Description
Who discovered that the underlying text of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C04) was from the Greek Bible? What drove the early interest in its text? How did the manuscript become known to the scholarly world? Answers to such questions are conspicuously absent in current-day introductions to biblical textual criticism. As we will show in our contribution, the manuscript had an interesting and important history in Western scholarship also before Tischendorf (from 1843 onwards). Many pieces of information can still be unearthed, though some riddles remain. Through Bernard Lamy we are informed of Jean Boivin’s discovery of the biblical text in C04 at the turn of the eighteenth century, but Wettstein (in 1751) attributed the same discovery to Pierre Allix, information that is very hard to confirm. It turns out that the earliest interest in C04 focussed on the text-critical issue of John 5:3-4, and that its LXX parts apparently remained out of sight. Wettstein procured a collation for Richard Bentley, which he also used for his own work.The quality of the collation amazed Tischendorf and others. Our contribution will shed new light on all these aspects and draw some lessons for our own dealing with manuscripts such as C04.| Period | 31 Jul 2024 |
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| Event title | Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Amsterdam, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |