Codex Amiatinus

Three Bibles, and a Journey That Ended at Langres

Bede tells the story in his Lives of the Abbots, and the sentence is short enough to quote whole. Ceolfrith, abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, "added three Pandects of a new translation to that of the old translation which he had brought from Rome; one of them, returning to Rome in his old age, he took with him as a gift; the other two he left to the two monasteries." A pandect is a complete Bible in one volume, which in the eighth century was a rare and enormous thing to attempt; three of them at once meant a herd of animals, and a grant of land made to the monastery in 692 has been connected with the parchment they would have needed.

Ceolfrith set out on 4 June and got as far as the country of the Lingones — the Gallic people whose city is modern Langres, in Burgundy — where he died on 25 September, seven hours after arriving, with about eighty English companions around him. Bede gives the day exactly and the year less exactly: the translation most readers will meet prints 715, and the British Library and modern scholarship both give 716. The Bible he was carrying went on without him, and came in time to the monastery of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany, which is where its name comes from. It is in Florence now, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, catalogued as Amiatino 1. The library has photographed all of it: 1,029 leaves of parchment, 500 by 335 millimetres, free to page through online.

One detail in the book has done more damage than any other. The dedication page names the donor, and at some point after Ceolfrith's death somebody scraped his name out and wrote another in. As H. A. G. Houghton puts it, the alteration changed "the donor's name from Ceolfrid, abbot of the English, to Peter, abbot of the Lombards." That single erasure is the reason an English book sat in Italy for a thousand years being described as Italian.

What the Vulgate Actually Is

It is worth being exact about what this book contains, because "the Vulgate" is routinely described as Jerome's translation of the Bible and it is not quite that. Pope Damasus asked Jerome, around 382, to produce a revised Latin text of the Gospels, and Jerome did that by comparing the Latin in use against Greek copies. He later translated most of the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew. The rest of the New Testament — Acts, the epistles, Revelation — is an anonymous revision by somebody else, and a handful of books came from other sources again. What became the standard Latin Bible of the west is therefore a composite, assembled over time, and it took a long time to displace the older Latin versions it was revising.

Amiatinus is the oldest copy of that composite surviving complete, which is what makes it the reference point for every critical edition of the Latin Bible. Its text is laid out per cola et commata, in sense-lines rather than continuous prose, the arrangement Jerome introduced for the Hebrew prophets and the one most modern editions of the Vulgate still use. A reader can see it: folio 843 recto, the opening of Mark 11, is a page of short lines broken where the sense breaks.

Two of its readings are worth a Bible reader's attention. The disputed clause at 1 John 5:7 about three heavenly witnesses, which the King James Version prints and modern translations do not, is not in Amiatinus — G. McDonald's study of that clause names this codex among "several important manuscripts" of its date from which it is absent. And the two sister Bibles are not entirely lost: fragments of one survive in the British Library as Additional MSS 37777 and 45025, carrying parts of what the Vulgate calls 3 and 4 Kings — the books an English Bible calls 1 and 2 Kings. Some of those leaves spent the sixteenth century as covers for property deeds.

A Book That Has Been Misread for a Thousand Years

Houghton's verdict on the literature is blunt: "Scholarship on this manuscript has been beset by a number of persistent misunderstandings." The Italian attribution was the first and the longest-lived. A second is the assumption that Amiatinus is simply a copy of the codex grandior, the large illustrated Bible made at Cassiodorus's monastery at Vivarium in southern Italy. Ceolfrith did bring a pandect back from Rome, but it was an Old Latin book, not a Vulgate one, so it cannot have been the exemplar for Amiatinus's text; the Vulgate assembled in these three Bibles was the work of the community at Wearmouth-Jarrow itself. Houghton's own verdict runs the other way, and the second half of it is the half that matters: "Although there is still some hesitation about the presence of the codex grandior in Northumbria, this is the simplest explanation for the format and certain features of Codex Amiatinus." What he is correcting is not the idea that Cassiodorus's book reached Northumbria — he thinks it probably did — but the idea that Amiatinus is a copy of it.

The famous miniature is a third. It shows a man writing in front of a bookcase holding a nine-volume Bible, and the caption in the manuscript names him Ezra. Houghton records that "there are good reasons for thinking that it may be a depiction of Cassiodorus himself" — the bookcase behind him holds nine volumes arranged as Cassiodorus describes his own nine-volume Bible, and the smaller book at his feet matches another of his formats. The picture is famous as an image of the scribe of Ezra 7:6 and may be a portrait of a sixth-century Italian statesman. Both readings are in print; neither is certain.

