Matthew D.C. Larsen, The Real and Imagined Biography of A Gospel Manuscript

Dies ist urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material. Bereitgestellt von: Jonathan Poletti, 18.03.
2023
Matthew D.C. Larsen
The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel

Manuscript
Dieser Artikel schildert die Objektbiographie des Codex Bobiensis, eines der ältesten
Manuskripte des altlateinischen Evangeliums. In Anlehnung an das Konzept von
Edward Soja wird die gleichermaßen reale und vorgestellte („real-and-imagined“)
Geschichte des Codex Bobiensis betrachtet und dabei berücksichtigt, was über den
Kodex bekannt ist und was die Menschen während seiner gesamten Geschichte über
ihn wissen konnten. Nachgezeichnet wird das „Leben“ der Handschrift vom spät-
antiken Nordafrika bis zu ihrem Platz in der Abtei von Bobbio und schließlich bis zu
ihrer (teilweisen) Zerstörung im Jahr 1901 in der National- und Universitätsbibliothek
von Turin. Anhand dieses relativ wenig diskutierten und oft übersehenen Objekts
versucht der Artikel, eine Mikrogeschichte nicht nur des spätantiken Nordafrikas,
sondern auch des Christentums im lateinischen Westen und darüber hinaus zu er-
zählen.
Keywords: Codex Bobiensis, gospels, object biography, real-and-imagined, North
Africa, Djémila (Algeria), Bobbio Abbey.
1 Introduction: A “Real-and-Imagined” Object Biography

of a Strange Codex1
This is a biography of a strange and overlooked object. It goes by many

names. Among scholars who conduct textual studies of gospel manu-
scripts, it goes by the name Codex Bobiensis. Strictly speaking, though, it is
1 I would like to thank the organizers of the “Material Gospel” conference at Notre Dame,
Indiana, as well as the other speakers and attendees for valuable feedback on this article. I
am indebted to Brent Nongbri, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Dina Boero, Tony Grafton, Helmut
Reimitz, and Mark Letteney for feedback on previous written or oral iterations of this
work. Thanks especially to Jeremiah Coogan and David Lincicum for careful editorial
work on the published version of the article. All these improved the article in meaningful
ways. All remaining deficiencies, alas, are mine alone. Research for this article was
generously funded by the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton Uni-
versity.
Early Christianity 12 (2021), 103–131 DOI 10.1628/ec-2021-0009

ISSN 1868-7032 © 2021 Mohr Siebeck
Dies ist urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material. Bereitgestellt von: Jonathan Poletti, 18.03.2023
104 Matthew D.C. Larsen
neither.2 Constantine von Tischendorf named it k.3 The Vetus Latina

project offered yet a third name: VL 1.4 Among the curators at the Turin
National University Library, where it currently resides, these names are
meaningless. To them, it is called G.VII.15. What it is (or more accurately
what it was) is a late antique gospel codex.
Methodologically speaking, in this article I tell the “real-and-imagined”
cultural biography of an object. In so doing, I am borrowing the language of
two theorists. I adopt the phrase “real-and-imagined” from human geo-
grapher Edward Soja. Historically speaking, there are real parts of this
story; there are also imagined parts. The hyphenation is critical. While I
want to remain aware of the real bits and the imagined bits, I am not eager
to separate them too cleanly from each other. I also employ the idea of the
“cultural biography of things,” which I take from cultural anthropologist
Igor Kopytoff ’s programmatic essay.5 I treat an object as the kind of thing
that can have a biography. The biography of the object tells us about the
social and cultural worlds in which the object existed and exists, and about
the humans who used it. What I am particularly interested in is the “real-
and-imagined” ancestry, birth, life, death, and possible resurrection of
Codex Bobiensis (a naming convention which I will maintain here), as well
as its long history and the complex worlds in which it has lived, moved, and
had its being. Along the way, we will learn a lot about this object, but just as
much about the history of Christianity, albeit told from an unusual vantage
point. One way of looking at my approach would be to say that I am telling
the story – or more accurately a story – of Christianity through the lens of
one small and often overlooked object.6
2 To those outside the gospel manuscript guild, this name would be as uselessly ambiguous
as a name like “the Paris manuscript”; it simply lists the physical format of the manuscript
and its location or, more accurately, its previous physical format and previous location.
3 In naming the manuscript k, Tischendorf followed the precedent of Karl Lachmann’s
naming of Latin manuscripts. See J. Wordsworth et al., eds., Portions of the Gospels ac-
cording to St. Mark and St. Matthew from the Bobbio Ms. (k) (London: Clarendon, 1886),
xi.
4 R. Gryson, Altlateinische Handschriften/Manuscrits vieux latins: Répertoire descriptive,
pt. 1: Mss 1–275, d’après un manuscrit inachevé de Hermann Josef Frede, Vetus Latina 1/2A
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1999). See also H.A.G. Houghton, The Latin New Tes-
tament: A Guide to Its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 9–10, 22, 210.
5 E. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); I. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Com-
moditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Per-
spective, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91.
6 As Claire Clivaz points out, and exemplifies in her own recent work, Codex Bobiensis
(VL 1) is experiencing some degree of new interest and new work is appearing more and
The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 105
Another way to understand this methodological approach would be to

place it in conversation with the recent intervention of Brent Nongbri in his
book God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts.7
In his conclusion, Nongbri writes:
The antiquities market has cast a shadow over this whole study [i. e., of the earliest
Christian manuscripts], obscuring the archaeological knowledge that we most wish to
access. The market is the enemy of archaeologists, but at the same time, it is often the
source of their objects of study. […] scholars need to take a more serious interest in
“museum archaeology,” that is, understanding the histories of collections: When and how
were materials acquired? Who was involved? If the materials were purchased, who were
the dealers? 8
Nongbri here issues a clarion call for the importance of attending to the
provenance of manuscripts and what he calls their “archaeology”; that is,
how they became unearthed, who subsequently came to own them, and
how they ended up where they currently are. Without such knowledge, not
only is the usefulness of the manuscript in constructing ancient history
severely diminished, but a host of thorny ethical and geopolitical issues
emerge. My interests are in line with those of Nongbri. Telling an object’s
cultural biography cannot avoid attending to its “archaeology.” Within my
“real-and-imagined object biography” approach, the archaeology that
Nongbri has in mind is a critical part of the “golden years” of any ancient
manuscript’s life. My biographical approach, however, also takes an in-
terest in the longue durée of the life of a manuscript, from cradle to grave.
With Codex Bobiensis, we are in a position not only to discuss its modern
“museum archaeology” but also to explore a more expansive real-and-
imagined biography of a cultural object.
2 The Real-and-Imagined Biography of Codex Bobiensis
As with any biography, it is necessary to discuss not only birth but also
ancestry. What can we say about Codex Bobiensis’s genealogy? Pieter
more on the (former) codex; see C. Clivaz, “Mk 16 im Codex Bobbiensis: Neue Einsichten
zur Textgeschichte des kurzen Markusschlusses,” Zeitschrift für Neues Testament 24,
no. 47 (forthcoming). Clivaz points to David Parker’s 1991 publication as the start of the
“come back” of Codex Bobiensis; cf. D. Parker, “Unequally Yoked: The Present State of the
Codex Bobbiensis,” JTS 42 (1991), 581–588, here 584–585.
7 B. Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
8 Nongbri, God’s Library (see n. 7), 270–271.
Willem Hoogterp argued, based on a study of the language of the manu-

