History of Codex Bezae?s Text in the Gospel of Mark

Using a combination of text-critical, church-historical, philological, and digital methods, the present study calls into question traditional assumptions about Codex Bezae’s distinctive Greek text of the gospels and Acts — that it represents an ancient native Greek tradition and source of the Latin version preserving a textual relic of the first century of Christianity — arguing that this text can be credibly dated to the end of the fourth century, immediately preceding production of the manuscript, and represents the diorthosis of a Greek text to a Latin model distinct from the Latin column found in the manuscript itself. So the better part of this remarkable text derives ultimately from other traditions and, hence, its true significance lies in what it can tell us about the historical circumstances under which the manuscript and its final text were produced at the turn of the fifth century.

As the principal Greek witness of the so-called "Western" tradition of the gospels and Acts, Codex Bezae’s enigmatic text in parallel Greek and Latin columns presents a persistent problem of New Testament textual criticism. The present study challenges the traditional view that this text represents a vivid retelling of the canonical narratives cited by ancient writers from Justin Martyr to Marcion and translated early into Syriac and Latin.

Peter Lorenz, Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung, Münster/W., Germany