The honest limit for a reader of this app is a different one, and it is about weight rather than origin. Amiatinus is a Latin Bible, and Latin is a translation. Where it matters what the New Testament said, a Greek manuscript three centuries older carries more, and this book's own Gospels are not an independent witness even in Latin — B. Fischer's work identified them as a copy of a Neapolitan gospel book, liturgical notes included. What Amiatinus is unmatched for is something else: the shape of a complete Bible, the state of the Vulgate text around AD 700, and the astonishing fact that the best surviving copy of it was made at the far northern edge of Europe, in a kingdom that had been Christian only since the seventh century. The last figure worth giving is one this article can source only once: the British Library's own account puts the book at 35 kilograms, and no other source consulted here confirms it.

Scripture references

• Mark 11:1 — The opening of Mark 11, the page of Amiatinus the Laurenziana reproduces
• Ezra 7:6 — "A skilled scribe in the law of Moses" — the figure the codex's miniature names
• 1 Kings 1:1 — 3 Kings in the Vulgate's numbering, part of what survives from a sister Bible
• 1 John 5:7 — The disputed clause about three heavenly witnesses, absent from this codex

Sources

• Holding institutionBiblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Teca Digitale: Amiatino 1 — Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence · The holding library's own record and its complete digitisation — every one of the 1,029 leaves, with IIIF. Source of the shelfmark, the leaf count, the 500 x 335 mm measurement and the catalogue's date range of 601-800. The record itself carries no description, so nothing about Ceolfrith or Wearmouth-Jarrow rests on it. Images are published CC BY-NC-SA and are linked here, not reproducedSupports: The shelfmark, the physical description and the fact that a reader can look at the whole book
• Primary textBede, Lives of the Holy Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, translated by J. A. Giles — Bede; translated by J. A. Giles · Public domain, read in full at Wikisource. Chapter 15 is quoted verbatim above for the three pandects; chapters 21 to 23 give the death among the Lingones, the departure on 4 June and the death on 25 September. Note that Bede does not name the Pope as the recipient, and that this translation prints the year as 715 where modern accounts give 716 — both points are stated as such in the article rather than smoothed overSupports: The three pandects, the journey, and the date of Ceolfrith's death
• ScholarshipH. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts — Hugh A. G. Houghton, University of Birmingham · Oxford University Press, 2016; the publisher's PDF, open access under CC BY-NC-ND, read in full here. Source of the altered dedication, the persistent misunderstandings, the codex grandior question, the Cassiodorus reading of the miniature, the per cola et commata layout, B. Fischer's finding about the Neapolitan exemplar of the Gospels, and the sister-Bible shelfmarks. Houghton is not a source for the absence of the Johannine clause from this codex: he says that of Codex Fuldensis, on page 56, and his catalogue entry for Amiatinus on pages 253-4 does not mention the clause at all. For that fact, see the McDonald dissertation below. The licence is non-commercial, so it is linked and quoted briefly, never hostedSupports: Everything in the third section, and the account of what the Vulgate is
• ScholarshipG. McDonald, Raising the Ghost of Arius (doctoral dissertation, Leiden University, 2011) — Grantley Robert McDonald · Open access at Leiden University. Page 45 lists the Latin Bibles that do not carry the disputed clause at 1 John 5:7 and names this one among them: it is "absent from several important manuscripts of a later date, such as codex Amiatinus", alongside the Lectionary of Luxeuil, Codex Harleianus, the Book of Armagh and Codex Sangermanensis. The same dissertation is the backbone of this app’s article on the Comma Johanneum. The Leiden viewer turns away some automated requests; the file downloads normally in a browserSupports: That the disputed clause at 1 John 5:7 is absent from this codex
• ReferenceC. Westwell, "King Offa and the Ceolfrith Bible", British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog (Internet Archive capture) — Chantry Westwell, The British Library · May 2013. The live British Library blog now returns 404 and the Library's digitised-manuscripts viewer has been offline since the 2023 cyber-attack, so this is cited from an Internet Archive capture and is the only source here for the 35 kg weight, which the article attributes rather than asserts. One sentence in the post places Monte Amiata "in Florence", which is wrong — it is in southern Tuscany — and that sentence is not followed hereSupports: The Ceolfrith Bible fragments, the deed-covers story, and the weight
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Codex Amiatinus

Further reading

• Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana: Amiatino 1, digitised in full
• Bede, Lives of the Holy Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Wikisource)
• H. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament (Oxford University Press, open access)

Reflect

Someone scraped Ceolfrith's name off the page and wrote another in, and for a thousand years the credit went elsewhere. Whose work have you been given credit for, or been quietly denied?