script, that it was copied directly from a North African archetype from the
end of the third century.9 But its textual contents suggest an affinity not
with Augustine, as with the fifth-century Latin gospel codex called Codex
Palatinus (e), but rather with Cyprian, the mid-third-century North Af-
rican bishop of Carthage. Cyprian converted to Christianity in 246 CE and
was martyred in 258. The text of Codex Bobiensis is remarkably similar to
the text of the Gospel according to Matthew that Cyprian used.10 This
shows that the family of Codex Bobiensis extends back to at least 250 CE in
Carthage.11 But can we say more? The evidence offers a tantalizing gesture,
only to have the trail go cold, and we find ourselves tilting from the real to
the imagined. It is sometimes asserted that Codex Bobiensis derives from a
second-century Greek papyrus manuscript.12 Where does this story come
from? In a delightful nesting of less-than-rigorously verifiable claims,
William Petersen mentions a quotation from Daniel Plooij in the 1936
Bulletin of the Bezan Club, an “informal ‘club’ of scholars interested in the
western text,” stating that the famous Latin codicologist E.A. Lowe “told me
that the Codex Bobiensis […] k shows paleographical marks of having been
copied from a 2d century papyrus.”13 Lowe never published such a claim, so
we do not know what evidence he would have marshalled for support, but
we know that the text of Codex Bobiensis predates the mid-third century,
so a second-century parentage is not absurd, and it seems clear Codex
Bobiensis had a close Hellenic relative.
Like many ancient gospel manuscripts, we do not know an exact date of
birth. We may offer a guess, though: Codex Bobiensis was born somewhere
in the vicinity of the year 400 CE. Since we determine this date largely based
on paleography, we must hold it loosely.14 Lowe, who knew as much about
Latin paleography as anyone in the twentieth century, dated Codex Bo-
9 P.W. Hoogterp, Étude sur le Latin du Codex Bobiensis (k) des évangiles (Wageningen:
Veenman & zonen, 1930), 17.
10 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xliii–lxvi.
11 W. Petersen, “Patristic Biblical Quotations and Method: Four Changes to Lightfoot’s
Edition of Second Clement,” in Patristic and Text-Critical Studies: The Collected Essays of
William L. Petersen, ed. J. Krans and J. Verheyden, NTTSD 40 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 539–
567, here 552–553.
12 B.M. Metzger and B.D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission,
Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 102.
13 Petersen, “Patristic Biblical Quotations” (see n. 11), 553.
14 On the limits of paleography for dating manuscripts, see Nongbri, God’s Library (see
n. 7), 47–82; id., “The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri: Some Ob-
servations on the Date and Provenance of P. Bodmer II (P66),” MH 71.1 (2014), 1–35.
biensis to the fourth or fifth century.15 While most follow this dating, Hugh
Houghton recently listed it in his catalogue simply as fourth century,
though without support for excluding the fifth century.16 The Earlier Latin
Manuscripts Project, directed by Mark Stansbury and David Kelly, offers a
date range of 380 to 420 CE.17 I do not wish to advance any further ar-
gument about its date, so I assume a date around 400 CE as a reasonable
timeframe. In any case, it is one of the earliest extant Latin gospel man-
uscripts, and quite possibly the earliest.
As with the date, we cannot speak with certainty about Codex Bobi-
ensis’s birthplace, but we may hazard an informed guess. It is most likely
that Codex Bobiensis was born somewhere in North Africa. This is based
on three pieces of evidence. First, its textual tradition is known to have been
in use in Carthage in the mid-third century, and – apart from this man-
uscript – is not known to have been used elsewhere. Second, as Lowe put it,
“the peculiar type of uncial in [Codex Bobiensis] has its nearest parallel in
two [fourth or] fifth century MSS. of Cyprian,” which are also from North
Africa.18 It contains the “African strand” of the Latin gospel tradition. The
“African” Old Latin text of the gospels is, among other things, marked by a
different rendering of the Greek source text. In the African Old Latin there
is a “predilection, for example, for sermo as a rendering of λόγος (rather
than verbum), […] for felix as a rendering for μακάριος (rather than be-
atus).”19 So the text of Codex Bobiensis is characterized not so much by
different Greek source texts, as by a different way of rendering Greek into a
particular style of Latin associated with Africa. That said, it is also clear that
Codex Bobiensis derives from a Greek source that contained several unique
and frankly peculiar readings.
15 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), ix; E.A. Lowe, Codices Latini antiquiores, pt. 4: Italy:
Perugia – Verona (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 18 no. 465.
16 Houghton, Latin New Testament (see n. 4), 210. Cf. Hoogterp, Étude sur le Latin du Codex
Bobiensis (see n. 9), 6; Lowe, Codices Latini antiquiores (see n. 15), 16–18.
17 See the entry “4/465,” last modified April 30, 2019, https://elmss.nuigalway.ie/catalogue/
811. The Earlier Latin Manuscripts Project is a “database of manuscripts written in Latin
before the year 800 based on the work of E.A. Lowe and his assistants published in
Codices Latini Antiquiores” (“About the Project,” accessed December 11, 2020, https://
elmss.nuigalway.ie/about). Thanks to Claire Clivaz for bringing this database to my
attention; cf. Clivaz, “Mk 16 im Codex Bobbiensis” (see n. 6).
18 Lowe, Codices Latini antiquiores (see n. 15), 18. Similar size, hand, ink, and use of nomina
sacra suggest a relationship between the manuscripts.
19 A. Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1913),
37. On the “African” text of the gospels, see also E.A. Lowe, “On the African Origin of
Codex Palatinus of the Gospels (e),” JTS 23, no. 92 (1922), 401–404.
Fig. 1: Examples of different hands in Codex Bobiensis from the verso of fol. 38 (photo: M.
Larsen)
For reasons I will explain in due course, it is difficult to determine the

original size of Codex Bobiensis. John Wordsworth, who examined the
manuscript and published his findings in 1886, described Codex Bobiensis
as a “middle-sized quarto,”20 with pages measuring about 19 cm high by
16.5 cm broad. Currently, it has 96 folios. David Parker estimates it would
initially have been a codex of 415 folios in 52 quaternions based on the
signatures on the quires.21 The pages are vellum and the ink yellowish-
brown.22 The scribe was an expert who used a uniform ruled-lining system
with prickings to make fourteen neat lines on each page. A second hand
uses similar ink and was perhaps the hand of a professional corrector (δι-
ορθωτής).23 There is also a third hand, that of a non-expert, using a different
ink – perhaps that of a later owner or user of the manuscript, as the ad-
ditions appear to be not corrections per se but rather other kinds of notes
(see fig. 1).
Codex Bobiensis had an unusual childhood, it would seem, at least when
compared to other contemporary gospel artifacts. It is a puzzle to guess
what kind of fourth- or fifth-century North African community would
have produced and read this gospel. It presently has the second half of
20 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xi.

