What does it look like?

It’s a large codex made up of over eight hundred pages of parchment, now divided into two volumes. Its cover, made of leather and wood, is modern but the pages it contains are ancient. They contain an extremely early handwritten copy of the four gospels, along with the Acts of the Apostles and one of John’s epistles.

The biblical texts are written in both Latin and Greek, on facing pages, interestingly, the same scribe wrote both texts. Although some pages are missing and others are damaged, the manuscript is extremely well preserved and still legible more than 1500 years after it was written.

Who, what and where?

We don’t know who copied the manuscript or where. The original books of the New Testament were written in Greek between roughly 50 and 90CE.  Latin translations of the gospels played an extremely important role in the spread of Christianity across Western Europe. This book demonstrates that there was a clear interest in studying and reading the Greek text of the gospels alongside the Latin at this time.

Monasteries and other religious communities copied and preserved manuscripts as their most important treasures. We know that this manuscript was kept in a monastery in Lyon in southern France from the ninth century until the sixteenth. It then passed into the hands of the Protestant reformer Theodore Beza (1519-1605), a friend of John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, who gave it to the University of Cambridge for safekeeping in 1581. That is why it is called the Codex Bezae.

The Codex Bezae contains the gospels and some other parts of the New Testament, which are familiar from modern bibles. We know that the manuscript was read and used throughout its life. In certain places the text has been corrected and annotated by later readers. There’s evidence on its pages of ancient repairs and of nineteenth-century attempts to restore faded words using chemicals.

In 1550, the French scholar and printer Robert Estienne created the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament, that is, an edition made by comparing the versions of the text in the oldest manuscripts he could find – and the oldest of them all was the Codex Bezae.

Why is it significant to the study of religion?

Although there are hundreds of manuscripts containing New Testament texts from the first five or six centuries of Christianity, none are originals, meaning they were not written by the authors themselves, and most of those that have survived only consist of a page or a fragment of a page.

As an almost complete copy of the gospels, Codex Bezae is an extremely important source – or what texual scholars call a witness. Since all manuscripts were written by hand, they are all unique and contain errors that creep in during the copying process. The aim of textual criticism, (studying and analysing texts), is to understand the context in which each manuscript was produced and its relationship to other manuscripts. Ultimately, the aim is to get as close as possible to reconstructing the original texts of the gospels and epistles.