Greetings and welcome to Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle. I'm the pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia. And in this episode of Word Magazine, I'm going to be doing another article review. And the article that I'm going to be reviewing is one that appeared online on the Brill academic site back on December the 17th of last year, 2024. And it was titled, Did the Original Scribes write the di-stigma in Codex Vaticanus B of the Bible. And Di Stigmae is a paratextual marking that's found in Codex Vaticanus. Vaticanus is one of the two unseal manuscripts that proved to be the twin heavyweights of textual criticism, modern textual criticism in the 19th century. Westcott and Hort followed Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. And these two manuscripts still have a lot of weight in shaping, guiding, constraining the modern critical text. Anyways, this article that was written by a fellow named Nehemiah Gordon and others was challenging a theory that had been poised about these di-stigma markings in Codex Vaticanus. And it had been theorized that some of these markings, these diastigma markings, that they were put there to indicate places in the text where the scribes knew of textual variants. And it was theorized that some of these diastigma were done soon after Codex Vaticanus was originally copied, so they dated to the fourth century. And many saw this as providing very early evidence that would justify the appearance of later textual variants that would be indicated in other manuscripts, or maybe even some that were controversial and they didn't have any evidence that they weren't original, but these distigmae were used to justify their reconstructions of the text and to undermine the readings of the traditional text. We'll look at some specific examples in a moment, but it's a quite significant article, and there are a lot of ramifications for it. I mean, we'll talk about this at the end, but one of the things it does is it sort of challenges, I think, some of the things that undergird the whole modern empirical reconstruction method. On what basis are many of the conclusions made by contemporary scholars? This article is actually an article that engages in more hard science because it's looking at the dating of ink. And so there were a lot of people in previous decades who are sort of using their visual interpretation, something that's very popular these days, it seems, is studying the so-called scribal habits, the habits of the scribes who copied and then making significant conclusions about the text based on identifying these supposed scribal habits. Well, this article sort of using actual hard science undermined some of the conclusions that were made by those approaching, I think, textual criticism as an art and a science. And so in that way, I think it's quite significant. So let's go ahead and take a look at the article. We're not going to read or look at the whole thing. I'm just going to look at some of it. Let's see if I can pull it up here. This is the Brill site. Brill is a major academic publisher. This article appeared in the Vatican Library Review. Codex Vaticanus, as the name indicates, is in the Vatican Library in Rome. Again, the authors were Nehemiah Gordon and others, Patrick Andrust, Oliver Hahn, etc. Again, this was placed online just before Christmas last year, December 17 of 2024. Some of the discussion is a little technical, not the easiest to follow, but let's start off with reading the abstract and then let's just jump in at a few points in the article and discuss some of why this article is significant. So here's the abstract. The fourth century Greek Bible manuscript Codex Vaticanus contains pairs of horizontally aligned marginal dots known as diastigma, which correspond to textual variants in other manuscripts. The production of the diastigma has been variously dated to the 4th or 16th centuries. A 4th century date would prove the early existence of hundreds of textual variants, many of which are otherwise only witnessed by later manuscripts. See, this is what's significant. They're saying these diastigma were placed there contemporaneously basically with the copying of Codex Vaticanus. So these are fourth century textual notes and this validates or gives weight to these textual variants within Codex Vaticanus, even if, for example, Vaticanus didn't omit some controversial passage there's the diastigma showing that some fourth century scribe was aware of it. But here's the hard science they used to investigate this theory, this hypothesis. Near-infrared microscope reflectography combined with micro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy proved that the diastigma, both those categorized as apricot, which are visually similar to the ink of the original main text, and chocolate, which are visually similar to the re-inking of the main text, were written with inks made from chemically purified vitriol, a process that only became standard in the 16th century. As a result, there is no reasonable chance that the diastigma were written in the 4th century. So this is the really big thing. They actually studied using these processes with microscope reflectography and micro x-ray spectroscopy. And they studied these inks and they said, hey, these markings that you thought came from the fourth century, they came from inks that weren't produced until the 16th century. And then there are also horizontal lines, horizontal lines, that have been hypothesized to function as text critical oboloi were written in the same ink as the original main text, which differs completely from that of the diastigma. In other words, the diastigma and horizontal lines tested were not produced during the same writing session and are separated by more than a thousand years, making it impossible for them to have functioned as