Description
In the history of New Testament textual criticism, it is well known that for centuries scholars outside Rome were prevented from examining Codex Vaticanus (Vat. gr. 1209 in the Vatican Library; B03 in the GA numbering). In fact, only until the publication of the first edition by Angelus Maius (1857), the complete text of the manuscript has become available to the entirety of textual scholarship. Before the mid-nineteenth century, scholars had to rely on two imprecise and often contrasting collations: a series of publications by Andreas Birch (1788; 1798–1801) and a reproduction of one of the Bentley collations by Charles Godfrey Woide (1799). However, there is a hidden treasure in the Vatican Library that has been off the scholarly radar until the present day, a three-hundred-year-old Abschrift of the famous Vatican manuscript.Currently numbered as Vat. gr. 2158, this minuscule manuscript was probably copied around 1700, containing all the remaining uncial part of B03’s New Testament. It was likely being a tailor-made copy for Lorenzo Alessandro Zaccagni (1657–1712), the then curator of the Vatican Library. Known for his groundbreaking work on the Euthalian apparatus (1698), Zaccagni was said to have prepared a new edition of the Greek New Testament, although he was not able to see it finished before his death. Based on the first-hand examination and newly available digital images, this paper details the current state of preservation of Vat. gr. 2158, provides an overview of its content, and analyses some sample chapters and paratextual features, as well as locating Zaccagni’s project to its intellectual and scholarly context.
| Period | 4 Aug 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event title | European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |