Biblical Scholars Be Trippin'

The meme above is one of those things that's hysterically funny if you understand it, and if you don't, explaining it to you would probably just exhaust me and bore you. So I'll just say that one reason Biblical scholars be trippin' is that they continue to discover huge amounts of extremely-old Biblical manuscripts.

For example, James Snapp Jr wrote last June about some palimpsests. When the ink is scraped off of a piece of parchment to make room to write something new, the indentations left by the old writing are a palimpsest. For over a century, people have been getting steadily better at using technology to recover palimpsests: that is, to make them readable again. Snapp wrote:

For at least the past five years, reports have circulated about the contents of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that were discovered in 1975 at Saint Catherine’s monastery. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, ScienceBlog, Ancient-Origins, and the BBC have all told readers that major research is underway that involves ancient manuscripts and expensive manuscript-reading equipment.

Now the Sinai Palimpsests Project has a website, and visitors can easily get some sense of the scale of the work that is being done with the (relatively) newly discovered manuscripts. The manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s include all kinds of compositions: ancient medicine-recipes, patristic sermons, poems, liturgical instruction-books, Old Testament books, and much more.

Fifteen continuous-text Greek manuscripts are among the newly discovered palimpsests. All but one of these New Testament manuscripts have been given production-dates in the 500s or earlier.

Another thing they be trippin' about is claims that the Codex Sinaiticus, famous for being the oldest complete Bible known to exist -- and named Sinaiticus because it was found in the very same St Catherine's monastery in Sinai where they have found the above-mentioned palimpsests -- is actually not nearly as old as had been thought. It was dated to the 4th century, now here come these guys saying it was made in the 7th century. But apparently that brouhaha has come and gone and the 4th-century dating has survived. But don't take my word for any of this: let Steven Avery tell you all about it.

Codices latini antiquiores --

-- also known as CLA, edited by E A Lowe, is a description of Latin literary manuscripts made before the ninth century. It excludes "-- with certain exceptions -- all business or official acts and documents, graffiti or other casual scribblings." (vol. 1, vii.)

I'd been eagerly searching high and low for reasonably-priced copies of the CLA. Finally, yesterday, I got Vol I: The Vatican Cityvia inter-library loan.

It's not what I expected. I had gathered from library catalogue descriptions and such that the volumes were 45 centimeters tall. Somehow I had managed to overlook in the same descriptions the number of pages per volume. I was expecting huge heavy tombstones full of fine print, probably all in Latin, of tens of thousands of manuscripts per volume.

But no, there are xii+44 pages in this first volume, plus 35 pages of illustrations, and the other volumes seem to be of a comparable size, and several pages of these 44 are taken up by bibliographies, and the print isn't particularly fine, and it's mostly in English. A total of 34 pages of this first volume are devoted to the sort of description I had imagined. Facing each of these 34 pages are full-sized photographic reproductions of parts of the manuscripts being described. 4 reproductions to a big page, sometimes more than one reproduction of the same manuscript. 117 in all in the first volume. Counting palimspests as 2, the primary and the secondary. There are a lot of palimspsests in this volume.

Of the 117 manuscripts described and photographed here, I counted 24 from pagan authors: Terrence, Cicero, Sallust, Vergil, Livy, Probus Seneca, Lucan, Juvenal, Gellius, Fronto, Symmachus. These manuscripts account for 20 and one-half percent of the total. Besides these 24, I'm not sure how to categorize a few others. Irony being what it is, I would not be at all surprised if the percentage of pagan authors described by the CLA in collections outside the Vatican were much lower. I would not be surprised, because, in the period before AD 800, there was an especially fervent effort in Western Europe to spread the learning of the Bible and of Christian authors, and an especially widespread -- although by no means universal -- condemnation of pagan Classical antiquity, including all of the writing of all of the individual authors I listed above. Books were burned. (Others were written over and then later rediscovered in palimpsest form.) It has been asserted, although it is controversial and remains unproven, that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, ordered all copies of Livy, listed above, which could be found to be destroyed. It's unproven, but it seems to me that if someone, Gregory or not, had been busily engaged in such destruction, it would help to explain why only 35 books, plus a few fragments, of such a popular author as Livy survive today, when as late as AD 401 the pagan patrician Symmachus, listed above, was busily engaged in making an edition of all 142 books. Symmachus appears in CLA, vol 1, in palimpsest form, as does a long palimpsest fragment of Livy's book 91 which had been gone from view for a long, long, long, long time. Whether or not it was the active destruction of Gregory the Great, and/or some other churchmen, which accounts for the disappearance of almost 107 books of Livy, which seems likely to me, there is no doubt that many Classical texts have been restored to the world through the effort of churchmen like the great 19th-century paleograher and specialist in palimpsest, Cardinal Angelo Mai, who worked under the instructions of and with the direct blessing of the Vatican, and that many Popes, and countless among their followers, have been great friends to and supporters of Classical scholarship. The Church giveth in this regard, it doth not only take away. Its ways are mysterious sometimes.

As I said, I was surprised to get a general idea of how many Latin literary manuscripts from before AD 800 survive, that is to say: I'm surprised by how few there are. I was also surprised when I found out that only 31 classical Greek tragedies survive, by only three authors. In that case also I had assumed that the number was much higher. It is naturally disappointing in each case to find that the numbers are lower than one had thought, but there is an ironic upside, as well: it emphasizes the significance of each new find. And new finds are made occasionally, papyrii in the Middle Eastern desert, palimpsests in existing texts.

Foolishly, I dream of finding the missing books of Livy in some place like a garage sale. Yes, these are the kinds of daydreams I have. Many experts snicker good-naturedly at dreams of finding any more significant amounts of Classical texts anywhere -- say, an entire lost book or 10 of Livy, or an entire lost play by Sophocles. (It is said that Sophocles wrote over 100 plays. We have 7 today, plus fragments of others.) They're the experts, I'm not one of them. Still, to my inexpert mind it seems irrational to dismiss the possibility of some really huge find, someday, somewhere: in a papyrus in Egypt or Israel, in a palimpsest in a library, among the possessions of an eccentric recluse. As recently as the 1980's they found a previously-unknown fragment of Livy's book 11, dating from the 5th century, while excavating the site of the monastery of Naqlun in Egypt. Yeah, so the fragment was only 40 words long, that doesn't mean that the next find won't be 40,000 words long.

So, yeah, the experts, some of them, think I'm daft. Other experts are as daft as I am when it comes to hoping for new discoveries. Maybe we are quite mad, who's to say.

I cannot emphasize enough how inexpert I am in such things. I've never been near an archaeological dig. I probably never will be, as I intensely dislike dirt and strong sunlight. I also have never had any inclination to study old manuscripts after someone else has gone to the trouble of finding them, cleaning them up, restoring a palimpsest if they contain one, etc. I have always been content to wait until they are transcribed into editions with contemporary typefaces and punctuation and so forth. And I had seen pictures of manuscripts similar to the one reproduced in this volume of CLA -- in some cases, pictures of the same manuscripts. For some, reason, when I saw the pictures of manuscripts in the CLA, I became interested in them in a way I had not been before. They're illegible to me at the moment. Look at this:



Can YOU read that? I can't. It's not one of the Vatican manuscripts, but it's similar. It's in the collection of the Library of Congress, which describes it as a page from a manuscript of Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, written in the 5th or 6th century. Sorry, I was looking for a linkable image of one of the manuscripts from the book I'm talking about, but it was slim pickings and I didn't feel like looking all day. My reaction to this sort of manuscript before yesterday was, It's purty, but I'll stick to my Oxford Classical Texts editionwith its modern typefaces and punctuation, thanks just the same. (Punctuation as we know it evolved slowly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.) Now, when I'm old enough to need glasses to read lots of things, now suddenly these strange, exotic old things catch my interest.

New Discoveries About Old Texts

I do not engage in scholarly editing, but I have great admiration for those who do, and I am very grateful for their efforts. I read the prefaces to the volumes of the Teubner and Oxford editions of classical Latin texts -- I've read a few prefaces to the editions of the Greek classics, too, although I can barely read any Greek at all -- and I'm thrilled by the stories of how this or that Classical text survived until our day.