21 Parker, “Unequally Yoked” (see n. 6), 584–585.
22 There is also red ink in the manuscript, which will be discussed in due course.
23 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), x.
Fig. 2: Title Page of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)
According to Mark, followed by the first half of According to Matthew,

with the sole title page in the manuscript separating them (see fig. 2).
As mentioned above, based on the numbered signatures on the re-
maining quires, it seems clear the codex initially contained much more text,
and the most common guesses for these contents would be the According
to Luke and According to John editions of the gospel. It is not possible to tell
if the order would have been Luke-John or John-Luke. It was undoubtedly a
gospel codex, almost certainly with more versions of the gospel, likely the
canonical ones.
In its youthful form, Codex Bobiensis not only had a strange order of the
versions of the gospel, it also contained unexpected readings. It is most
famous for its unique ending of the According to Mark version. In fact,
most people who know of Codex Bobiensis at all only know of it because of
its ending of According to Mark. In the broader gospel manuscript tra-
dition, there are five or so different component parts that make up the
many possible ways of concluding According to Mark.24 A number of
24 See D. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Fig. 3: Recto of fol. 41 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)
manuscripts offer multiple endings, with paratextual notes guiding the

reader on how to proceed through the textual pluriformity in a “choose
your own adventure” sort of way.25 Codex Bobiensis is the only manuscript
now extant that has only the so-called “shorter ending,” in which Jesus
sends Peter and the others to preach “from east to west, the sacred and
imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation,” without also providing
the so-called “longer ending” (the one with the snake handling and
drinking of poison) and without any paratextual notes to aid or alert the
reader to other options for ending the gospel. Even in its ending, it also has
unique variants of the shorter ending.
As seen in the image above (fig. 3), Jesus does not address his words to
Petrus but to his puer (boy). This is, of course, easily understood as a
harmless textual mistake, but, as with other examples that will follow in this
article, it is curious that the corrector (the second hand) corrected so many
1997), 124–147; M.D.C. Larsen, Gospels before the Book (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2018), 114–120.
25 For a new assessment of the evidence of the manuscripts giving plurality of endings of
According to Mark, see C. Clivaz, “Looking at Scribal Practices in the Endings of Mark
16,” special issue of Henoch, ed. P. Pouchelle and J.-S. Rey (forthcoming).
other mistakes yet allowed this one to stand. It raises questions about what
kind of community would have read or heard such a reading, of Jesus
giving instructions not to Peter but to his puer, and found it not only legible
but even appropriate and not in need of correction.
Nearly every folio of Codex Bobiensis contains remarkable readings.
Below are just a few highlights. I will discuss two and then point out several
in a more serial fashion. In the midst of Mark 16:4, Codex Bobiensis offers
an otherwise unknown addition of forty-six Latin words, explaining how
the angels snuck into the tomb and helped effect the resurrection (recto and
verso of fol. 40, see fig. 4a and b):
subito autem ad horam tertium tenebrae diei factae sunt per totum orbem terrae et de-
scenderunt de caelis angeli et surgent in claritate vivi di simul ascenderunt cum eo et
continuo lux facta est tunc illae accesserunt ad monimentum et vident revolutum lapidem
fuit enim magnus nimis.26
But suddenly at the third hour of the day darkness came over the whole world and angels
from heaven descended and, as he was rising in the brightness of the living God, at the
same time they [sc. the angels] ascended with him and immediately there was light.
How far these words go back in Codex Bobiensis’s manuscript lineage in

North Africa is difficult to tell, though it seems unlikely the person who
produced this manuscript had invented them out of whole cloth. This
reading represents an important contribution to the story of Jesus’s res-
urrection in the context of this particular manuscript. It has been largely
ignored in the past, seemingly because, if one is solely interested in the
“original” version of According to Mark, this reading is basically useless. To
understate the matter dramatically, it is a challenge to make the case that
this is the original reading. If, however, one is interested in how some late
antique North African Christians read and heard gospel tradition, this is an
essential datum. For the readers of this particular manuscript, for whom
this manuscript was likely not a gospel but their copy of the gospel, this is
the story of how Jesus was resurrected. For such readers, the angels played a
critical role in the resurrection of Jesus.
A few pages earlier, on the verso of fol. 38, Codex Bobiensis offers a
unique reading of the crucifixion. We see a different take on Jesus’s cry of
dereliction from the cross. In the place in the text that we now call Mark
15:34, Jesus hangs on the cross and cries out to Helios, the sun god (see
fig. 5): Et exclamavit voce magna heli helianum et zaphani di meus di meus
26 See Larsen, Gospels before the Book (see n. 24), 117–118, for notes on the reading and the
textual emendation (following Metzger’s reconstruction, for the most part).
Fig. 4a and b: Recto and verso of fol. 40 of Codex Bobiensis (photos: M. Larsen)
Fig. 5: Verso of fol. 38 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)
ad quid me maledixisti [hand of corrector changes to: dereliquisti] (“And he

cried out in a loud voice, ‘Helios, Helios, and Zaphani! My god! My god!
Why have you mocked [corrected to ‘forsaken’] me?’”).
Jesus hangs in the heat of the day in Jerusalem, railing against the sun for
mocking him. It is too facile to explain Jesus crying out on the cross to
Helios as a scribal error, changing heloi heloi lema sabachthani to heli he-
lianum et zaphani.27 This is to miss the point on multiple fronts. First, while
the corrector (the second hand) apparently had no problem with this
reading, the third hand, which has been described as “Irish” and does not
date any earlier than the seventh century, spotted the text and noticed a
mistake.28 But the mistake was that Helios had not mocked Jesus (male-
dixisti) but had forsaken him (dereliquisti). Importantly, the reference to
Helios is not corrected, either by the initial corrector or by the third “Irish”
hand. Further still, we can switch from the intention or mistake of the
producers of the text to the perspective of the readers of the text. When read
aloud, auditors would have heard a reference to the sun god Helios mocking
27 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), cxxx.

28 F.C. Burkitt, “Further Notes on Codex ‘k,’” JTS 5, no. 17 (1903), 100–107, here 104.
(initially, and later forsaking) Jesus, at least in his perception, as he is

crucified.
I list a few more such readings in quick succession. On the recto of
fol. 81, which covers parts of Matt 12, Jesus says to a crowd in synagogue,
Quanto ergo differt homo Iove? (“How much does humanity differ from
Jupiter?,” see fig. 6). The recto of fol. 42 provides the opening to the Ac-
cording to Matthew version of the gospel: liber generalis fili David, fili
abrahae (“Book of the common son of David, [and] of Abraham” or
“Common book of the son of David, [and] of Abraham,” see fig. 7).
In the most recently published images of Codex Bobiensis (the ones
from the 1913 plates of Carlo Cipolla),29 the images for fol. 58 were too poor
to read, but in my visit in March 2019, I was able to confirm Wordsworth’s
transcription of the Lord’s prayer, which does not read “Let your kingdom
come” but “I have come into your kingdom” (veni ad regnum tuum), which
offers a rather different take on the so-called Lord’s Prayer.
29 C. Cipolla, Il codice evangelico k della Biblioteca Universitaria Nazionale di Torino (Turin:

