[JSNT63 (1996) 105-123]

MANUSCRIPTS, THE CODEX AND THE CANON* J.K. Elliott

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT

In any discussion of the canon of both Old and New Testaments patristic evidence is recognized as having crucial importance. Equally significant sources of informationall too frequently neglectedare extant biblical MSS. As far as the New Testament is concerned it was not until the fourth century that relative agreement was reached about precisely which books should be in the canon. Books that fell outside that canon were branded as apocryphal in the sense of 'spurious', 'secondary', 'of dubious value'. The books accepted as the canonical scriptures of the church for its new testament were in general those that were ancient, of apostolic authority and had received universal Christian acceptance. As for the Old Testament, this canon was never drawn so precisely. This article will investigate the evidence of MSS and versions concerning the contents of both testaments. First we turn to the New Testament. English versions of the New Testament and modern editions of the Greek New Testament contain the same 27 books usually in the same sequence. The order of the books has become standardized. The four Gospels in the sequence Matthew, Mark, Luke, John followed by Acts form as it were the history of Jesus and the church. These are followed nowadays by the Paulines separated by Hebrews from the Catholic epistles in afixedorder; then comes Revelation at the end. There is little logic, chronological, theological or historical, in the sequences of books within each section. The normal order of Gospels seems to place one of the longer Gospelsfirst;the order of the Paulines seems to be based on * Based on a paper delivered at a seminar organized by the British Library and the University of Sheffield Graduate School in Sheffield in March 1995.

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the decreasing length of the individual books. But as we shall see below, other sequences have been followed in manuscripts and in printed editions of the Greek. However authoritative the opinion of the synod or the church leader about what was and what was not canonical,1 it is likely that the codex form in which the Christian scriptures circulated helped to promote the establishment of the definite, fixed canon of the 27 books we know. When each book circulated as a separate entity, obviously there was no limit to the number of texts that could be received. When certain, approved, texts were gathered into small collections this had the effect of ostracizing and isolating texts which were not deemed suitable for inclusion. Some early church authorities knew of and cited Gospels that were later branded as apocryphal. According to Eusebius the Gospel of Peter was read by the church at Rhossus. Jewish Christian Gospels like the Gospel according to the Hebrews were quoted by Fathers such as Clement, Origen and Jerome in the same way as they cited works that were later to be in the canon. All these Gospels, canonical and apocryphal (to use these terms anachronistically) presumably circulated originally as separate items. Christianity soon began to distinguish between the various Gospels then in existence. Patristic citation and Christian preference generally agreed that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John were the authoritative foundation documents for the faith. Eventually it was these which were the four that were gathered into a single codex. The oldest New Testament manuscripts extant today generally contain (or, appear to have contained) only single books (e.g. second century: p52 John; third century: Spi Matthew; $5 John; $37 Luke; $p9 1 John; $512 Hebrews; $pi3 Hebrews; spi8 Revelation) but that does not tell us much because these very fragmentary manuscripts may originally have contained more than one text. In fact, some papyri surviving from the third century do contain portions from more than one text (e.g. *p20 1 and 2 Thessalonians; ^ 5 3 Matthew and Acts; ^ 7 2 1 and 2 Peter and Jude; $p92 Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians). The oldest known manuscript that contains all four Gospels (and Acts) is the third-century Chester Beatty papyrus ^ 4 5 . Luke and John survive
1. Canonical lists are to found in H.B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), pp. 203-14; B.M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV; G.M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. Tables 3.1, 3.3,4.1.

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in 9S75 of the third century, but this manuscript may originally have contained more than two Gospels. The well-known papyrologist and palaeographer T.C. Skeat is of the opinion that the manuscripts numbered Sp64 (fragments of Matthew), ^ 6 7 (fragments of Matthew), and ^ 4 (fragments of Luke) originally belonged together and should now be registered under one siglum. He claims2 that it can be proved statistically that Luke did not follow Matthewanother Gospel must have intervened. In other words he argues that this manuscript was possibly originally written as a four-Gospel codex and that if the secondcentury date for $p64 and $P67 can be maintained, then this would be our earliest known example of such a codex. ($P4, usually given a thirdcentury date, may in fact be much older: the fragments were found in the binding of a manuscript of Philo, which itself has been dated as third century. 4 must therefore be older than that; and some time must be allowed for a well-written codex to have deteriorated to such an extent that it was torn up and used as waste. All in all 4 can hardly be any later than 200 CE.) Collecting the four chosen Gospels into one codex had the effect of according a special status to those four but, possibly more significant, helped to limit the number of Gospels to these four and no more! The fourfold Gospels could fit into one codex, but not onto one roll, so the adoption of the codex would itself have had the effect of enforcing the fourfold Gospel canon as a fixed entity. The Gospels that were rejected from that fourfold collection were never bound together with any or all of those four. There are no manuscripts that contain say Matthew, Luke and Peter, or John, Mark and Thomas. Only the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were considered as scriptural and then as canonical. It could be that the reason why the Christians adopted the codex long before anyone else was to safeguard the four Gospels from either addi tion or subtraction. This is in effect the operation of a 'canon'. Unlike the writing of a roll, when a codex was planned one had to decide what was to go into it, particularly if it was a single-quire codex where the number of leaves has to be fixed in advance. It is interesting to note that the Gospel of Mark was included right from the beginning, despite the fact that nearly all of its contents are to be found in at least one other of the canonical Gospels. The belief that Peter's authority lay behind Mark may have helped its reputation as an indispensable source (although that tradition may only have originated
2. In private correspondence.

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after Mark was already bound in as one of the authoritative four). Once the quartet of Gospels had been established the figure four was itself seen to be of significance as Irenaeus is at pains to point out. In his Against Heresies he refers to the four winds, the four points of the compass and the four covenants between God and humankind as precedents for the inevitability of the fourfold Gospel canon. As is also well known, Irenaeus compares the four Gospels to the living creatures of Ezek. 1.1-21 (called cherubim in Ezek. 10.20) in which the sequence of man (= Matthew), lion (= John), ox (= Luke), eagle (= Mark) is the socalled Western order of the Gospels.3 That Irenaeus was able to argue in favour of the fourfold Gospel canon in c. 170 suggests that such a collection was already well in existence by then, although the establishment of the collection was in need of defence. Our surviving manuscripts that contain the four canonical Gospels do not have them in only onefixedorder. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John was the most common sequence, but other sequences exist. The order known as the Western order, Matthew, John, Luke, Mark, has just been referred to. This sequence is found in Codex Bezae and several so-called Western manuscripts such as W X and several minuscules, as well as in Old Latin manuscripts and the Peshitta. One reason for such an order may be that in the Western order the Gospels attributed to two leading apostles are given pride of place. Various other sequences occur in manuscripts but it is interesting to see that no sequence has Lukefirst.The following orders are found in manuscripts, in canonical listings or in versional evidence: 1432, 1423, 1243, 1324, 4123, 4132, 2134, 2314, (where Matthew = 1, Mark = 2, Luke = 3, John = 4). As well as the fourfold Gospel codex other collections of Christian scriptures were issued. Some manuscripts contain the Catholic Epistles; other manuscripts contain the Pauline corpus. There is an equally arbitrary sequence in those manuscripts too. As far as the Pauline collection is concerned, the various patristic and other early lists of canonical books show that there was hesitation especially in the West over Hebrews. The letter is absent from the Muratorian
3. For the identification with the creatures in Ezekiel in preference to those in the book of Revelation see T.C. Skeat, 'Irenaeus and the Four-Gospel Canon', NovT 34 (1992), pp. 194-99. The importance of the number as well as the order makes sense only when all four are contained in a codex. If the identification were with Revelation various problems with Irenaeus's parallels occur, as Skeat makes clearnot least the resulting order of the gospels, John, Luke, Matthew, Mark, which is unique.

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canon (of the second or, more probably, the fourth century) and even from the tenth-century Cheltenham canon, although it seems as if there are no Greek manuscripts of the Pauline corpus extant that excluded Hebrews.4 The Muratorian Fragment finds it significant that Paul, like the seer, wrote letters to seven churches (Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Galatia, Thessalonica, Rome) and that was the justification for publishing for general reading correspondence that had been addressed to individual churches. The addition of Hebrews to the Pauline corpus was a problem that needed explaining. A justification was found in the total of 14 letters (including 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon): it was then possible to see in that total the significant number seven doubled! The order within the Catholics was also not invariably fixed.5 Decreasing length of the letters may have made the sequence James, Peter, John, Jude a popular one (this order is found in Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus), although the order John, Peter, James, Jude is also to be found (in Innocent's list of c. 405 CE). The motive there may have been to include the three letters (those by John) before two letters (attributed to Peter) and to leave the single compositions until the end. Other sequences found in canonical lists and/ or manuscripts (where Peter = 1; John = 2; James = 3; Jude = 4) are 1234, 1324 (as in the list found in Codex Claromontanus), 1243, 1342, 3412.6 Mostly what was copied was either the four Gospels only (some 2122
4. The position of Hebrews varies in the Greek manuscripts. (1) In the thirdcentury ^ 4 6 it follows Romans in number two position, possibly because of its length. (2) In some minuscules Hebrews follows 2 Corinthians. (3) It followed Galatians in an ancestor of Codex Vaticanus (B 03), although the manuscript itself has Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians. The consecutive chapter numbers found throughout the Pauline epistles in 03 have Galatians end at ch. 58. Next comes Ephesians beginning with ch. 70. Hebrews begins at ch. 59. (4) Hebrews follows 2 Thessalonians in Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, i.e. it comes immediately before the letters to individuals. This is the position printed in Greek New Testaments that favour not only the text but the order of contents in their preferred manuscripts. Such a sequence may be found in the editions of Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort and von Soden. (5) Hebrews follows Philemon in Claromontanus, the Latin Vulgate and most modern translations. 5. The Muratorian canon list refers to Jude and two of the letters by John. 6. H.-J. Frede, 'Die Ordnung der Paulusbriefe und der Platz des Kolosserbriefs im Corpus Paulinum\ in H.-J. Frede (ed.), Epistula ad Colossenses (Vetus Latina, 24/2 fascicule 4; Freiburg: Herder, 1969) pp. 290-303 gives 17 differing sequences for the Pauline letters in the Latin tradition. Hebrews is absent from several manuscripts.

