Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus

Also called Codex Ephraemi

A great Greek Bible whose text was erased in the Middle Ages so the parchment could carry sermons instead — and which was then damaged past repair in 1834 by a chemical applied to bring the old writing back.

Siglum: C (Gregory-Aland 04; Rahlfs C for the Greek Old Testament)
Type: Parchment palimpsest codex. The biblical undertext is fifth-century, a single column of about 41 lines — the only one of the four great Greek Bibles in one column. The overtext is a twelfth- or thirteenth-century copy of works of Ephrem the Syrian in Greek. 209 catalogued leaves, of which 208 physically survive: one Old Testament leaf disappeared in the nineteenth century
Language: Greek, in both layers
Contents: 64 leaves of Old Testament: fragments of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach only. 145 leaves of New Testament, preserving part of every book except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John, which are entirely absent — roughly three-fifths of the New Testament, very unevenly distributed. The original order of the books cannot be recovered, because the leaves were reused out of sequence
Written: Fifth century AD on every catalogue's reckoning, including the holding library's. G. Cavallo dated it to the sixth, and P. Andrist reports that palaeographers generally follow him Disputed dating
Origin: Unknown. Palestine and Mesopotamia have both been proposed; no institution asserts a place
Found at: Not applicable. The codex passed through private and royal libraries; it was never excavated
Found in: Not applicable. Gregory credits Pierre Allix with noticing the erased biblical text, Jean Boivin with the first collation of it, and J. J. Wettstein with collating it in 1716 at Bentley's request
Found by: No finder. Owned by Cardinal Niccolo Ridolfi (d. 1550), then Pietro Strozzi, then Catherine de' Medici, who had it carried to Paris; bound in 1602
Now held at: Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. The original is consultable only by special permission; readers are supplied with microfilm
Shelfmark: Grec 9
Facsimile: View the manuscript

A Book Used Twice

Parchment was expensive, and a book nobody could read any longer was raw material. Some time in the twelfth or thirteenth century a scribe took a Greek Bible several hundred years old, scraped the ink off its leaves, cut and rearranged them, and wrote across them a collection of Greek sermons and treatises of Ephrem the Syrian. That is what a palimpsest is — a manuscript written again — and this one is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, now Grec 9 in the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

What lies underneath is a Bible of about the fifth century, written in a single column of about forty-one to forty-four lines — the only one of the four great Greek Bibles laid out that way. Two hundred and nine leaves are catalogued, of which two hundred and eight physically survive — one Old Testament leaf disappeared in the nineteenth century. Sixty-four carry Old Testament text and they preserve nothing but fragments of six Wisdom books: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach. The remaining leaves carry parts of every New Testament book except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John, which have vanished entirely — roughly three-fifths of the New Testament in all, and unevenly: Colossians and 2 Timothy nearly whole, 1 Thessalonians barely present.

Because the leaves were reused out of order, the original arrangement of the Bible cannot be read off the book. The original sequence of the books cannot be determined, and editors since Tischendorf have simply followed his arrangement. The codex reached Paris by a route that is documented, and it is not the one usually told. Gregory traces it: it belonged to the Florentine cardinal Niccolo Ridolfi, who died in 1550; it was then bought by the marshal Pietro Strozzi, and through him passed to Queen Catherine de' Medici and was carried to Paris. It was bound in 1602. That sequence rules out the story that Catherine brought it to France in her dowry — she married in 1533, seventeen years before Ridolfi died still owning it.

The Tincture

The undertext was noticed as early as the late seventeenth century and collated in the eighteenth — Wettstein went over it in 1716 for Bentley — but reading a scraped page is slow work, and in the nineteenth century chemistry offered a shortcut. The Giobert tincture — water, hydrochloric acid and a small quantity of potassium ferrocyanide — reacts with the iron in old ink and turns it a strong Prussian blue. Applied to a palimpsest it makes the lower writing leap out. It also eats the parchment.

