Codex Bobiensis (k)

Reflection

Codex Bobiensis — designated k in the Old Latin apparatus, catalogued as Vetus Latina 1 — is the most important surviving witness to the African Old Latin Gospel tradition, the Latin translation that circulated in North Africa before Jerome's Vulgate of the late fourth century displaced it across the Western church. The codex preserves Mark 8 through 16 and fragments of Matthew 1 through 15 on ninety-six vellum folios, written in a late Roman uncial that paleographers date to the fourth century. The exemplar from which it was copied is earlier — Bruce Metzger placed the underlying African Latin translation in the second century, drawing on the citations of Cyprian of Carthage and the African martyrology tradition. Bobiensis carries the unique Latin shorter ending of Mark, an alternative closing to Mark 16:8 that appears nowhere else in the manuscript tradition and provides crucial evidence for the early diversity of endings attached to the Second Gospel. The text reached the Irish-founded monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy in the early medieval period, where it was preserved until its transfer to the royal library at Turin in the eighteenth century. Bonifatius Fischer and David Parker have used Bobiensis to reconstruct the textual character of African Latin Christianity in the age of Tertullian and Cyprian — a tradition that preceded the Greek New Testament's full standardization in the West.

Sources: Bonifatius Fischer, Beiträge zur Geschichte der lateinischen Bibeltexte (Herder, 1986); Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford, 1977); David C. Parker, Codex Bezae: An Early Christian Manuscript and Its Text (Cambridge, 1992).