Molfese, 1913).
On the recto of fol. 33 in Codex Bobiensis, one reads the Latin text of the
story in Mark 14:51–52 of the young man who fled during the arrest of
Jesus: iuvenculus autem quidam sequebatur illum circumamictus pallam et
detinuerunt illum ille autem relicta palla fugit nudus. For comparison, the
Vulgate has adulescens instead of iuvenculus and says the young man was
wearing a sindon instead of a palla. A sindon was a garment made of linen
and represents the same article of clothing as the Greek νεανίσκος, found in
the NA²⁸ edition of Mark 14:51–52, who was wearing a σινδόνα. A palla,
however, was the traditional garment worn by Roman women, and was the
female-gendered equivalent of the pallium. One perhaps slightly playful
way of translating the Latin text into English, which brings out the gen-
dered-clothing issues, might be: “Now there was a juvenile following him,
who was wearing a gown, and they had arrested him. But he abandoned his
gown and fled naked.” So, when the Latin text of Mark 14:51–52 in Codex
Bobiensis would have been read aloud in its late antique North African
setting, there would have been an element of cross-dressing happening in
the story of the young man from the garden.
In such readings, we witness a continued plasticity and pluriformity of
gospel tradition that seems to move beyond a simple scribe-author dyad.
Fig. 8: Cross section of the baptistry in Djémila (Zamani Project.org)
The person who produced Codex Bobiensis did not frequently offer
wholesale additions or renderings of the tradition. Nor are they all in-
consequential scribal errors.30 They are a complex blend of scribal errors,
additions, and creations that verge upon a new iteration of gospel tradition
altogether.
Some scholars have even wondered whether the person who made
Codex Bobiensis was a “non-Christian.”31 This suggestion is based on the
assumption that any Christian scribe should have known the “right”
version of the Lord’s Prayer, would not have liked Jesus comparing humans
to a “pagan” god such as Jupiter, and would not have been comfortable with
Jesus arguing with the sun god Helios while enduring his political exe-
cution. If we again shift from the scribe to the readers, we gain a different
perspective, and a new and perhaps more answerable question arises. In
what kind of a reading community could Codex Bobiensis plausibly have
lived its early life?
30 Some “mistakes,” such as palla instead of pallio, might have been an inconsequential
mistake. Others changes, such as the words added in Mark 16:4, seem more meaningful.
31 Houghton, Latin New Testament (see n. 4), 22; Burkitt, “Further Notes” (see n. 28), 107: “I
cannot help suspecting that Paganism was still alive when k was being written, and that
the scribe was a professional copier of books, perhaps a heathen still or only a recent
convert.”
Fig. 9: Layout of the baptistry in Djémila (Zamani Project.org)
To answer this question, I would like to turn to the material remains of a

fourth-century CE North African Christian community. In the city of
Djémila (Algeria) is one of the best preserved (and least discussed) late
antique covered baptismal buildings in the entire Mediterranean basin (for
a layout of the baptistry, see fig. 8 and 9).32 The catechumens would have
walked through a corridor and seen an inscription “Come to God and be
illuminated” from the Vetus Latina of Ps 33, then walked around the outer
section of the baptistry with stalls to prepare themselves for baptism, then
processed in their turn to the font, where they would have walked over a
mosaic of dolphins, which are, of course, not common in Christian
scriptures, but very common imagery in contemporary North Africa, such
as in the arm rails of the public toilets near the forum in Djémila as well as in
the nearby city of Timgad, and then entered the baptismal font itself (see
fig. 10–12). On the floor of the font is the inscription: [GENTES T]EMPVS
ERIT OMNES IN FONTE [LAVARI] (“There will be a time for all people to
be washed in the font [or spring]”).
Here I quote from Nathan Dennis’s forthcoming article on the baptistry:
32 I documented the site in October 2019, and Prof. Nathan Dennis was kind enough to
share with me his forthcoming publication about the baptistry.
Fig. 10: Entrance to the baptistry in Djémila (photo: M. Larsen)
The relative obscurity of the baptistery is likely the reason why the […] inscription has
escaped the attention of both art historians and classicists, but the text is, quite re-
markably, a paraphrase of a line from Virgil’s third Eclogue, […] the inscription ap-
propriates the language of Virgil […]. “Tityre, pascentis a flumine reice capellas; ipse, ubi
tempus erit, omnis in fonte lavabo,” or “Tityrus, turn back from the stream the grazing
goats; when the time comes, I’ll wash them all in the spring myself.” […] It seems clear,
therefore, that the original designer of the Djémila mosaic, the concepteur, was not only
classically educated and aware of Virgil’s Eclogues, but also he almost certainly intended
the textual appropriation to allude to the bucolic, even paradisiacal landscape described in
the Eclogue.33
Catechumens walked into a baptismal font in which they were literally

standing upon an allusion to Virgil. As far as we can infer from this
baptistry, no disjunctive relationship existed for this community between
scripture, their sacred rites, and so-called “paganism.” As Dennis points
out, this was not an accident but an integral part of the design of the
building. At the center of baptism, at least for these late antique Christians
in Djémila, was an allusion to Virgilian poetry.
33 N. Dennis, “Baptizing Virgil: The Early Christian Baptistery at Djémila and the Making
of a Pagan Saint” (forthcoming). See also id., “A Tale of Two Inschriptions: Tipasa,
Djemila, and the Role of Textual Icons in the North African Cult of Saints,” Mosaic 47
(2020), 20–32, here 29–30.
Fig. 11: Floor of the baptismal font in Djémila (photo: M. Larsen)
Fig. 12: Central room of the baptistry in Djémila with font and ciborium (photo: M. Larsen)
Where could a gospel codex like Codex Bobiensis have had a flourishing
early life? It does not take an overactive imagination to believe that the same
sort of late-fourth-century CE North African environment that designed
and used the baptistery in Djémila could have also read the Latin text of
Codex Bobiensis aloud with profit and without problem. Such complex and
competing religious imagery seems to have lived together comfortably in
such a late antique North African context. If one has been baptized in
“pagan” classics such as Virgil, then imagining a Jesus who screams at
Helios for mocking him, a Jesus who casually compares human beings to
Jupiter, no longer seems a problem of inherent incompatibility. After all,
already in the second century, Justin Martyr associated the dying and rising
of Jesus with the setting and rising of the sun and his resurrection on the
first day of the week with the Day of the Sun (ἡμέρα ἡλίου) and Clement of
Alexandria associated Jesus with the rising sun (ἥλιος).34 Further, a ceiling
mosaic from the Tomb of the Julii (Mausoleum M, Vatican City) from the
late third or early fourth century has an image that has been interpreted as
Christ-Helios.35 Helios/Sol Invictus was often associated with late Roman
emperors from the second through the fourth centuries,36 and the emperor
Elagabalus (Heliogabalus, r. 218 to 222 CE), of the Severan dynasty, whose
family hailed from North Africa (Leptis Magna, Libya), was devoted to the
god Elegabalus and promulgated the deity’s worship around the empire
during his reign. So, perhaps, for a late-fourth-century North African
community, it would not have been strange to imagine Jesus, as he hangs on
a cross in the midday sun, screaming out to a deity closely associated with
Roman imperial power, asking why Helios had mocked (maledixisti) him
as he suffered public execution. On the whole, the hybridity of religious
symbols reflects an approach to Christian devotion that views a variety of
myths as mutually supporting rather than exclusive.
Codex Bobiensis is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) extant Latin
manuscripts of the gospels, and certainly the oldest exemplar of the African
strand of the Latin gospel tradition.37 One might expect that, like other early
gospel manuscripts, it would enjoy global fame and a mountain of scholarly
tomes discussing its every jot and tittle. Such is not the case. So why has this
particular gospel codex been relatively overlooked? I am sure there are
many reasons, but here I suggest two. Both relate to the longstanding,
though now weakened and wobbling, notion that gospel manuscripts are
34 Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 40, 67; Clement of Alexandria, Protr. 11.