It was used on this codex, and the result is visible in every photograph: large blue-green stains across the written area, and text that faded further as the years passed. F. Albrecht, surveying the use of chemical reagents on manuscripts, singles this book out — "A sad example of its use is the Codex Ephraemi Syri rescriptus" — and illustrates the damage from folio 58 of this very manuscript. The Bibliotheque nationale now allows the original to be consulted only by special permission; readers are given microfilm.

The blame is almost always laid on C. von Tischendorf, who published the undertext, and for the treatment of 1834 it is misplaced. C. R. Gregory set the record straight in 1900: the Leipzig professor Ferdinand Florens Fleck asked for the treatment, the librarian Karl Benedict Hase permitted it, and a man named Simonin applied it. Gregory's German is not quoted here, because seven years later he put the same correction into his own English: "It has sometimes been said that Tischendorf spoiled this manuscript by using a bad reagent to draw forth the old letters that had grown so pale. That was a mistake. Simonin put Gioberti tincture on some of them with the librarian's permission in 1834, and that was the year at which Tischendorf left school and went to the university." Tischendorf came to the manuscript later, found it already stained, and said so: he wanted his facsimile to show "those stains which every page took on when the chemical tincture was applied", and noted elsewhere that the tincture had eaten the writing. He published the New Testament portion in 1843 and the Old Testament in 1845.

What a Damaged Witness Can and Cannot Tell You

This manuscript carries a limit that the other great codices do not. With Sinaiticus or Vaticanus, a scholar disputing a reading can go and look at the page. Here the page may be a blue stain over a scraped surface under a layer of thirteenth-century sermon, and what the editor reports is partly what the editor could make out. A. Ceriani said as much in 1888, doubting whether Tischendorf's edition was accurate enough and whether it did not first need a complete revision. His words are not quoted here: he wrote in Italian, his paper is print only, and no page of it was opened for this article. R. W. Lyon made extensive corrections to it in 1959, and P. Malik, writing in 2021, describes the situation without softening it: "Being a palimpsest, however, Ephraemi's wording exhibits an inherent measure of uncertainty, as evinced by Robert W. Lyon's extensive corrections to Constantin Tischendorf's editio princeps."

That uncertainty is honest information and it belongs in the open. A reader who is told that a fifth-century manuscript "reads" something has a right to know whether anyone can check it. Multispectral imaging — photographing a page at wavelengths the eye cannot see — now recovers erased writing without touching it, and Malik reports that such images of this codex have been made and open up "a new opportunity to put this codex under closer scrutiny". They do not appear to be publicly available, and the article does not say who produced them.

There is one more thing worth saying about dates. Every catalogue gives the undertext as fifth-century, and that is the figure to print — but it is not unanimous among specialists. P. Andrist, who examined the codex in 2018, follows G. Cavallo in dating it to the sixth century and remarks that the traditional fifth-century date is "still too often retained". The place of writing is unknown; Palestine and Mesopotamia have both been proposed. Four things are commonly said about this manuscript with more confidence than the record supports: that it is fifth-century, that it came from Egypt, that Tischendorf applied the chemical, and that Catherine de' Medici brought it to France in her dowry. The last is contradicted by the dates and the third by Gregory, who wrote the correction down in 1900.

Scripture references

Job 1:1 — One of the six Wisdom books of which fragments survive in the Old Testament leaves
Proverbs 1:1 — Another; nothing of the Law, the Prophets or the Psalms survives here
2 Thessalonians 1:1 — One of the two New Testament books that have vanished from the codex entirely
2 John 1:1 — The other

