So you stare at the big blank space and think, 'Aha, that is just the right amount of space to squeeze in 16.9-20 '. I think in this case I am a bit reluctant to claim that I can interpret with any particularly significant degree of confidence the significance of nothing (i.e. Sometimes it is interesting to figure out why, sometimes it is not really worth the time and energy. Plenty of things that other people think are obvious do not seem obvious to me. The cut-and-pasted reconstruction of verses 9-20 shows that a precise calculation is a valid possibility. 9-20, or merely (as I have previously thought) an estimate. The only real question, istm, is whether the copyist made a precise calculation of the space that would be required for vv. 9-20 in the time he had to finish his work, /or/ he did have access, but made a conscious decision to defer the include-or-omit decision to someone else, either a supervisor, or the future owner of the manuscript. (D) Either the scribe could not access a copy with vv. (C) I don't grant that the same scribe added the subscription - but if this was the case, it would not be a hard task to pumice out the subscription. (B) He perceived that there was no need to begin to compact his lettering earlier, since the calculated space was sufficient for the compactly written passage. 9-20 could fit in the blank space was correct he merely reckoned that one would need to use compacted lettering, which any trained scribe could do. The evidence fits the following four points: I don't know why this is not as obvious to you as it is to me. But inasmuch as there is a blank space here, just at the point where there is a 12-verses-long major textual variant, and the blank space is just the right size to fit that 12-verses-long variant in compact lettering (which the scribes knew how to write, as shown in Luke 1:1-76 in Sinaiticus), then as a deduction based on evidence, the conclusion that the scribe's memory of verses 9-20 elicited this blank space seems extremely probable. We can't know /in an empirical sense/ that the blank column was deliberately left for additional text (after all, the request to /know/ this is a request to read the mind of someone who lived in the 300's). Such a blank column worth replicating, but not add a blank column between JohnĪnd Acts, or between Acts and James, or between Jude and Romans? Such a blank space, but not the order of the Space at the end of an exemplar as a feature worth replicating? Any manuscript, unless its text happened toĮnd at the end of its last column, would contain some blank space at the The result of a determined effort to dismiss the obvious implication of the blankĪlexandrian form of the Gospels-text was ever anything but in the order Mt-Mk-Lk-Jn? (In Papyrus 75, John follows Luke.) And why would any copyist regard the blank When he wrote the text of Mark 16:1-8 from an exemplar that did not have versesĩ-20, Daniel Wallace has proposed a different explanation, namely, that theĬopyist was using an exemplar in which the Gospels, though containing theĪlexandrian text, were arranged in the Western order (Mt-Jn-Mk-Lk), andĪlthough the copyist rearranged the Gospels into the order Mt-Mk-Lk-Jn, heĪdded a blank space to represent the blank space at the end of his The implication that the copyist of Codex Vaticanus clearly recollected 9-20 Obvious answer is that the copyist was aware of copies that contained versesĩ-20, and although his exemplar lacked these verses, he left space to give theĮventual owner of the manuscript the option of including them in the event that This is the only blank column in the New Testament portion of Codex Of Vaticanus to leave an entire column blank. It was not normal, however, for the copyist Happened to conclude right at the end of a column). Normal for copyists to begin books at the tops of columns, and thus some space was typically left below the end of each book before the next bookīegan at the top of the next column (except in those cases where the book The text on this page begins in 15:43, and endsĪt the end of 16:8, on the 31 st line of the second column.
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