35 K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to
Seventh Century; Catalogue of the Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
November 19, 1977, through February 12, 1978 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1979), 522–523 no. 467.
36 Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality (see n. 35), 67–70 nos. 58, 59, et al.
37 Another good candidate for the oldest Old Latin gospel is Codex Vercellensis.
only useful insofar as they can help us recover the “original text” of the
gospels. First, Codex Bobiensis is not a Greek manuscript of the gospels but
a Latin one. So even if the manuscript contains a useful reading, there is still
the problem of translation in recovering the original text. Second, it con-
tains several odd readings, some of which I have discussed here. To my
knowledge, no one has ever tried to incorporate some of these weirder
readings into a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. Most do not
even appear in apparatus, despite Codex Bobiensis being the oldest Old
Latin gospel manuscript and a witness to many singular readings. Simply
put, if the game is reconstruction of the “original text” of the gospels, Codex
Bobiensis doesn’t even make the team.
This article and this special issue of Early Christianity are about
something else, though. They are about shifting attention to the gospel as
material artifact – about asking, “What is a gospel?” from a different, more
material framework. This moves us away from the first few centuries of the
Common Era, in which we have almost no material evidence, to the social
and material worlds of late antiquity – and well beyond that into the
medieval and early modern worlds and even up to the current day. Pre-
sumably, Codex Bobiensis was the (text of the) gospel for someone or more
likely some community or communities. Thus, it offers a picture, not so
much of the original text of the According to Mark and According to
Matthew editions of the gospel, but of the cultural and social history of late
antique North African Christians – offering material data points we can use
to imagine a world of Christians reading from a gospel where Jesus cries out
to Helios from the cross and Christians baptize and are baptized in Vir-
gilian poetry. In the cultural- and social-history or “gospel as material
artifact” framework, Codex Bobiensis has much to offer – and this is just its
childhood.
Adolescence was a time of great change for Codex Bobiensis. It once
probably had four versions of the gospel, but presently it has only the
second half of According to Mark followed immediately by the first half of
According to Matthew. In fact, they even start and stop in the middle of the
same story: the feeding of the 4,000.38 Some previous scholars have noted
this but dubbed it a “coincidence.”39 Based on my inspection of Codex
Bobiensis, I believe this cannot be a mere coincidence (at least not an
accident) for several reasons.
38 I have noted elsewhere the similar order of events in the overall structure of According to
Mark and According to Matthew; cf. Larsen, Gospels before the Book (see n. 24), 100–114.
39 Parker, “Unequally Yoked” (see n. 6), 583.
First, it not only starts and stops in the middle of the same story; it starts
and stops at the same place in the same story – almost to the word. In fact, if
we presume the NA²⁸ construction of According to Matthew as the base
text, the only underlying Greek that would seem to be missing are the
following nine words: οἱ δὲ μαθηταὶ τοῖς ὄχλοις καὶ ἔφαγον πάντες καί […].
If we assume the NA²⁸ construction of According to Mark as the base text,
all that is missing are the seven Greek words: εἶπεν καὶ ταῦτα παρατιθέναι
καὶ ἔφαγον καί […]. In the context of the feeding of the 4,000, the idea of
the disciples distributing food and the crowd eating can be easily inferred
from what one finds on the first and last folios of Codex Bobiensis. Thus, in
the current state of the reconfigured codex, there was a complete gospel
story, containing everything from genealogy to resurrection, albeit using
not “one” gospel but the second half of According to Mark and the first half
of According to Matthew as the new iteration of one, new, “complete”
gospel. There are myriad ways to split up and splice two different gospels
that would not have resulted in a complete gospel story; the approach that
we see in Codex Bobiensis was not accident or coincidence.
Second, as mentioned earlier, the manuscript uses yellowish-brown ink
throughout – except in two places. (This only became clear by inspecting
the manuscript in person.) The middle title page (the verso of fol. 41) and
the current last page (the verso of fol. 96) are the sole pages with markings in
red ink. When I consulted the manuscript in Turin in March 2019, I was
shocked that fols. 1–8 were missing (more on this in a moment), so I cannot
confirm the presence of red ink on the recto of fol. 1, but I suspect it was
there too. The presence of red ink solely in these places suggests that the
person who altered the manuscript used a new ink color to frame and
interpret the new, hybridized instantiation of the gospel, one which does
not run from beginning to middle to end but from middle to beginning/
ending to middle.
Third, the running titles at the top of each folio of the According to Mark
section occasionally read not CATA MARC but CATA MATTH, and vice
versa: the title in According to Matthew occasionally reads CATA MARC.40
In fact, it is curious that the opening page of this hybridized gospel created
during the adolescence of Codex Bobiensis likely read CATA MATTH, not
CATA MARC, even though the text that followed was the second half of
According to Mark, not According to Matthew. There is a contested history
here, probably due to the confusion created by what modern readers knew
to be the contents of the opening folio. When Tischendorf visited Codex
40 See, for instance, fols. 26r, 32r, 33r, and 44r.

Bobiensis in the 1840s to prepare his edition of the manuscript, he recorded

that the opening page came from According to Matthew, not According to
Mark.41 Wordsworth, however, found this incredible, since the subsequent
text came from Mark 8. So, after he had returned to England from in-
specting the manuscript in Turin, Wordsworth wrote to a certain “Prof.
Rossi,” apparently his colleague in Italy, who “assure[d]” him that it must
read CATA MARC and not CATA MATTH.42 Some twenty years later,
however, in 1902 and 1903 C.H. Turner (Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford) and F. Crawford Burkitt (Lecturer of Paleography, Cambridge)
separately inspected Codex Bobiensis and published their re-collations.
While Burkitt does not comment on the opening title on the recto of fol. 1,
Turner makes explicit that it reads CATA MATTH and not CATA MARC,
as Wordsworth’s Prof. Rossi had apparently wrongly assured him, and
Turner hopes his correction will be taken as definitive on the matter and
thus end the confusion.43 For reasons that will soon become obvious, it is no
longer possible for me to verify which reading is correct, but, if the normal
principles of textual reconstruction apply, the lectio difficilior is certainly
CATA MATTH, and this commends it as the more plausible option.
Fourth, when Tischendorf viewed Codex Bobiensis in the 1840s, he
concluded that the first page of the codex he saw (the second half of the
feeding of the 4,000 from According to Mark) was in fact from the Ac-
cording to Matthew section initially and subsequently moved to become
the first page of the reconstituted form of Codex Bobiensis.44 Supporting
such a claim is that fact that, in the barely legible image of Cipolla (pub-
lished in 1913), the first folio read “Mageda” (as in the According to
Matthew version), not “Dalmanutha” (as in the According to Mark ver-
sion).45 He thought this moving of the page from the According to Matthew
section to the According to Mark section was “a mistake” (“ein Verse-
41 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xi; Parker, “Unequally Yoked” (see n. 6), 583; C. von
Tischendorf, “Die Bobbienser Evangelienfragmente zu Turin,” Jahrbücher der Literatur
120 (1847), 43–56, here 47 n. 1.
42 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), vi–vii, xi.
43 C.H. Turner, “A Re-collation of Codex K of the Old Latin Gospels (Turin G. VII. 15),” JTS
5, no. 17 (1903), 88–100, here 88–89.
44 “Das erste Blatt im Ms. ist dem Inhalte nach das letzte; durch ein Versehen des Buch-
binders ist es zum ersten geworden” (Tischendorf, “Bobbienser Evangelienfragmente”
[see n. 41], 47 n. 1, cited in Parker, “Unequally Yoked” [see n. 6], 583). By the time
Wordsworth viewed Codex Bobiensis, it was apparently still bound, but the first pages
had received further damage (Portions [see n. 3], ix–xi).
45 The two versions of the story are quite similar, as a perusal of a gospel synopsis will make
clear.
hen”).46 I think it would be far too coincidental to be a mistake. It would