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manuscripts survive), or the Pauline corpus only (there are about 292 surviving manuscripts), or Revelation only (139); or Acts plus the Catholic epistles (86).7 Up to the third century no surviving codex is known to have had more than 300 pages. After that the codex grew: B, Codex Vaticanus (fourth century), had 1600 pages; Sinaiticus (fourth century) 1460 pages; Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) 1640 pages. (All these figures are minima because all three are defective at the end.) This meant that more than one section of the New Testament could be included within one set of covers. The following contents of extant manuscripts are found:
79 manuscripts contain the New Testament minus the Gospels, i.e. a/cpr 10 " " er 12 " " ea/c 2 " " ea/cr 6 " " pr 5 M " a/cr M 5 " ep 273 " " a/cp (e = Gospels, a/c = Acts and/or Catholic Epistles, = Paulines, r = Revelation)

Only about 60 of our 3000 or so surviving continuous-text Greek New Testament manuscripts were written as complete New Testaments, that is with all 27 books included. Some 150 contain the whole New Testament minus Revelation (which was looked upon with some suspi cion by the church in the East for some time, before being eventually admitted into its canon). Even today the Eastern Orthodox churches do not include readings from Revelation in the lectionary. In total 2361 manuscripts including fragmentary manuscripts contain the Gospels, 662 including fragments contain Acts and the Catholics, 792 contain Paul and 303 Revelation. Where we have manuscripts containing more than one section of the New Testament the precise order of the sections was no more fixed than the sequences within each section. Thus we find manuscripts with the order ape, acp (as in manuscripts Alexandrinus, Vaticanus and Ephraimi Rescriptus and the Majority Text), pac (as in Codex Sinaiticus8 and some
7. All these figures are approximate and are taken from K. and B. Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill) with the MSS available to them in the preparation of the 2nd English edition in 1989. 8. The order epacr of Codex Sinaiticus is also found in the sixth-century Latin

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minuscules), pea. What is not clear is whether this was because of a perceived ranking of the sections' theological significance. The sequence Acts with the Catholic Epistles following directly is found in the printed Greek testaments edited by Tregelles, von Soden and Tischendorf. Three of the writers of the Catholics were the so-called pillars of the church, Peter, James and John. Perhaps it was felt that their works should follow on naturally from Acts. It is tempting to surmise that those great codices, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, which are our earliest examples to contain the Old Testament and the New Testament, were designed specifically to demonstrate and encapsulate the established Christian canon of scriptures. It was by the dates these manuscripts were written that a general consensus had been established in churches East and West about the canon. Roberts and Skeat9 remind us that the adoption by Christians of the codex did not in itself create the fourfold Gospel canon. That observation applies to the other sections of the New Testament as well. The New Testament canon was decided by Church authorities on theological and historical grounds, but canon and codex go hand in hand in the sense that the adoption of afixedcanon could be more easily controlled and promulgated when the codex was the normal means of gathering together originally separated compositions. (On the other hand, we also need to remind ourselves that the Jews had a canon but not the codex.) It is also interesting to see that Codex Sinaiticus contains more than the New Testament as we know it. After the New Testament come the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Shepherd of Hermas. Alexandrinus contains 1 and 2 Clement after the New Testament. We must assume that the authorities behind Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus considered these works canonical and wished to promote them as such. Certainly the user of these codices would have accepted all the texts in their Bible codex as having equal status. There is evidence that these 'extra' writings were influential. The canon of the Coptic church includes 1 and 2 Clement (and the Apostolic Constitutions) after Revelation. Jerome hesitated about the status of the Epistle of Barnabas ('almost a New Testament book' De Vir. III. 6). He also knew that the Shepherd of Hermas was read in some churches (De Vir. III. 10). The Shepherd of Hermas is included in the ninth-century manuscript Codex Fuldensis and also in the Complutensian Polyglot. 9. CH. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 65

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Latin Codex Sangermanensis. 1 and 2 Clement are included within the Paulines in one Harclean Syriac MS. This varied testimony shows how these texts were on the fringes of the New Testament canon for many centuries. However, the canonical list in the sixth-century Codex Claromontanus marks the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas together with the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter as works of doubtful canonicity. The influence of these 'extra' books seems thereafter to have been curtailed. In the Latin field the Epistle to the Laodiceans, normally considered as a worthy contender for inclusion in New Testament apocryphal collections, is found within the New Testament proper in Codex Fuldensis, Codex Ardmachanus and some 100 other Vulgate MSS. On their authority Laodiceans is found in the appendix of modern printed editions of the Vulgate. (All 18 German printed Bibles prior to Luther's translation include it too.) In the Armenian version printed by Zohrab 3 Corinthians (now considered as part of the apocryphal Acts of Paul) occurs as an appendix to its New Testament. The broader canon of the Ethiopie church has 35 books in its New Testament but the extras are books of church order. In any case no Ethiopie manuscripts contain more than one part of the New Testament so the tradition of a complete codex of the 27 normative New Testament books does not apply here. Of more significance is the Syriac. For a time the Syriac included 3 Corinthians. Of particular importance is the canon of the fifth-century Peshitta which omits four short epistles (2 and 3 John, Philemon, 2 Peter) and Revelation. All 27 New Testament books ultimately appeared in the Philoxenian version, yet the official lectionary of both East and West Syrian churches uses only the 22 books found in the Peshitta. One sideline to be mentioned here is that the text of the New Testament that was found in the manuscripts was not of importance to those who pronounced on the canon. Jerome, Origen and others recognized certain books as approved, canonical scripture, but they did not try to specify a particular or precise form of the text to be found in the manuscripts even though these Fathers were alert to textual variation in manuscripts. As we know, the surviving manuscripts exhibit a marked difference between themselvesand this is especially true of the earliest manuscripts (precisely in the centuries before the canon was fixed). So what was fixed as canonical was 'Mark' without further qualification. The question was not raised whether Mark is to include 16.9-20 or not.

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'John' was approved without a word being said about the inclusion or exclusion of the passage about the adulteress (Jn 7.53-8.11). In effect, the manuscript an individual church possessed was canonical; a neighbouring church may have had radically different forms of the same books and these would be its canonical scriptures. We have seen that from the fourth century onwards the New Testament canon was, with a few exceptions in Syriac or Ethiopie, generally agreed. That meant that one could expect that a complete New Testament would contain the same 27 books, and a Pauline manuscript would contain the same 14 books, or a manuscript of the Catholic Epistles would contain the same 7 letters. Since the invention of printing an edition of the New Testament always contains the same 27 books.10 Obviously the same text is not always to be found: the Textus Receptus and Westcott and Hort's Greek testament do not agree throughout. In English the text in the AV (KJV) on one side and modern editions like RV, RSV, NIV, GNB on the other side differ in their textual base and textual decisions. But the titles of the works included in the New Testament are the same on the contents pages of all these editions. But when we turn to the Old Testament the situation is far more fluid. There is far less uniformity. Titles on the contents pages vary depending on which printed edition one consults and in which language. Not only is there a Hebrew Old Testament, which differs from a Greek Old Testament, which differs from a Latin Old Testament, but even our modern versions are often not in agreement about what constitutes the Old Testament canon proper (by which is normally meant the Hebrew scriptures of the Palestinian Jews), and what are apocryphal or deuterocanonical works. The Apocrypha in the AV (KJV) used always to be printed as a separate section between the Old Testament and the New Testament. (It was only in the nineteenth century that Protestant Bibles began to print the Hebrew scriptures [the Old Testament] alone without following them with the Apocrypha.) In this section are to be found 1 and 2 Esdras,

10. Luther's printed New Testament included Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation after 3 Johnan order without manuscript precedent. He separated them by a line on his contents page from the rest of the New Testament to show his disapproval of these books in the canon! Unlike the other books in his New Testament these four are unnumbered.

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Tobit, Judith, the extra portions of Esther,11 the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Ben Sira (or Sirach or Ecclesiasticus), Baruch including the Epistle of Jeremiah, the extra portions of Daniel, the Prayer of Manasseh, 1 and 2 Maccabees.12 (1 and 2 Esdras are not found in Luther's Bible. The Prayer of Manasseh is not allocated a number in Luther's apocrypha13.) These so-called apocryphal books were not originally separated in the codices. In Greek and/or Latin manuscripts they are dispersed throughout the whole testament in order (presumably) to allow them to accord to some extent with other books that are in close proximity. The practice of gathering them into a separate unit, the form in which English readers are used to seeing them, dates from about 1520. As for recent English editions, GNB transfers 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh from its 'Apocrypha' to a separate section with the sub-heading 'Some Additional Books'. NRSV divides its apocryphal/ deuterocanonical books into four sections:

11. Some modern editions now give a translation of the whole of the Greek version of Esther in the apocrypha so that the additions can be read in context. 12. Other modern English versions also print these texts in the same order (e.g. RSV, NEB). For Tobit AV translated the text of Vaticanus, the RV of 1894 followed Alexandrinus, the RSV used both these MSS from Rahlfs' edition of the LXX. NEB and NRSV based their translations on the text in Codex Sinaiticus. 13. Luther' s Bible of 1545 includes the following apocryphal texts in the following order: I Judith II Wisdom III Tobit IV Ben Sira V Baruch (and Epistle of Jeremiah) VI 1 and 2 Maccabees VII additions to Esther VIII additions to Daniel The Prayer of Manasseh The Confessio Belgica of 1561 was another influence on Protestant thinking about the apocryphal books on the continent. In its Article 6 it lists the following as apocryphal: 3 and 4 Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ben Sira, Baruch and Epistle of Jeremiah, additions to Esther, additions to Daniel, Manasseh, 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Zrich Bible of 1907-31, however, contains only 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Ben Sira and Wisdom.

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b.

c.

d.

those recognized as deuterocanonical by the Roman Catholic, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches (i.e. Tobit, Judith, additions to Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sira, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, additions to Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees); those recognized by the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches but not by the Roman Catholic church (i.e. 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, 3 Maccabees), although the Latin Vulgate includes the Prayer of Manasseh and 1 Esdras (numbered there as 3 Esdras14) in an appendix where it is treated as 'Apocryphal' as opposed to 'Deuterocanonical'; 2 Esdras, recognized as canonical in the Slavonic church (where it is numbered 3 Esdras). The Latin Vulgate includes 2 Esdras in its appendix (where it is numbered 4 Esdras); 4 Maccabees, which appears as an appendix to the Greek Bible.

The effect of these decisions in modern printed editions is well summarized by Torrey. Writing of the books printed as a separate 'Old Testament Apocrypha' he says, 'Just as in the early centuries the codex had guaranteed to these particular books (the apocrypha) enduring recognition by the church, so now the printed Bible assured to them for all the future an inferior place in the public estimation' and 'No reader
14. There is much confusion over the various books called Esdras or Ezra. We are dealing with four books, Ezra and Nehemiah in the Hebrew canon, the Greek Ezra, which retells part of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, and the so-called Ezra Apocalypse. The Hebrew canonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah are called 1 and 2 Esdras in the Vulgate and are combined in the LXX under the name 2 Esdras. The Greek Ezra is 1 Esdras in the LXX. It is 3 Esdras in the Latin Vulgate, which took over one of the two available Old Latin versions, and which prints it as an appendix after the New Testament. (It had been in the Latin Bibles of 1474 and 1480 but was rejected by Trent.) In the Great Bible and in the Anglican Articles of Religion VI it is also called 3 Esdras, although the Bishops', and Geneva Bibles and KJV (AV) have it as 1 Esdras. The Ezra Apocalypse does not occur in Greek MSS, except for one fragment containing only a few verses, or in the LXX. In the Latin Vulgate it is 4 Esdras, although the first two chapters and the final two chapters, seen as separate entities originally and not a part of 4 Esdras, are named respectively 5 and 6 Esdras (Ezra). In KJV (AV) 4 Ezra is called 2 Esdras. To make confusion worse some Latin manuscripts call Ezra-Nehemiah 1 Esdras; the Ezra Apocalypse chs. 1-2 = 2 Esdras; the Greek Ezra = 3 Esdras as in the Latin Vulgate; Ezra Apocalypse chs. 3-14 = 4 Esdras; Ezra Apocalypse chs. 15-16 = 5 Esdras. The Russian Orthodox tradition names Hebrew canonical Ezra 1 Esdras; its 2 Esdras is the Greek Ezra and 3 Esdras is the Ezra Apocalypse.

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of the Catholic Bible would henceforth see divine authority in the two Esdras books and the Prayer of Manasseh; nor would Protestants, except by occasional inadvertence, quote their apocrypha as holy scripture'.15 Let us look at the reasons why certain Old Testament books were separated from others in modern versions. First we turn to the Hebrew. In many ways modern readers of the English Old Testament are familiar with the contents of the Hebrew scriptures in the Palestinian canonthe Law, the Prophets and the Writings. The English sequence, however, divides the books of the Hebrew Old Testament into four: the Law, the historical books, the Wisdom literature, the Prophets. To be precise: Pentateuch (books 1-5 in the Hebrew scriptures); Joshua (book 6), Judges (book 7), Ruth (31), 1 and 2 Samuel (8-9), 1 and 2 Kings (10-11), 1 and 2 Chronicles (38-39), Ezra (36), Nehemiah (37), Esther (34), Job (29), Psalms (27), Proverbs (28), Ecclesiastes (33), Song of Songs (30), Isaiah (12), Jeremiah (13), Lamentations (32), Ezekiel (14), Daniel (35), the 12 Minor Prophets in the order Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachai (15-26). The order of the Minor Prophets is the same in the English versions as the Hebrew; a different order is found in the LXX (see below). The Major Prophets seem to be ordered by length, as we suspected was the case for some arrangements of the Pauline Letters in the New Testament. Elsewhere the Hebrew differs. There is a great difference in the sequence. Hebrew and English agree up to Judges, then the standard printed Hebrew Bible has the Former Prophets, minus Ruth. The numbers in brackets above show the Hebrew order. (1-5 = the Law; 6-11= the Former Prophets; 12-26 = the Latter Prophets; 27-39 = the Writings.) Note that 1 and 2 Chronicles and Daniel appear in the third section, 'Writings'. In the English versions all the prophets including Daniel and Lamentations come at the end. The order in Hebrew manuscripts has itself not always been constant16. After 2 Kings there are several differing arrangements. The Leningrad manuscript of the eleventh century has Chronicles at the beginning, not the end, of the Writings. It has Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth*, Song of Songs*, Ecclesiastes*, Lamentations*, Esther*, Daniel,
15. C.C. Torrey, The Apocryphal Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 35. 16. For fuller details see Swete, Introduction, p. 200.

