A silver codex in Uppsala
Posted on | October 27, 2008 |
Codex Argenteus, the ‘Silver Codex’, is a manuscript of exceptional interest in the collection of Uppsala University, Sweden. The early sixth-century codex, produced in Ravenna, contains the Four Gospels in Gothic. The Gospels appear in the order Matthew, John, Luke, Mark. Images of the pages are available online.
Also available online is a transcription of the text, together with an English translation and a Greek text from the Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament. This online resource is part of Project Wulfila, based at the University of Antwerp, a project named after Wulfila (Ulfilas), the fourth-century bishop who devised the Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic.
Codex Argenteus has purple parchment leaves with lettering in silver and gold. Like Codex Gigas, it fell into Swedish hands in Prague at the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). In the previous century it had been in Germany. From Sweden it passed for a time to Holland, then back to Sweden, where it was bound in silver and presented to the University of Uppsala in 1669. Details are given on the Uppsala University website.
Of originally 336 leaves, 148 have been lost. Of the surviving leaves, 187 are in Uppsala and one was found in 1970 at Speyer cathedral. Chapters represented are Matthew 5-11, 26-27, John 5-19, Luke 1-10, 14-20, and Mark 1-16. The leaf in Speyer has the last verses of the long ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:12-18 on the front, 16:18-20 on the back). A transcription of the Speyer leaf may be found for example in Felicien de Tollenaere and Randall L. Jones, Word-Indices and Word-Lists to the Gothic Bible and Minor Fragments, Leiden, Brill, 1976, p. 581.
The Gothic version in Codex Argenteus reflects wording in the Greek manuscripts from which Ulfilas worked, as well as transmissional changes since that time. The text at Luke 1:3 may be taken as an example. In the facsimile one can see that this verse includes the words transcribed jah ahmin weihamma, ‘and the holy Spirit’. The variant reading ‘it seemed good to me and to the Holy Spirit’ is also found in two Old Latin manuscripts (b q) and some manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate (3 and others), in which the insertion et spiritui sancto occurs.
The Old Latin manuscripts b (in Verona) and q (in Munich) are dated respectively to the late fifth and sixth/seventh centuries but represent earlier stages of the transmission – as does Codex Argenteus. Such manuscripts raise questions about stages of New Testament textual transmission and the extent to which the earliest forms of the text were adapted in the course of copying and translation.
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