Fourteen years ago, on this blog, I summarized co-blogger Peter Head's paper at the SBL in New Orleans in 2009: ”The Marginalia of Codex Vaticanus: Putting the Distigmai (Formerly
known as 'Umlauts') in Their Place" in two blogposts here and here in which he basically argued that
the double dots now known as distigmai, marking textual variation in
Codex Vaticanus, belong to one unified system that was added some time
in the 16th century contra Philip Payne, who discovered these distigmai
in the first place and had published several articles since 1995 arguing that they, or most of them, are are original to the scribe working in the 4th century.
Right after the publication of my summaries on the blog Philip Payne contacted me and asked if he could post a full response on this blog, to which I and Peter Head agreed. That rather long response was published in five parts but then made available in full here. The main pillar of Payne's theory was that a group of approximately 50 (now 54) had the same ink colour described as "apricot," which had not been reinked – most scholars had assumed that the reinking of the codex took place in the 10-11th century. So the "chocolat"-colored distigmai were presumably reinked but the apricot-colored distigmai proved that these signs were from the fourth century.
Already in 1995 – fourteen years before Head's paper – Payne had noted the distigmai (then "umlauts") in his article "Fuldensis, Sigla for Variants in Vaticanus and 1 Cor 14.34-5, NTS 41 (1995): 240-62, but there he took a step further by arguing that there were not only distigmai (umlauts) but a combination which he called "bar-umlauts," subsequently changed to "distigme-obelos" (distigme in combination with a horizontal bar, which in reality is a paragraphos sign marking out a new paragraph). This argument reached a climax in Payne's article "Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5," NTS 63 (2017): 604–25. I together with many colleagues wondered how this article could have passed peer review at the time. Peter Gurry wrote this blogpost in reaction to the article.
Subsequently, Jan Krans published a response in the same journal, "Paragraphos, Not Obelos, in Codex Vaticanus, in NTS 65 (2019): 252–57. In his article, Krans concludes that the "distigme-obelos" does not exist, and whereas Payne "seems to be correct on the text-critical status of the distigmai . . . their date and the identification of variant readings are clouded in uncertainty."
As of 21 November 2023, there is no longer any cloud of uncertainty regarding the date of the distigmai. On that final day, at the SBL in San Antonio, Ira Rabin of BAM Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing presented her paper "Beyond Chocolate and Apricot: Using Scientific Techniques to Determine the Relationship of the Inks of Codex Vaticanus" followed by the presentation by Nehemia Gordon of École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), on "The Scribes of Codex Vaticanus." These two papers marked a climax of a wonderful conference for those interested in New Testament textual criticism.
In her paper Ira Rabin explained how the application of micro X-ray fluorescence (µXRF) has revolutionized the study of ancient and medieval cultural artifacts, making it possible to examine them using objective criteria. She demonstrated how the application of "such objective scientific measurements to ancient and medieval manuscripts shows how color, hue, and appearance of ink to the human eye can be highly misleading" (cited from the abstract). I do not remember all the details, but there is a highly instructive chapter on this topic (open access) by Rabin, "Material Studies of Historic Inks: Transition from Carbon to Iron-Gall Inks" (2021).
For example, on folio 1390 in column A line 5 there is an omicron on the line which was left unreinked and could be compared to the darker omega above it.
Without going into too many details, the result of the scan gives a fingerprint of the ink in the ratio of copper/iron and zinc/iron. The very surprising result was that the unreinked text had the same fingerprint as the reinked text – the inks were based on a similar (but not identical) recipe. This led Rabin to conclude that the reinking was made already in antiquity, because the original ink had soon begun to degrade (apparently a bad mix). I asked in the Q/A how soon this degrading could have happened and Rabin answered that it could be as soon as after 10 years (!). Rabin had not yet said anything about the distigmai, which added to the drama – could both the "apricot" and the "chocolate"-colored distigmai be dated to the fourth century? Jan Krans, who now had to leave for the airport to catch his flight, and others in the room were getting nervous – and this drama paved the way for Nehemiah Gordon's presentation.
Gordon went through several examples from Payne's publications including an interesting case of Payne's apricot "distigme-obelos" in the left margin at the end of the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6:13 (folio 1241, column B, line 9) which very likely was related to the doxology.
