Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Pauline Epistles

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

This manuscript is a bilingual copy of the Pauline Epistles, with parallel text in Greek and Latin, probably produced in the 9th century in the Carolingian Empire. It is known as the Codex Augiensis due to its former ownership by the monastery of Augia Major on the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance.The text is written in two columns, the Greek appearing on the inner side of the page and the Latin on the outer. Its date and place of origin have been identified on the basis of the Carolingian minuscule style of its script, while the Greek text is written in majuscule script of a western European type. The scribe has separated the words of the Greek text, rather than writing them continuously as in early Greek majuscule manuscripts, and has unusually emphasised the word divisions by placing middle points between each word. Reflecting the scribe's limited familiarity with Greek, single words have frequently been erroneously divided. Such errors have subsequently been corrected by erasing the dividing point and using a curved hyphen below the line to link the parts of the word (e.g. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(2);return false;'>f. 7r, col. a, lines 25-26</a>, "δικαιοσύνης").The opening folios, containing part of the Epistle to the Romans, have been lost. There are other lacunas in the Greek text, where a gap has been left, indicating that this text was apparently missing from the exemplar from which the manuscript was copied. The Latin text is complete at these points. For the same reason of incompleteness in the exemplar, the Greek text of the penultimate epistle, the Letter to Philemon, ends imperfectly (<a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(127);return false;'>f. 131r</a>). The final Epistle to the Hebrews is written in Latin only.Unlike the other letters, Hebrews is provided with a prefatory text, excerpted from the commentary on the epistle by Rabanus Maurus (c. 784-856), Archbishop of Mainz. It is also followed by another text excerpted from the works of the same author, comments by an abbot which he had drawn on in his treatise on penance and added to the end of that text as an appendix. Its intended relevance here is unclear.The text is closely related to that of the Codex Boernerianus (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/134296/1'>Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB), MS A.145b</a>), which contains identical lacunae (excepting that caused by the mutilation of the beginning of Augienses), but in its case applying to the Latin text as well as the Greek. Each have in the past been supposed to be a copy of the other, but the present consensus is that both are derived directly or indirectly from the same source manuscript, whose losses account for the lacunae. Evidently the copyist of Augiensis, or of an intermediate exemplar, supplied the missing Latin text from another source, while Boernerianus received only the text present in the principal exemplar.The manuscript retains a 15th-century binding, added during or prior to its time at Augia Major.Dr Christopher Wright