have involved unbinding a quarto, taking out a middle bifolium, cutting
that bifolium in half, and then moving part of it to the first page of the newly
rebound codex.
Fifth, while I have not run precise statistical analysis, if one desired a
single gospel story with birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of
Jesus in the most compact form possible, then compiling a codex of the
second half of According to Mark (beginning at the feeding of the 4,000 and
having the “shorter ending” without the “longer ending”) followed by the
first half of According to Matthew, with its genealogy, birth narrative, and
teachings (including the Sermon on the Mount) would likely be the shortest
way to do it. This would make Codex Bobiensis useful as traveling gospel
codex for preaching and teaching, much easier for traveling around than
carrying a codex of four versions of the gospel, which would weigh more
than four times as much.47
Why does the remaking of this gospel codex matter, and what does it
indicate? It demonstrates the continued fluidity of material gospel tradi-
tion. The metamorphosis of Codex Bobiensis altered a fourfold gospel into
a new form of gospel previously unknown, both in terms of its unusual
additions as well as its new strange shape. The layout of the title page in the
middle of Codex Bobiensis, written in red ink, does not call the manuscript
the Gospel according to Mark and the Gospel according to Matthew, but
the Gospel – According to Mark and According to Matthew. This is a
reworking of gospel tradition into a new shortened hybridized version. It
would have been ideal for traveling missionaries in terms of size, porta-
bility, durability, and content, as it would have fit easily in some form of a
carrying case.48 In terms of implied reading practices, it creates a gospel that
46 Tischendorf, “Bobbienser Evangelienfragmente” (see n. 41), 47 n. 1.

47 This is the shortest way based on an existing four-gospel codex. There are shorter ways to
cut up and reconstitute a new hybridized gospel, if one is willing to epitomize more
dramatically or if one finds some teachings or other stories unnecessary to include.
48 Maximus, a disciple of the fourth-century Martin of Tours, hung a “book of the gospels”
around his neck during his travels, along with the instruments of the sacrament (a small
paten and chalice); see Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria confessorum 22 (R. Van Dam,
Gregory of Tours: Glory of the Confessors [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988],
37). Sozomen refers to a certain Milēs, martyred under Shapur in Persia, who carried a
gospel book in a bag (Μίλης δὲ μόνον πήραν ἐπιφερόμενος, ἐν ᾗ τὴν ἱερὰν βίβλον τῶν
εὐαγγελίων εἶχεν, Historia ecclesiastica 2.14.3). Slightly less relevant: Chrysostom com-
mends “women” who “wear gospels hung from their necks” as “reminders” (Hom. Matt.
72.2), although he’s quite critical of those who wear miniature gospels as amulets (Adv.
Jud. 8). On miniature codices, see T.J. Kraus, “Miniature Codices in Late Antiquity:
Preliminary Remarks and Tendencies about a Specific Book Format,” VC 7.1 (2016),
was not designed to be read “from front to back,” but was designed to have
all the “basics” of the story, likely for public reading purposes such as
preaching or teaching.49 It could conceivably have functioned well in local
liturgical reading sequences, rather than sequential reading of a single
gospel narrative.50
When did this adolescent change happen to Codex Bobiensis? Again, it
is unfortunately not possible to speak with precision, but two telling signs
may allow us to place it broadly speaking. First, as mentioned above, the red
ink only appears on the sole title page in the middle of the present form of
Codex Bobiensis and on the last page. Using red ink on the title page makes
sense, although there are no other signs of decorative elements on the
manuscript. But why use red ink on the title page in the middle, put it on the
verso of the last folio, and nowhere else? The most plausible explanation is
that the red ink was added to the manuscript at or around the time it was
remade into a new epitomized hybrid gospel.51 This use of ornamental red
ink bears a striking resemblance to manuscripts of Cyprian’s Epistles
originally from fourth- or fifth-century North Africa that are now held in
the British Library.52 Second, the last page (and presumably the first) shows
134–152. On Irish pocket gospels, see P. McGurk, “The Irish Pocket Gospel Book,” SacEr
8.2 (1956), 249–270; B. Meehan, “Irish Pocket Books,” in The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies
on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John, ed. C. Breay and B. Meehan (London:
British Library, 2015), 83–102. The so-called pocket gospel book is a characteristically
insular format from late antiquity and the early middle ages. Examples include:
St. Cuthbert Gospel/Stonyhurst Gospel ( John only; British Library, Add. MS 89000, 8th
cent.); The Book of Mulling (Dublin, Trinity College, MS 60, olim MS A.1.15, 8th cent.);
The Book of Deer (Cambridge University Library, MS. II.6.32, 10th cent.); The Book of
Dimma (Dublin, Trinity College, MS A.IV.23, 8th cent.). Thanks to Jeremiah Coogan for
assistance with bibliography in this footnote.
49 On the variety of nonlinear reading practices afforded by late ancient gospel books, see
the article by Coogan in this thematic issue of Early Christianity.
50 In light of the mostly eighth-century dates of the Irish pocket codices, one could also
propose the eighth century as a reasonable period for Codex Bobiensis’s reconfiguration.
51 It is, of course, not impossible that this red marking was added later and perhaps even was
a library stamp. The damaged nature of the manuscript, and especially of its current final
page, only further complicated the question. During my inspection, it struck me as the
same sort of red marking as the interior title page, and most likely from the same period.
52 The manuscript Add. MS 40165A, housed in the British Library, contains on fols. 1r–5v
fragments of Cyprian’s Ep. 55, 74, and 69. They are dated to the fourth or fifth century
