stephan huller's observations: Is Codex Sinaiticus Important?

It should be noted that one of our principle talking heads for the documentary, Dr David Trobisch gave the key note address at the recent Codex Sinaiticus conference in London (July 6, 2009). As his knowledge of the text far surpasses my own I will have to defer to his opinions on the subject. His speech in London was entitled ‘Codex Sinaiticus and the formation of the Christian Bible.’ His conclusions were that the manuscript isn’t nearly as old as the hype suggests. He dates the text to the fifth or even sixth century. He believes that many people with a vested interest in promoting the work gave it the earliest date possible which is the early fourth century.

The text of course does not contain the so-called longer ending of Mark. But we know from the time of Irenaeus that the gospel had a long ending. Irenaeus’ testimony seems to suggest that the Mark that he was familiar with at the end of the second century concluded with a description of Jesus’ enthronement to the right of the heavenly King. The Codex Sinaiticus is essentially an Egyptian text. The reason the manuscript avoids providing an ending for Mark may well have to with the original Egyptian community knowing a different ending to Mark.

A parallel to this explanation for leaving out the ending of Mark is found in the Codex Sinaiticus’ employment of what are called nomina sacra. We can use the text to demonstrate a surprising but unreported fact about all the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament - the word ‘Christ’ is never printed on any page. Instead in the many places where our English texts print this word we find the nomina sacra – the letters XS or XY (genitive form) with a line over them.

Most scholars just assume that the XS stands for ‘Christ’ (i.e. XS = XristoS). Yet it is also well established fact that many groups associated with St. Mark identified Jesus with the title Chrestos rather than Christos (XS = XrestoS). So it is that the ‘Marcionites’ gave Jesus the Chrestos (Greek and Latin inscriptions discovered in Greece and in Asia Minor (1870), volume 3, inscription 2558) because they identified him as the angel of the presence who guided Israel during the Exodus while the followers of Irenaeus identified Jesus as Christos, i.e. the messiah of Israel. Since these two communities continued to co-exist in the same Christian Church the editors of the Codex Sinaiticus decided to print only the first and last letters (XS) common to both commonly used titles and let everyone read the text they wanted.

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