conjoining text critical symbols in the fourth century. Well, I'll show you an example of this in just a moment with a little image from Vaticanus. But they were saying if there's a diastigma and there's a horizontal line, that those two things were working in tandem with one another to indicate places where the scribes knew of major variants, comparing them with other early 4th century manuscripts. And what they found was that can't be because these horizontal lines are in the original ink. whereas the Di Stigmae were not written till the 16th century. And so it exploded basically theories that many scholars over past decades had accepted based on their artistic interpretations of these heritage textual markings. and the assumptions that they had about the age of these things. So let's read just a little bit of the article. I'm not going to read all of it. It starts off Codex Vaticanus. B is among the most important manuscripts of the Bible in Greek. It was written in majuscule or unseal or capital letter script in the fourth century, mostly laid out in three columns. The Codex preserves most of the Old Testament and New Testament. Some pages were replaced in minuscule script in the 15th century, so part of Vaticanus was replaced. Not all of it supposedly dates to the 4th century, but some of it was written in the minuscule script in the 15th century. A scribe re-inked the entire manuscript, systematically tracing over faded letters with new ink. This re-inking obscured the original shapes of most of the letters, making it difficult to differentiate between the original hands that wrote the manuscript. This is a major reason why there is no consensus as to whether the original text was produced by two, three, or four scribes. So supposedly it's first copied in the fourth century, it fades, and then someone goes through and totally re-inked copies over the whole thing. And because of this, Modern scholars aren't even sure how many scribes have worked on Codex Vaticanus. Were there two people who did this, three people, four people? How many times have there been scribal corrections, updates made to this manuscript? Let's see. Nevertheless, the re-inker did leave many letters and words un-re-inked, especially in the case of what he considered to be errors. Pietro Versace recently carried out a thorough study of over 30 different scribal features, arguing that Codex Vaticanus was re-inked twice, first in the 10th or 11th century and again in the 16th century. So this Fellow Versace has a theory that it was re-inked not once, but twice, once in the 10th or 11th century, and again, the 16th century. So what's the debate about the distigme? In 1995, Philip B. Payne identified pairs of horizontally aligned dots in the margins of Codex Vaticanus. They'd be originally called umlauts. but which were later dubbed di-stigma, the singular is di-stigma, plural di-stigma, meaning two dots. The number of di-stigma has been estimated between 765 and 858. According to Payne, the original scribe of Codex Vaticanus had access to other manuscripts in the fourth century, which he systematically compared to Codex Vaticanus, marking the location of textual variants with diastigma. And we'll look at that figure in just a moment to illustrate this. In 2000, Payne, along with Paul Kennard, carried out groundbreaking work by directly examining Codex Vaticanus with the naked eye, a magnifying glass and a seven-time magnification loop with internal illumination. They propose a dichotomy between a dichotomy rather of original apricot distigmi and chocolate or dark brown re-inked distigmi with visual observations as the only available criterion. See, they're just using their eyes and then making assumptions based on what they think it might possibly be. They correctly noticed that the color of the apricot distigmi matched the original un-re-inked text, whereas the chocolate distigmi corresponded to the dark brown ink of the reinker. They also found two instances of apricot distigmi protruding from chocolate distigmi. Based on this, they argued that the chocolate distigmi were the product of reinking original apricot distigmi. Notable exceptions are distigmi that Payne argued were added by the reinker or possibly by an unspecified later hand and therefore do not have apricot diastigmae hidden underneath them. And they give an example here from 1 Corinthians 14 verses 33 and 34. And I'll pull that up in just a moment, but let's just read this. A diastigmae, two dots in the left margin of Codex Vaticanus, according to Philip Payne, this diastigmae and the adjacent horizontal line are an example of a so-called diastigmae obolos pair. indicating that the original scribe of Codex Vaticanus in the 4th century is aware of other manuscripts that omitted the verses in 1 Corinthians 14, 34, and 35, telling women to be silent in church. And so this example became very important for Paine because it was a controversial passage. And as we'll see in a few moments, Paine had his own presuppositions as an egalitarian about this passage. He didn't think it was original, but he must've been quite concerned about the fact that it was there in Vaticanus in this very early manuscript. And if you're aware of the controversy over this passage, 1 Corinthians 14, in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is writing the church at Corinth and there's been trouble in the worship services, there have been questions of women speaking in the church meetings, there's been questions of speaking in tongues and interpretation, and the meetings have become chaotic. And in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 33, it says, for God is not the author of confusion, but of peace as in all churches of the saints. Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law." And, of course, for people who are egalitarians and want to think that there were women elders and women preachers in our church, this passage is problematic. And various modern scholars have attempted to understand ways in which this statement from Paul can be taken other than being a, a, a positive teaching coming from him. And one of those answers has been to say that this passage was not original and, but it's there in Vaticanus, but aha, Paine says, but there is a diastigma. and there is a corresponding diastigmae rather, one of these double dots, and there is an obelisk, there's a horizontal line, and this indicates that in the fourth century, even though it was copied in Codex Sinaiticus, the scribe knew that this didn't appear in some other manuscripts, so the theory goes. He argued that both the diastigmae and the horizontal line were re-inked in the Middle Ages according to Kurt Nicum and Pietro Versace. The diastigma were added in the 15th or 16th century and the horizontal line is an unrelated 4th century paragraphos, which divided the text into sense units. So let me pull up, if I can, this picture so that you can get a clear look at this as an example. So here's This text, oops, didn't want to come up for me, sorry. Let's try that again. Yeah, there we go, okay. So this is from Codex Vaticanus, and this is part of verse 33 and part of verse 34. And if you look up here at the top, you've got Omega Sigma Hos, as and then the preposition in hosts in as in and you've got plus ice all uh uh let's see plus ice ice as in all the eck play sea ice as in all the churches ton, hagion, of the saints, and then we've got the statement about hi, gune, kais, the women, in, tais, and then it's in the ek, and presumably the word ekklesia continues. So this is from 1 Corinthians 14, verses 33 and 34. And out there in the column, there's the diastigma, there's this horizontal line, which is an obelisk, and Paine is saying these were put together as an indicator that this was a controversial passage and that this statement didn't appear in some other manuscripts, even though it's copied here in Codex Vaticanus. and other people were saying, no, this was from the 16th century and this was original and it served another purpose. It was a paragraphos that was dividing the thought units. Some scribe is dividing the thought units in this way. So anyways, you get a little bit of a background about how this discussion over these paratextual markings might influence or be used by scholars who are trying to make arguments about the originality or lack of originality of a particular passage. Let's go back to this article if we can, and let's just read a little bit more. I'm not going to read all of it, but I'll just pick and choose a little bit. The overwhelming statistical correspondence between the diastigma and textual variance known from modern critical editions further suggested to Paine and Cunard that the chocolate diastigma were likely to be re-inkings of the earlier apricot diastigma. Hence, according to this hypothesis, most of the chocolate diastigma correspond to the locations of the original apricot diastigma. Again, this is part of their argument for the antiquity of these markings that they go back to a fourth century scribe. They're not much later additions. If the 700 plus diastigma are original, their importance is immense for textual criticism of the New Testament. In other words, according to this hypothesis, the diastigma serve as fourth century witnesses for numerous variants only known from later manuscripts. So, according to those who thought these things were from the 4th century, like Paine, they prove that passages like 1 Corinthians 14, 33 and 34 were controversial very early on. Let's look a little bit about the paragraphoi. Throughout the New Testament portions of Codex Vaticanus, horizontal lines in the margin mark a new section. These horizontal lines, usually dubbed paragraphoi, are often accompanied by a space in the text where the new section begins. But again, Paine identified these as combined with the distigmae as distigmae obolos pares, where there was an indication of some significant variation in the text. So he goes on and talks about how Paine's hypotheses about Vaticanus were received and how there was debate about it. And then it gets into really the hard science. They actually took these inks and tested them. And I'm going to skip through a lot of this, but you can just see that, you know, there was hard science study of these inks And let's go all the way down to the conclusion that they reach. Whoops, there it is. Here are the conclusions. This study builds on the pioneering work of Philip Payne, who discovered the distigma nearly 30 years ago. It also continues the legacy of Paul Canard, who carried out paleographical observations of Codex Vaticanus. Micro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy has now proven that all the distigmite tested, both apricot and chocolate, were written in chemically purified inks typical of the 16th century or later. Despite appearances, the apricot distigmite tested were not written in the same ink as the original main text or original horizontal lines, paragraphically. Any similarity in color between the inks of the apricot and the distigma and the original ink is purely coincidental and entirely superficial and therefore can no longer be cited as evidence for an early date for the distigma. So, can they blown out of the water that these distigma were from the fourth century. And the last line there says, finally, this study should serve as a warning about reaching definitive paleographical or codicological conclusions based on visual appraisals of the color of ink alone. So there's quite a reprimand there that, in other words, be careful of the art part of textual criticism conclusions. And those who just study these manuscripts and come up with fanciful theories based on what