and believed to have originated in North Africa before being brought to England in the
seventh or eighth century and used as flyleaves in a twelfth-century manuscript, along
with an eighth-century Old English martyrology. On Add. MS 40165A, see E.A. Lowe,
Codices Latini antiquiores, pt. 2: Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935),
no. 178; W. Schipper, “Digitising (Nearly) Unreadable Fragments of Cyprian’s Episto-
lary,” in The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed.
S. Echard and S. Partridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 157–168. Image
signs of significant additional wear. This is hardly conclusive for dating, but
may suggest a change in antiquity. Cipolla similarly said that the current
first and last pages had become such in antiquity.53 Based on the use of the
red ink, I hazard a guess (and only a guess) that Codex Bobiensis was re-
made and rebound into a new hybridized gospel sometime between the
fourth and sixth centuries in North Africa.
After Codex Bobiensis’s adolescence, it left its home to launch a career
on a different continent. It eventually made its way from North Africa
(probably) to Northern Italy (definitely). How it made the trip is unclear.
We can imagine it went from Numidia to Mauretania to Spain and then
over to Italy, or perhaps it took a four- to five-day boat voyage across the
Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.54 Either is possible; we know that
people and objects (such as smaller codices like the reconstituted, hy-
bridized gospel codex of Codex Bobiensis) frequently traveled from North
Africa to Italy, and had been doing so for centuries. In any case, the codex
eventually took up residence at Bobbio Abbey, seemingly at an early phase
of the monastery’s existence.55 Bobbio Abbey was founded by St. Colum-
banus in 614 CE. Columbanus was remembered as an effective preacher
from Ireland who had great success as a missionary. He was the founder of
Celtic-style monasteries across central Europe and was credited with
converting the Lombard king Agilulf to Christianity.56 It is curious, then,
that the third hand found in the manuscript, which uses a different, darker
ink, and is paleographically dated later than the other two (not that of an
expert scribe but rather of a non-expert) has been described as a distinc-
tively “Irish” hand.57 Burkitt corroborates Wordsworth’s analysis that “[i]t
is like the work of an amateur or owner of the book.”58 The notes made by
the “Irish” hand are not corrections, but non-systematic aides-mémoire to
help a user of the text. While the initial form of the codex, with four gospels
and bibliography taken from the entry in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts of
the British Library, accessed January 7, 2020, https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminat-
edmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8341&CollID=27&NStart=40165.
53 Cipolla, Il codice evangelico (see n. 29), 10.
54 The timeframe is estimated from the travel tool at ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial
Network Model of the Roman World, accessed July 11, 2020, http://orbis.stanford.edu/.
55 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xiii–xviii.
56 See also A. O’Hara, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Com-
munity in the Seventh Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
57 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), x.
58 Burkitt, “Further Notes” (see n. 28), 102. Burkitt entertains the idea the handwriting of
the “third hand” of the manuscript was that of none other than St. Columbanus himself
(ibid., 105).
and about 415 folios, would potentially have been somewhat unwieldly to
carry on missionary journeys, the current 96 folios would have been only
about 23 percent of the size and could easily have fit within a leather satchel,
which was a well-known practice among Irish missionaries in late antiquity
and the early medieval period.59
It is no surprise, then, that the caretakers of Codex Bobiensis at Bobbio
Abbey came to describe this codex as the one used by St. Columbanus
himself in his missionary journeys. Tischendorf in his inspection of the
codex in the 1840s saw a tag as well as a note on the first page that said: ut
traditum fuit illud est idem liber quem B. Columbanus Abbas in pera secum
ferre consueverat 60 (“Tradition has it that this is the very book that blessed
Abba Columbanus used to carry with him in a satchel”).
When Wordsworth saw the codex about forty years later, he was unable
to read much of the first page, but did see the tag, which he ascribed to the
seventeenth century. While there are critical reasons for thinking the as-
cription is wishful (and unreliable) thinking, and that this was not the
actual book used by Columbanus, it is nonetheless the case that the
chronology, the size, the “Irish” third hand, and the location of the
manuscript make it possible that it could have been the preaching gospel of
St. Columbanus himself. The details and historical timeline fit the bill.
While it is unlikely that this was St. Columbanus’s preaching gospel codex,
it is understandable why the monastery made the connection and enjoyed
the claim.
After the illustrious imagined career of Codex Bobiensis as the gospel
book used by a famous preacher and missionary, it went quietly into re-
tirement at Bobbio Abbey. Unfortunately, after its glorious youth and
imagined career, its retirement and “golden years” appear to be a situation
of neglect. It remained in Bobbio Abbey for about a thousand years –
seemingly unused and not well-cared for.
The vellum has significant damage caused by dampness. Sources from
documentary papyri as well as an ancient mishnah describe the need to air
out one’s manuscripts regularly so that they are not damaged from
dampness.61 P. Ross. Georg. 3.1, for instance, is a letter from Marcus to
Antonia, dated around 270 CE from Alexandria, in which Marcus, a
physician, writes to Antonia, his mother, to ask her to shake out his medical
treatises, so that they are not damaged by dampness, dust, or larvae –
59 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xiv. See bibliography in n. 48 above.

