarged (e.g., the 22.2mm high letter κ on

3 Cavallo, “Greek and Latin Handwriting in the Papyri,” 128–129. 4 Nigel Wilson, “Greek Palaeography,” in Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin McCormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109. 5 The scribes of the NT “bear a striking resemblance to each other in the formation of the individual letters” (H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus [London: British Museum, 1938], 92). 6 Edward Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography (Richmond: Tiger of the Stripe, 2008), 208.