"Survived" is the right word. And "dark," I believe, is a very appropriate term to describe the Dark Ages in Western Europe. I'm using the term "Dark Ages," not as synonymous with "Middle Ages," but only to describe the first part of them: the time between the fall of the Western part of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, and the rise of Charlemagne, emphatically punctuated by his crowning in Rome as Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, AD 800. Yes, this talk of a renewed Roman Empire was a little silly and presumptuous on the part of Charlemagne and Leo; no, the Empire which began in 800 never compared to the ancient Western Empire, nor to its contemporary the Eastern Empire, usually referred to in the West as Byzantine; and yes, Charlemegne's empire fell to pieces when he died, not least because he maintained tradition of Germanic chieftains of dividing his land among his male heirs, instead of the Imperial tradition of choosing one chief heir to rule after him and finding other occupations for his other legitimate sons.

Despite all of that, however, it does make a lot of sense to state that the Dark Ages came to an end with the reign of Charlemagne, and one very dramatic measure of this is the number of manuscripts of ancient, Classical Latin authors which survive today dating from the time of Charlemagne and later, compared with those dating from the time before. Aside from copies of the Bible and of Christian authors, almost all of those manuscripts date from the 9th century and later; then there are a few from the late Western Empire; and from the Dark Ages, almost nothing. Charlemagne gave massive support to monasteries, not just for doing things like copying Bibles and chanting hymns, but also for things like copying Classical texts. Although the Empire fell apart when Charlemagne died, the program of preserving the work of Classical authors survived and grew and flourished.

One of the many problems facing a scholarly editor of an ancient Latin text, attempting to produce the best version he or she can of that text, is that the very idea of preserving old manuscripts, of valuing them precisely because they are old, seems to have occurred to very few people before the past several centuries. And so the manuscripts which survive are mostly relatively recent, copies of copies of copies of... repeat a few times, or a lot of times. And just like in the game where people sit in a circle, and one person whispers into the ear of the person seated next to them, and that person repeats what they think they've heard, and by the time the whispering has gone all the way around the circle the result is comically different than what was whispered first, so a lot gets lost and changed as manuscripts are copied and recopied many times over the centuries, and the older copies get lost. Except that with the manuscripts, the original statements have almost always disappeared, and not many people think that the changes are very funny. On the contrary. This is one area where change is almost always considered bad.

So, any discovery of an old manuscript, from before the age of printing, is a great sensation in the scholarly world, and an especially old manuscript is a bigger sensation, because, it is hoped, it may be closer to the original text of the ancient author, and so it is diligently compared to the other manuscripts, and revisions of printed texts may be in order. Older is not always considered to be better -- not always, but most of the time, all other considerations being equal.

Before the idea of older manuscripts being better just for the sake of being older became widespread, however, the writing was sometimes scraped off of older parchments in order to make room for something else to be written. In such cases, the indentation left by the pen when the older text was written may remain although the ink of the older text is gone. These indentations are called palimpsests, and in the 19th century, in a new field of scholarship largely pioneered through the efforts of a Catholic Cardinal named Angelo Mai, many very old palimpsests began to be deciphered, and some texts which up until then had disappeared from the view of the scholarly world re-appeared: the letters of Fronto for example, Cicero's Republic, a large fragment of book 91 of Livy's history of Rome -- these and quite a few other ancient texts are available for our perusal today only because some whip-smart scholar somewhere, examining a manuscript, noticed that something had been written on it once and then scraped off, and was able to recover the text just from the indentations, from the palimpsest. In the late 19th century archaeologists began to dig up scraps of papyrus in Egypt with writing on them, mostly Greek writing but also some Latin and Coptic and other languages, scraps which had been mostly thrown away, but the ancient world's garbage is now our gold, because these papyri were written on between the 2nd century BC and the 6th century AD, and remember the whispering circle, older is better, even an old raggedy scrap of garbage can cause a sensation if it contains a copy of a passage by Homer or Hesiod or Vergil centuries older than the oldest previously-known copy of that passage. Thousands of such scraps have been found, better methods keep on being found of deciphering texts on pieces of papyrus which in some cases have thousands of years' worth of dirt on them -- I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but big things have been happening lately in the intersection of Classical scholarship, archaeology and other things like laser-imaging technology.

It's sort of a shame that the general level of interest in Greek and Latin antiquity has been dropping over the past couple of centuries, while at the same time so much more of that ancient world has been re-discovered.