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Ezra-Nehemiah. The books asterisked in the list are known as the Megilloth. They are sometimes grouped in the order, in which these books were read at Jewish festivals. Thus one finds within the Writings the sequence Song of Songs (Passover), Ruth (Weeks), Lamentations (Anniversary of the Chaldean destruction of Jerusalem), Ecclesiastes (Tabernacles), Esther (Purim). It is not clear quite when the Hebrew canon was closed. Possibly it was the Christians' use of the LXX with its wider Old Testament canon that persuaded Jews to specify their own canon, restricted to certain books known in Palestine. Josephus in 100 CE suggested that the Hebrew canon was closed, but precisely what books were contained in that canon is not specified. The Council of Jamnia (c. 90) is often referred to as the time when the Jews settled the matter of the canon, but one ought not equate the meeting at Jamnia with Christian councils convened to establish a canon. Although the Law and the Prophets were fixed by the second century CE, the third section, the Writings, remained undefined for a longer time. The New Testament refers to books outside what became the Hebrew canon: Jas 1.9 alludes to Ben Sira 5.11; Heb. 11.35 knows 2 Maccabees 6-7; Mt. 27.43 cites Wis. 2.13, 18; Jude 14-15 cites Enoch. The New Testament regularly refers to the Jewish scriptures conventionally only as the Law and the Prophets (e.g. see Mt. 5.17; Lk. 16.29; Jn 1.45; Acts 28.23). In Lk. 24.27, 44 the common phrase 'Law and Prophets' occurs but, with the exception of the Psalter, the Writings are left undescribed. The Dead Sea Scrolls seem to have had a canon wider than that conventionally known as the Hebrew canon. At Qumran not only have manuscripts been found of all the books of the Hebrew canon, except Esther and Nehemiah, but other scrolls containing Ben Sira, Tobit, Epistle of Jeremiah, Jubilees and Enoch have been discovered. Just as the Writings may have remained a relatively fluid section of the Hebrew canon for several centuries, the whole of the Old Testament in Greek remained unsettled. In many ways the issue still remains unfixed: the Greek Orthodox church has never satisfactorily settled the status of the deuterocanonical/apocryphal texts. We can see this instability as early as the Eastern Fathers' lists. Gregory of Nazianzus's list of 374-79 CE, for example, in effect follows the Hebrew canon. But the lists produced by Epiphanius are more extensive. The second Trullan Synod of 692 recognized six differing canon lists.

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The list in the Stichometry of Nicephorus17 includes the following as 'not recognized': three books of the Maccabees, Wisdom, Ben Sira, Psalms and Odes of Solomon, Esther, Judith, Susanna, Tobit. The 'Catalogue of the Sixty Books'18 has the following outside the 60 (34 Old Testament; 26 New Testament): Wisdom, Ben Sira, 1-4 Maccabees, Judith, Esther, Tobit. More recently the Eastern churches at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 used the LXX but rejected all the books not in the Hebrew canon except Tobit, Judith, Ben Sira, Wisdom. In 1950 the Holy Synod of the Greek Church authorized an edition of the Old Testament which contains the entire apocrypha, but with 4 Maccabees in an appendix. (The 1913 Russian Bible has the same contents but adds the Ezra Apocalypse, 3 Esdras.) By adopting the LXXthe product of Alexandrian Jewsthe church did not inherit afixedcanon of Scripture. The LXX is not a tripartite Old Testament like the Hebrew is. That might suggest that when the LXX was being translated such an arrangement in the Hebrew was not fixed. There is little in common in the relative order or indeed in the contents, if one compares the Hebrew and various Greek editions, which may also show that the Hebrew scriptures were not settled when the Greek translations were being undertaken. The books that occur in the Greek but not in the Hebrew were not regarded as different in the LXX; they were not separated from each other. In the LXX, for instance, Baruch, Lamentations, and the Epistle of Jeremiah follow Jeremiah. A longer form of Daniel is associated with the three Major Prophets (who follow the 12 Minor Prophets). Wisdom, Ben Sira, Judith, Tobit all come before the prophets, as in the Latin Vulgate. (They follow in the LXX Codex Alexandrinus.) The 12 Minor Prophets occur in a different order in the LXX and Hebrew. In the latter Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah are second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, but in the Greek they come in the order fourth, second,fifth,sixth, third. The Latin and English follow the Hebrew. But the differences between the LXX and Hebrew are not just a matter of contents and sequence but of text as well. Greek Esther and Hebrew Esther are significantly different even where they run in parallel.
17. A ninth-century catalogue found in Nicephorus's Chronology. See C. de Boor, Nicephori archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani opusula histrica (Leipzig, 1880), p. 132. 18. A seventh-century Greek list. See T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons (Leipzig, 1888-92), ILI, pp. 290-92