If this "distigme-obelos" went back to the fourth century, there must have been ancient manuscripts that included it (Gordon seemed to be unaware of the fact that versions of the doxology are attested in the Didache, many important Greek minuscules, in the Old Latin, Syriac, Coptic et al., which shows that it is indeed early).
What made this example so interesting was that there is a part of the paragraphos sign which was not reinked so here we can measure at several points, the unreinked and reinked horizontal bar, and the apricot distigme and compare it to the unreinked and reinked main text from another place (like the o/ω above). This test revealed not two but three fingerprints at the crime scene!
Ink 1 (Original ink)
Unreinked main text: Cu 0,12
Unreinked horizontal line: Cu 0.12
Ink 2 (Reinker)
Reinked main text: Cu 0,17
Reinked horizontal line: Cu 0.20
Ink 3 (Apricot Distigme): Cu 0.02 (under 3% is reaching limit of detection)
Then Gordon turned to an example of Payne's "chocoloate distigme+original obelos" (folio 1241 1243, column A, line 12):
Ink 1 (Original ink)
Unreinked main text: Cu 0.10
Unreinked horizontal line: Cu 0.09-010
Ink 2 (Reinker, p. 1244)
Reinked main text: Cu 0.16-0.17
Ink 3 (Chocolate Distigme): Cu 0.00-0.01
In sum, the distigmai, whether apricot or chocolate brown, had the same very distinct fingerprint which showed that they had an ink-composition with far less copper than the unreinked and reinked text and horizontal line. This demonstrated clearly that the "distigme-obelos" has existed only in fantasy, in spite of Payne's hard attempts to show with advanced statistical method that they must exist.
Rabin and Gordon explained that the ink-composition used for the distigmai, original and reinked, could be assigned to the 16th century at the earliest. This speaks in favor of Pietro Versace's proposal, in his masterful examination of the marginalia of Codex Vaticanus, that in the final phase in the 16th century, Arabic numerals were added to mark Vulgate chapters as well as the distigmai to mark out textual variation in the NT. In this connection, Versace also observed that certain marginalia including distigmai occur on (supplement) pages written in minuscule in the 15th century (I Marginalia del Codex Vaticanus [2018]: 8-9). The new analysis of the ink confirms the date of the marginalia but cannot prove that one and the same scribe who added the Vulgate chapters also added the distigmai. However, it is indeed the most economical hypothesis.
The dating of the distigmai to the 16th century further confirms the proposals by Curt Niccum and Peter Head. In his article "The Voice of the Manuscripts on the Silence of Women: The External Evidence for 1 Cor 14.34–5," NTS 43 (1997): 242–55, Curt Niccum had suggested that the distigmai were added in the 16th century by Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (1490-1574) who had access to the codex and in a letter exchange supplied Erasmus with 365 readings to show that these readings agreed with the Vulgate against the TR, and that Erasmus should revise his edition. (As Jan Krans has pointed out to me, Erasmus prefered to go with the pope’s opinion and refused to carry through this revision [– for clarification, see Krans's comment to this blogpost].)
Following Niccum (and Head), James Snapp has more recently suggested that the 365 variations in Vaticanus, should be reread as 765, changing just one roman numeral (CCCLXV → DCCLXV) and thus better matching the actual number of distigmai (see Peter Gurry's blogpost here and Snapp's post here).
To come full circle, we are back to Peter Head's paper from SBL in 2009, in which he presented a comparison of the location of the distigmai with the published text of Erasmus reflecting MSS available in his time and he
had found that in the gospels there was a 92% match between Erasmus
edition and the distigmai. If one included the notes in Erasmus the rate
went up tp 98%! Unfortunately, Head never published this paper. However, as I posted the breaking news from SBL 2023 on Facebook here, Head made just one comment in his characteristic fashion, which I also decided to include in the title of this blogpost:
"When material analysis catches up with common sense."
Epilogue: As we await the full publication of the results by Ira Rabin, Nehemia Gordon and the rest of the team (P. Andrist, P. Vasileiadis, N. Calvillo, O. Hahn), which will actually contain more suprises (implied by the presenters), I sent some follow-up questions and comments to Gordon who had contacted me (I am still waiting for his reply):