they think it might be, and someone might come along later and apply hard science and find out that these theories aren't based on what's reliable to be understood. And part of what we see here is that scholars are humans. They come with presuppositions. And if you look at Philip Paine, who is the one who, starting in 1995, began to develop these theories about the antiquity of these markings and so forth, and what the significance might be of a stigma and an obelisk together, a lot of it, I think, was driven by some of what he wanted to, the conclusions he wanted to reach about the text of the New Testament. And I pulled up this article that he wrote back in 2019 in a journal that's called the Priscilla Papers. And this is a journal that is produced by Christians for Biblical Equality. So it's an egalitarian organization promoting women serving as elders and having equality in the roles they play within the church and so forth. And this was an article written in 2019, and it's about 1 Corinthians 14, 34, and 35. And He says a marginal comment or a quotation. He's responding to someone named Kirk McGregor. And Kirk McGregor, I think, is another egalitarian who tries to explain 1 Corinthians 14, 33 and 34 as a quotation. And whereas Paine has described it as a marginal comment that somehow spuriously came into the manuscript. And so, you can read this article, it's online, there it was, Priscilla Papers, Volume 33, Number 2, Spring of 2019. So, it wasn't that long ago. And in making this argument, of course, he appealed to some of this research he had done. And there's the same passage that we looked at before. He wrote here, interface of 1 Corinthians 14, 33 and 34. Note the diastigma in the left margin and the gray triangle in the upper right corner. So he put a triangle here to show this space pointing at the gap. And so he's assuming that this diastigma and this obelisk, indicated and the space here indicate awareness of some major textual issue and of course his argument is it shows that even though this passage is in Codex Vaticanus that the scribes of the fourth century knew that it was missing in others and this leads him to his assumption that this passage is not authentic. How could such a misogynistic passage be authentic to the New Testament? It wouldn't fit with the egalitarian ideal. And so his theory is that some scribe had written in the margin and somehow then it had gotten to the text. And he talks about that. He says, let's see, The only adequate explanation for both locations of verses 34 and 35 is that they were originally written in the margin of a manuscript sometime in the first two centuries and were later inserted into the body text in accordance with scribal convention. And this is a very similar argument to what is often made about the Koma Yohanaim, 1 John 5, 7, that it wasn't original, that some scribe wrote in the margin and somehow it made it into the text proper. And he has this very similar theory for this passage that it was a marginal note. And then his work on looking at the text of Vaticanus helped to buttress his theory. But now that theory, it seems, has been discredited by this article that has come out, if that makes sense. Well, what are the conclusions we can draw from this? I was thinking of at least, I think, two things related to a central issue. A central issue is the problem of modern empirical reconstruction methods of textual criticism. So, two issues. First of all, This article shows that the so-called assured results of one generation can be wiped away in the next generation. We've seen this in other ways. Go back in the 19th century, text families were all the rage and there's the Western family and there's the Alexandrian family and there's the Byzantine family. And now the CBGM has come along and now they're saying, oh, well, actually there aren't any text families except for the Byzantine. And here's an idea that's been around since 1995. I'm guessing Many people accepted this. I wonder how many articles discussing scribal habits were published. And now here comes this hard science article that says, nope, these inks don't match up. You can't date these distigmae to the fourth century. They're much later. And they don't have all this significance for evaluating textual variance as some were giving to it. Secondly, what it shows us is that many of the so-called scientific conclusions or the science and art conclusions of modern textual criticism are based on, influenced by, shaped by the subjective presuppositions of the scholars. So pain, for example, is an egalitarian. He doesn't like 1 Corinthians 14, 33, and 34 because it is counter to his egalitarian mindset that men and women in early Christianity served in the same roles. Men were elders, women were elders, and so he doesn't like what 1 Corinthians 14, 33, and 34 say. And so this shapes his approach to the evidence when he's looking at Vaticanus, when he's trying to understand these two little dots that he finds in the margin of the manuscript. His commitment to egalitarianism shaped his analysis of the evidence, and it even led him to a hypothesis that 1 Corinthians 14, 33 through 34 was a marginal gloss that spuriously made it into the text. And again, I just think overall, this article and the things it's discussing demonstrate the weaknesses, dare I say, the failures of modern reconstruction textual criticism. Well, with that, I'm going to bring this episode to a conclusion. I know this sort of dealt with some material that's a little bit technical. I was struggling myself to understand all of it. Hope I've properly and fairly represented it. And I hope that this episode will be helpful for those who are listening and you'll find some profit in it. I'll look forward to speaking to you in the next episode of Word Magazine. Till then, take care and may the Lord richly bless you.