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Job is one sixth shorter in the LXX compared with the Hebrew. There are significant differences also in Joshua, 1 Samuel, 1 Kings, Proverbs and Jeremiah. There are also differences between the Hebrew texts from Qumran and other Hebrew texts. Also note that NRSV adds a paragraph at the end of 1 Samuel 10 found in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unlike in the New Testament where the earliest complete manuscripts agree in including the same 27 books, these same manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus) differ considerably in what was and what was not included in their Old Testament.
Vaticanus Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth 1-4 Kingdoms 1-2 Chronicles 1-2 Esdras Psalms Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Solomon Sinaiticus Genesis Alexandrinus Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth 1-4 Kingdoms 1-2 Chronicles Hosea Amos Micah Joel Obadiah Jonah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah Malachi Isaiah Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations Epistle of Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel Esther

Numbers

Job
Wisdom Sirach Esther Judith Tobit Hosea Amos Micah Joel Obadiah Jonah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah

1 Chronicles 2 Esdras Esther Tobit Judith 4 Maccabees Isaiah Jeremiah Lamentations Joel Obadiah Jonah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah Malachi Psalms Proverbs Ecclesiastes

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Vaticanus Haggai Zechariah Malachi Isaiah Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations Epistle of Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel Sinaiticus Song of Solomon Wisdom Sirach Alexandrinus Tobit Judith 1-2 Esdras 1-4 Maccabees Psalms Ps. 151

Job

Job
Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Solomon Wisdom Sirach

In the Table above19 one may see the following: 1. Alexandrinus has Psalm 151 and 14 liturgical Odes (which include the Nunc Dimittis and the Magnificat from the New Testament, several Old Testament hymns as well as the Prayer of Manasseh and the poetic additions to Daniel 3 from the non-Hebrew canon). The Odes are not in Sinaiticus or Vaticanus but they regularly appear in Greek manuscripts from the fifth century onwards. All the Wisdom literature is placed at the end. 1-4 Maccabees appear after 1 Esdras. Eighteen Psalms of Solomon are listed in the contents to appear after the New Testament but they are now no longer extant. These Psalms remained only on the fringes of the Greek Bible.20 2. Codex Vaticanus is virtually complete. It never contained Manasseh or 1-4 Maccabees.21 1 and 2 Esdras occur after Chronicles. Psalm 151 is included. 3. In Codex Sinaiticus 2 and 3 Maccabees are not present. 1 Esdras is not extant, but the existence of 2 Esdras presumes 1 Esdras would have been included. Among other Greek manuscripts Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus now
19. Adapted from Swete, Introduction, pp. 201-202. 20. Swete's edition includes in an appendix these Psalms from Codex Gamma, the Odes from Codex Alexandrinus and Enoch from MS P. Such texts are now normally found in the so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, e.g. J.H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983-85). Enoch is found in H.F.D. Sparks (ed.), The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). This latter title is confusing, because what the book contains are texts conventionally known as pseudepigrapha. 21. B.M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 48, thinks the omission of Maccabees was 'an oversight'.

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contains only Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom, Ben Sira. Most early witnesses, especially those on papyrus, contain only parts of individual books. The differences between the texts and contents in these complete Christian Bibles has affected modern printed editions of the Greek Old Testament. Most editors follow the text, order and contents of their favourite manuscripts. In the Old Testament not only have the separate codices defined the canon but they have influenced printed editions of the Greek Old Testament! There is less text-critical eclecticism in the classic printed editions although the Gttingen edition of the LXX is attempting in its ongoing series of volumes to print an eclectic text of the LXX. The Complutensian Polyglot used Vatican manuscripts (not Vaticanus), the Sixtine edition of 1587 followed Vaticanus, the Oxford edition of 170720 used Alexandrinus. Swete (1887-94) followed the order, contents and text of Vaticanus, adding from Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and others only when necessary (although their variants are given throughout in his apparatus). In Daniel, for example, Swete printed the text of MS 87 (Codex Chisianus, one of the few surviving manuscripts of Daniel witnessing to the LXX text) in parallel with Alexandrinus and accepted the position of Susanna following Daniel with MS 87, although he placed it in a section by itself. (Theodotion's text has Susanna, in a longer form, at the beginning of Daniel, which is the position found in Old Latin MSS). The Latin Vulgate placed Susanna and the story of Bel and the Dragon as Daniel 13-14. For Tobit Swete (as usual) followed Vaticanus but also printed (in smaller type) the text of Sinaiticus. For 1-4 Maccabees he relied on Alexandrinus. Swete's edition differs from Rahlfs's edition of 1935. Its editor did not slavishly follow Vaticanus in text or sequencenor any other single codex for that matter. The order of the books in Rahlfs's edition is distinctive and follows neither Sinaiticus, Vaticanus nor Alexandrinus. Rahlfs even adds the Psalms of Solomon (after Wisdom and Ben Sira) as if these were part of the canon of the Greek New Testament. Rahlfs prints two parallel versions of Daniel: one is the LXX version, the other is that by Theodotion. For Tobit he printed Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus combined with Vaticanus. Bratsiotis's edition is similar to Rahlfs's but has only 1-3 Maccabees: 4 Maccabees is in an appendix. Rahlfs's order of Tobit, Judith and Esther is reversed in Bratsiotis. Job precedes Proverbs. Neither the Psalms of Solomon nor the Odes are included.