60 Tischendorf, “Bobbienser Evangelienfragmente” (see n. 41), 45.
61 For these references, I thank AnneMarie Luijendijk. She references them in her paper,
“Cacata carta” (forthcoming).
something he confesses he failed to do before he left town.62 One mishnah

recommends monthly airing out of manuscripts to prevent damage:
If one found books, he should read from them once in thirty days (to air them out and
prevent their decay). If he does not know how to read, he should roll them. However, he
should not study in them for the first time nor should another read with him (so that they
should not each pull the scroll in opposite directions, causing it to tear).63
It would appear that this sort of regular airing out did not happen to Codex
Bobiensis during its retirement. There are folios now on which you can only
see the letters when you hold them up to light. Only then do the letters
appear, as if they were magic runes.64
These are indications that the manuscript remained unused for an
extended period of time, left to rot on shelves or in lattice or in chests or
wherever. It was retired from regular use or ongoing care, and was replaced
by younger, better, more useful gospel codices. So why was it preserved at
all and not simply thrown away or recycled? The best explanation is that it
was preserved because of the gloriousness of its imagined past accom-
plishments. Its utility had shifted away from being readable text to being a
kind of relic. Its imagined career helps us understand why it was afforded
valuable real estate in the library, even though it possessed an aged and
outdated text of the gospel.65
The reports of Codex Bobiensis’s death have been greatly understated. It
died several deaths in a long, drawn-out, and minimally publicized way.
Houghton’s treatment of Codex Bobiensis, for instance, does not mention
its demise as a codex (as I will show, it is no longer a codex in the strict sense
of the word).66 Houghton is not alone in this regard. Perhaps I should be
embarrassed to admit that it was only after I had made plans to visit the
artifact in Turin that I discovered it was no longer a codex. Here is the story.
In the early 1800s, Bobbio Abbey, sitting as it did in northern Italy, was
suppressed by the French under the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte as he
secularized properties of the Catholic Church. Sometime after the sup-
pression, Bobbio Abbey began to send their books away to preserve them
62 P. Ross. Georg. 3.1, ll. 17–19. See also C.H. Roberts, “An Army Doctor in Alexandria,” in
Aus Antike und Orient: Festschrift Wilhelm Schubart zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. S. Morenz
(Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1950), 112–115; Luijendijk, “Cacata carta” (forthcoming).
63 b. B. Meṣ. 29b. Citation and translation from Luijendijk, “Cacata carta” (forthcoming).
64 I use the imagery of magic runes emerging in natural light from D. Parker, Introduction to
the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 90.
65 A. Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” VC 64.3
(2010), 217–254.
66 Houghton, Latin New Testament (see n. 4), 10, 22–23, 125, 210.
Fig. 13: Turin National University Library (photo: M. Larsen)
for safekeeping. Many went to the Turin National University Library. Some
went to the Vatican. Others went elsewhere. Codex Bobiensis was among
those transported to the Turin National University Library, but we do not
know exactly when that happened. By the 1840s, however, we do know that
Tischendorf visited the manuscript at the Turin Library (fig. 13).
The Turin Library, so the thought seemed to go, would have better
means to keep the codex “safe” from destruction or Bonaparte’s nefarious
deeds. This “safe keeping,” ironically, was the beginning of the death of
Codex Bobiensis.
In January of 1904, a fire swept through Turin National University Li-
brary and destroyed or damaged many books. Codex Bobiensis was one of
the treasures that was damaged. It was charred, though not totally con-
sumed. Calling it now a codex is misleading. The binding – likely scorched;
we do not know anymore – was seemingly thrown away. The quartos were
dissected, and each bifolium is now mounted hermetically within a card-
board frame. I must confess: in my visit in March 2019, it was a rather sad
sight to behold, considering its august biography. The measurements of
Codex Bobiensis from Wordsworth, Cipolla, and others prior to its demise
as a codex are fairly uniform, but my recent measurements were roughly an
inch less on the height and an inch less on the breadth. The current shape of
each page is not uniform. I infer that some portion of the vellum pages may
have been removed in the process of de-codifying Codex Bobiensis, though
I do not know with certainty how to explain the discrepancy. It is also
possible that heat has caused the parchment to shrivel and contract. Since
the 1904 fire and the codex’s “restoration,” few scholars have given much
attention to what remains the oldest Old Latin gospel manuscript and the
oldest strand of African gospel tradition.
When Codex Bobiensis is discussed, its significance is almost invariably
reduced to its role as a witness to the shorter ending without longer ending
of According to Mark, which no one takes as original anyway, so it has been
taken as an ignorable manuscript. It has been left to sit in relative obscurity
on the metal shelves of the inner sanctum of the Sala Manoscritti e Rari in
Turin. To my shock, when I visited Codex Bobiensis, the whole of the first
quarto (fols. 1–8) was nowhere to be found. The curators told me during my
visit in March 2019 that it had been destroyed in the 1904 fire and was now
gone, though this seemed suspicious to me, since Cipolla’s facsimile images
dated after 1904. In January 2020, however, I was subsequently informed,
when I formally requested permission to publish my images of Codex
Bobiensis, that – happily – the first quarto (fols. 1–8) had been found; it had
simply been “in restoration” for years, but was now re(dis)covered.67 The
curators were kind enough to share the images of the restored pages with
me. The opening title is damaged badly and not legible but does appear to
resemble CATA MATTH more than CATA MARC, thereby suggesting
that Tischendorf and Turner were correct, while the place where we might
suspect a comparable red ink mark is completely damaged and thus pro-
vides an absence of evidence, though not an evidence of absence. To be
clear, though, fols. 1–8 are badly damaged and none of this is as clear as I
would wish. The last scholar to visit Codex Bobiensis (to my knowledge)
was Parker in 1989, who then called for new casing, as the cardboard
mounts were tired, and the folios were out of order.68 Thirty-one years later,
nothing has happened, save the continued inattention of the now mis-
leadingly named Codex Bobiensis, which is wrong on both accounts.
In conclusion, I paraphrase the prophet Ezekiel, “Can this damp vellum
live?” Can we imagine the possible resurrection of Codex Bobiensis in early
Christian gospel studies and in manuscript studies more generally? Only, I
67 Personal correspondence with Fabio Uliana of the Turin National University Library on
January 7, 2020.
68 Parker, “Unequally Yoked” (see n. 6), 587.
will suggest, if we continue the turn from a commitment to a lost, abstracted

reconstruction of the “original text” of the gospels to an attentiveness to the
vibrant matter of material gospel manuscript tradition.69 In such a shift of
perspective, manuscripts like Codex Bobiensis have much yet to offer.
What I have provided here is a model, a real-and-imagined cultural object
biography, for how to talk about such artifacts. Gospel manuscripts do
more than witness to the “original” text of a version of the gospel. They tell
us more than just what their initial creating or reading communities
thought. If we attend to their whole “biography,” we can tell a different kind
of history. Codex Bobiensis, in this frame, tells us a rich, almost “Forrest
Gump-like” micro-history not only of late antique Christianity, but also of
Christianity in the West through the lens of one fascinating gospel artifact.
Matthew D.C. Larsen

University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Princeton University (USA)
orcid.org/0000-0002-5251-6274
69 On the phrase “vibrant matter,” see J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of
Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

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Dies ist urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material. Bereitgestellt von: Jonathan Poletti, 18.03.

Matthew D.C. Larsen

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel

1 Introduction: A “Real-and-Imagined” Object Biography

This is a biography of a strange and overlooked object. It goes by many

Early Christianity 12 (2021), 103–131 DOI 10.1628/ec-2021-0009

104 Matthew D.C. Larsen

neither.2 Constantine von Tischendorf named it k.3 The Vetus Latina

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 105

Another way to understand this methodological approach would be to

2 The Real-and-Imagined Biography of Codex Bobiensis

106 Matthew D.C. Larsen

Willem Hoogterp argued, based on a study of the language of the manu-

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 107

108 Matthew D.C. Larsen

For reasons I will explain in due course, it is difficult to determine the

20 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xi.

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 109

Fig. 2: Title Page of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)

According to Mark, followed by the first half of According to Matthew,

110 Matthew D.C. Larsen

Fig. 3: Recto of fol. 41 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)

manuscripts offer multiple endings, with paratextual notes guiding the

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 111

How far these words go back in Codex Bobiensis’s manuscript lineage in

112 Matthew D.C. Larsen

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 113

Fig. 5: Verso of fol. 38 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)

ad quid me maledixisti [hand of corrector changes to: dereliquisti] (“And he

27 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), cxxx.

114 Matthew D.C. Larsen

Fig. 6: Recto of fol. 81 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)

(initially, and later forsaking) Jesus, at least in his perception, as he is

29 C. Cipolla, Il codice evangelico k della Biblioteca Universitaria Nazionale di Torino (Turin:

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 115

Fig. 7: Recto of fol. 42 of Codex Bobiensis (photo: M. Larsen)

116 Matthew D.C. Larsen

Fig. 8: Cross section of the baptistry in Djémila (Zamani Project.org)

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 117

Fig. 9: Layout of the baptistry in Djémila (Zamani Project.org)

To answer this question, I would like to turn to the material remains of a

118 Matthew D.C. Larsen

Fig. 10: Entrance to the baptistry in Djémila (photo: M. Larsen)

Catechumens walked into a baptismal font in which they were literally

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 119

Fig. 11: Floor of the baptismal font in Djémila (photo: M. Larsen)

120 Matthew D.C. Larsen

34 Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 40, 67; Clement of Alexandria, Protr. 11.

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 121

122 Matthew D.C. Larsen

40 See, for instance, fols. 26r, 32r, 33r, and 44r.

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 123

Bobiensis in the 1840s to prepare his edition of the manuscript, he recorded

124 Matthew D.C. Larsen

hen”).46 I think it would be far too coincidental to be a mistake. It would

46 Tischendorf, “Bobbienser Evangelienfragmente” (see n. 41), 47 n. 1.

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 125

126 Matthew D.C. Larsen

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 127

59 Wordsworth, Portions (see n. 3), xiv. See bibliography in n. 48 above.

128 Matthew D.C. Larsen

something he confesses he failed to do before he left town.62 One mishnah

The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript 129