Sources

ScholarshipC. R. Gregory, Textkritik des Neuen Testamentes, volume 1 — Caspar Rene Gregory · Leipzig, 1900, p. 42; public domain and read in the original German at the Internet Archive, in two independent scans, for this article. Gregory names Fleck as the requester, Hase as the permitting librarian and Simonin as the applier, in 1834, and says the charge has been laid against Tischendorf "falschlich" — wrongly. The same page gives the ownership chain from Ridolfi through Strozzi to Catherine de' Medici, the 1602 binding, and Allix, Boivin and Wettstein. Nothing is quoted from it in translation, because Gregory wrote the correction out again in English himself; see the next entrySupports: That Tischendorf did not apply the reagent, who did, and the ownership chain
ScholarshipC. R. Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament — Caspar Rene Gregory · New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907, 348-350; public domain and read at the Internet Archive. Gregory's own English account of this manuscript, and the source of the passage quoted in the second section. He is writing for a general reader here rather than for textual critics, and he says the same thing he had said in the Textkritik seven years before, which is why this article quotes his English rather than translating his GermanSupports: Gregory's correction about the reagent, in his own English
ScholarshipF. Albrecht, "Between Boon and Bane: The Use of Chemical Reagents in Palimpsest Research in the Nineteenth Century" — Felix Albrecht · In M. J. Driscoll (ed.), Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 13 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012), 147-165. Gives the composition of the Giobert tincture, names this codex as "a sad example of its use", and illustrates the damage from folio 58 of this manuscript. No URL is given: the copy this project could reach is on a site that refused access when the link was checkedSupports: What the reagent was, and what it did to this book
ScholarshipP. Malik, "A New Light on Old Variants: Notes on the New Testament Text of Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus" — Peter Malik · In Ancient Texts, Papyri, and Manuscripts (Brill, 2021), 160-190; DOI 10.1163/9789004465732_011. The sentence quoted in the third section is from the published abstract, which is public; the chapter itself is behind a paywall and was not read here. It is also the source for the existence of multispectral images of this codex, and it does not say who made them or where they are, which is why this article says so · paywalledSupports: That the codex's readings carry an inherent uncertainty, and that multispectral images exist
ScholarshipR. W. Lyon, "A Re-examination of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus"; and A. Ceriani's earlier doubt — Robert W. Lyon; Antonio Maria Ceriani · Lyon: New Testament Studies 5 (1959), 260-272; DOI 10.1017/S0028688500006548 — the study that corrected Tischendorf's edition extensively. Ceriani's remark of 1888, quoted in this article, is in the Rendiconti of the Reale Istituto Lombardo, series II, vol. 21, p. 547. NEITHER was opened here: Lyon is paywalled and Ceriani is print only. Both are cited because the third section's whole point is that the edition has needed correcting, and a reader should be able to check who said so · paywalledSupports: That Tischendorf's edition has been questioned and corrected
ScholarshipP. Andrist, on the date and origin of the codex — Patrick Andrist · Scrineum Rivista 17:2 (2020); DOI 10.13128/scrineum-11466; open access under CC BY. Andrist, who reports examining the codex at the Bibliotheque nationale in 2018, follows G. Cavallo (Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 1967, 91-93) in dating the undertext to the sixth century and remarks that the traditional fifth-century date is still too often retained; the Mesopotamian origin is P. Orsini's. Cavallo and Orsini were not opened, and their positions are reported from AndristSupports: The sixth-century dating and the proposed places of writing
Primary textC. von Tischendorf, Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, New Testament (1843) and Old Testament (1845) — Constantin von Tischendorf · Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. Public domain at the Internet Archive. The two remarks of his quoted in this article — that he wanted the facsimile to show the stains the tincture left, and that the tincture had eaten the writing — are from his Prolegomena; note that he writes of the treatment impersonally throughout and nowhere says who applied it, which is consistent with Gregory's accountSupports: Tischendorf's own description of the damage he found
Holding institutionBibliotheque nationale de France, Grec 9 — Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris · The holding library, which dates the upper script to the thirteenth century and the lower to the fifth and restricts consultation of the original. No URL is given 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 does exist and a reader in an ordinary browser should reach itSupports: The shelfmark, the two dates, and the access restriction
Holding institutionCSNTM: Manuscript GA 04 — Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts · Free page images, re-served from the Bibliotheque nationale's own digitisation and credited to it. CSNTM's record gives the shelf number as Gr. 9, the date as fifth century, and the extent as 145 leaves with 41-44 lines per columnSupports: Page images and the physical description
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus

Reflect

Someone tried to recover this text and destroyed part of it in the attempt, meaning well. Where might your urgency to get at something be costing the thing itself?