Sunday, December 07, 2008

That glaring hole in Codex Vaticanus

So go here and tell me Mark 16:9-20 wasn't blotted out.
Dan Wallace says there's not enough room for it in the space, but I disagree. (Maybe he was referring to the space after Mark 16:8 in the Sinaiticus, I can't remember, but still there's quite a bit of space there.) He also says that the Western order has Mark last among the Gospels, which formed their own unit, so it's quite logical that the space would be there since you would start another unit on its own page. Then how do you explain Luke starting at the upper left? I think he's reaching.

Anyway, Burgon is kicking butt in my opinion, in his The Last 12 Verses of Mark.

Just got a kick out of the following marginal note, found, ironically, in the Vaticanus, at Heb. 1:3: ""Fool and knave, can't you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!" Yeah, can't you keep from erasing 12 verses?

And I really love the duplicity of this image. Notice they didn't mention that the next column to the right was left completely blank, unlike any other column in the Vaticanus. Why did they show this image and not the above-mentioned one.

1 comment:

James Snapp, Jr. said...

Greetings.

The blank space in Codex Vaticanus after Mark 16:8 is four lines too short to fit 16:9-20, if the text is written in the same manner in which the preceeding text is written. But if one uses compact lettering, the passage can be made to fit, without difficulty.

Dr. Wallace's idea that the scribe of Vaticanus saw a blank space after Mark in his exemplar, and so left one after Mark in Vaticanus, is nothing but a desperate attempt to avoid admitting the obvious. Blank space at the end of a MS would be nothing unusual. Let me re-phrase Dr. Wallace's theory:

The scribe of B refrained from placing blank spaces between the Gospels and Acts, and between any other genres of books, but when he came to what he perceived to be a genre-gap at the end of Mark, he put a genre-gap *Between Mark And Luke.*

I welcome you to visit my online presentation about Mark 16:9-20 at

www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html

and I also have a lengthy (over 130 pages) research paper on the subject available; you can track it down via a search for "Snapp" at the TextExcavation website.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.