Codex Claromontanus

Paul in Two Columns

Codex Claromontanus is a parchment codex of the Pauline letters written in Greek and Latin, the Greek on the left-hand page and its Latin translation facing it on the right. It is laid out per cola et commata — in sense lines rather than continuous text — which is why a book containing only Paul runs to well over five hundred leaves. It is catalogued as D in the list of manuscripts of Paul, and this is a standing source of confusion: Codex Bezae is also called D, but Bezae is D 05 and covers the Gospels and Acts, while Claromontanus is D 06 and covers Paul. They are different books in different libraries, and they only share a letter because Theodore Beza once owned both.

Beza said his copy came from Clermont, which is where the name comes from, and it passed afterwards into the French royal library. It is now in the Bibliotheque nationale de France as Grec 107, with a supplementary volume as Grec 107 A. C. von Tischendorf published a transcription of it in 1852, and that edition became the one everybody used — a fact that turns out to matter a great deal.

The List Between Philemon and Hebrews

Four pages separate Philemon from Hebrews in this codex, and a later scribe — a different hand, different ink — filled two and a half of them with a Latin list headed VERSUS SCRIBTURARUM SANCTARUM, "the lines of the holy scriptures". It is a stichometry: a scribe's working tool giving each book with the number of standard lines in it, so that a copyist could work out how much parchment to buy. Because it lists what a Bible contained, it is also, incidentally, one of the earliest canon lists we have, and it is usually called the Catalogus Claromontanus.

What it lists is not the Bible as later fixed. On the New Testament side it gives the four Gospels in the order Matthew, John, Mark, Luke, then ten letters of Paul, then two books titled ad petrum, then the letter of James, the letters of John, the letter of Jude, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Apocalypse of John, Acts, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter. Twenty-seven books — but not the twenty-seven. Four works that no later canon kept are simply in the list, and four that every later canon kept are missing: Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Hebrews.

The omissions are almost certainly a copying accident. The scribe's eye seems to have jumped from Ephesians to 1 Timothy, and the standard explanation is that the Greek titles for Hebrews and Ephesians look alike — Hebraious and Ephesious — with the confusion compounded by translation from a Greek exemplar into Latin. The codex itself contains all four of the missing letters, which is the strongest argument that the list, not the church behind it, lost them.

The Dashes Nobody Looked At

Alongside some of the titles a later hand has drawn a short horizontal stroke, an obelus, and for a century and a half these have been read as marking the four books that did not make the canon: the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter. On that reading the list is nearly the familiar New Testament, with the intruders already flagged as second-rate. Standard reference works give that reading.

K. G. Rodenbiker went back to the manuscript and found that the reading descends from a single footnote. C. von Tischendorf printed none of the marks in his 1852 transcription and mentioned only four of them in a note — and there are six. The other two stand beside Judith in the Old Testament and beside ad petrum prima, the odd title for 1 Peter. Why he named four rather than six, she writes, "remains a mystery", and the effect has been that generations of scholars cited Tischendorf rather than the page. Physically the marks are a later addition: "while the main list is in brown ink and clearly inscribed with neatness and care, the obeli appear to be written in a darker ink and to have been penned more hastily, as their width and length appear uneven."

If she is right, the inference usually drawn is backwards. The obeli are not the original compiler ranking his books; they are a later reader annotating a list he found puzzling — the mark beside 1 Peter most plausibly noting the strange title rather than doubting the letter. Her conclusion is that the stichometry "originally (at least in its sixth-century context) presented a NT comprised of an alternative list of 27 books which included 23 of the now-canonical NT texts... as well as Barnabas, the Shepherd, the Acts of Paul and the Revelation of Peter", and that this "demonstrates a lasting interest in alternative scriptural texts and the continuing elasticity of the NT canon." That is a real and slightly uncomfortable finding, and it is better met than avoided: the boundaries of the New Testament were settled by the church over time and with argument, not handed down complete, and a sixth-century scribe's book list is evidence of the process rather than a scandal to it.

Scripture references

• Philemon 1:25 — Where the codex's text of Paul pauses; the canon list follows on the next leaves
• Hebrews 1:1 — Hebrews resumes after the list — and is one of the books the list itself omits
• Philippians 1:1 — Present in the codex, absent from its canon list
• 2 Peter 1:1 — Listed as "ad petrum II", one of the two oddly titled Petrine entries

Sources

• ScholarshipK. G. Rodenbiker, "The Claromontanus Stichometry and its Canonical Implications" — Kelsie G. Rodenbiker, University of Glasgow · Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44:2 (2021), 240-253; DOI 10.1177/0142064X211055647. The author's open-access copy at Glasgow, read in full for this article. Source of the list's location on fols. 467v-468v, its heading, its full contents, the six obeli against Tischendorf's four, the ink and hand evidence, and the conclusions quoted hereSupports: The whole of the second and third sections
• Holding institutionBibliotheque nationale de France, Grec 107 and Grec 107 A — Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris · The holding library. No URL is given here because the BnF's Gallica service refused every automated request from this project and served a bot-verification challenge to a browser as well, so no link could be confirmed by opening it. The library's digitisation of the codex does exist: Rodenbiker's article cites the Gallica identifier ark:/12148/btv1b84683111 for it, and a reader in an ordinary browser should reach itSupports: The shelfmark and the holding institution
• Holding institutionCSNTM: Manuscript GA 06 — Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts · Free page images. CSNTM's own record gives the shelf number as "Gr 107 and 107 A", the date as sixth century, the contents as Paul, the format as a Greek-Latin diglot in a single column of 21 lines, and the extent as 533 leavesSupports: The physical description and the date
• Primary textC. von Tischendorf, Codex Claromontanus sive epistulae Pauli omnes graece et latine — Constantin von Tischendorf · Leipzig, 1852; the stichometry is transcribed at pp. 468-469 with a note at p. 589. Print only, and not opened here; it is cited because Rodenbiker's argument is precisely about what this edition did and did not printSupports: The 1852 transcription whose footnote shaped the later reading of the obeli
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Codex Claromontanus

Further reading

• K. G. Rodenbiker, "The Claromontanus Stichometry and its Canonical Implications"
• CSNTM: Manuscript GA 06 (Codex Claromontanus)
• Wikipedia: Codex Claromontanus

Reflect

A scholar went back to the manuscript and found that a hundred and fifty years of citation had rested on a footnote rather than on the page. Where are you repeating something you have never checked?