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The contents of the Latin Vulgate were determined at the Council of Trent in 1546. Eventually the Clementine edition became the official Vulgate in 1592. It contains the following: the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, \-A Kingdoms, 1-2 Chronicles, 1 Esdras (Ezra), 2 Esdras (Nehemiah), Tobit*, Judith*, Esther (and additions*), Job, 150 Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ben Sira, Isaiah, Jeremiah (plus Lamentations, Baruch* with theEpistle of Jeremiah attached), Ezekiel, Daniel (and additions*), the Minor Prophets (in the Hebrew order), 1-2 Maccabees*, with the following in an appendix: Prayer of Manasseh, 3-4 Esdras, Psalm 151. The texts in this appendix are 'apocryphal', the texts asterisked in my list are designated 'deuterocanonical' in the Roman Catholic tradition. Jerome had translated only the Hebrew texts of the Palestinian canon. He removed the additional portions of Esther and relegated them to the end of the book with the result that the story of Esther in his sequence is unintelligible. The additional texts from the Alexandrian Jewish canon were added from the Old Latin. The Vulgate then supplanted the LXX as the Bible for Western Christians. This means that, for readers of the Vulgate, 3-4 Maccabees were removed from their Bibles, and the books in the appendix were accorded a lower status than the rest of the Old Testament.22
22. As far as other canonical lists are concerned we note that there are differences between the Coptic, Ethiopie, East Syrian and Armenian. The biblical canon of the Coptic Orthodox Church includes the following writings: the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, two books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Job, 151 or 150 Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, the Minor and Major Prophets, Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, Esther, three books of Maccabees and Sirach. The most extensive biblical canon is that of the Ethiopie Orthodox Church, which itself distinguishes between a wider and a narrower canon. The wider canon has only theoretical significance since it has never formed the basis of a printed Bible. By contrast the 1927 diglot Geez-Amharic edition and the 1953 Amharic edition are both based on the narrower canon, which includes the following: the Pentateuch, Enoch, Ezra, Nehemiah, 3-4 Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther (including the additions), 1-3 Maccabees, Job, 151 Psalms, Proverbs, Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Sirach, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch and Epistle of Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel (plus additions), Minor Prophets. In addition is the Prayer of Manasseh after 2 Chron. 33.12. Thus the Ethiopie Bible contains the entire LXX including 3 Ezra, 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151, and also the Prayer of Manasseh and 4 Ezra, found in the appendix to the Vulgate. It also includes Jubilees. On the Syriac side it is worth emphasizing that the complete Bible text, or even complete Old Testament and New Testament text, is a rarity, partly because of the great cost and

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ABSTRACT The article analyses the contents of the most significant MSS of the New Testament and identifies the major differences between them regarding their contents and the sequences of the books they contain. It is argued that one of the reasons why the New Testament canon became relatively firmly fixed from an early date was that Christians used the codex. For the Old Testament the contents were far more fluid. The article draws attention to the differences not only between the Hebrew and Alexandrian canons but also between the often fluctuating contents of the Hebrew, Syriac, Latin and Greek MSS of the Old Testament. It is shown how the main MSS, especially within the Greek tradition, have affected modern printed editions of the Septuagint. A description of how the varying traditions in Latin and Greek have influenced modern versions is also included.

labour of producing such a thing, and partly because convenience led to a preference for single books, small groups of books or lectionaries containing only extracts. The Syriac canon has been influenced, as far as contents but not order are concerned, by outside ecclesiological concerns; the manuscript collections of the Old Testament Peshitta (and New Testament Peshitta) by the Greek canon; the generally available printed collections of the Old Testament (and New Testament) Peshitta by Protestant canons, as a consequence of the editions produced by the American missionaries at Urmia and the London British and Foreign Bible Society. The Mosul edition shows the influence of the work of the Dominicans and the background of the Latin Vulgate. The (East) Syriac canon is: the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 12 Kings, Proverbs, Sirach, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, Song of Songs, Job, Isaiah, Minor Prophets, Jeremiah (including Lamentations and the Prayer of Jeremiah), Ezekiel, Daniel (plus additions but not Susanna), Psalms, 1-3 Maccabees, Chronicles, Ezra, Wisdom, Judith, Esther, Susanna, Letter of Jeremiah, Syriac Baruch, Baruch. The Armenian canon is: the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-4 Kingdoms, 1-2 Chronicles, 1, 3, 4 Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (plus additions), Judith, Tobit, 1-3 Maccabees, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach, Job, Isaiah, Minor Prophets, Jeremiah, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, Lamentations, Daniel (with additions), Ezekiel (3 Maccabees and 3-4 Ezra are called *extracanonicaT). Some details in this footnote are drawn from H.P. Rger, The Extent of the Old Testament Canon', Bible Translator 40 (1989), pp. 301-308.

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