The Sinope Gospels (Codex Sinopensis)

Reflection

The Sinope Gospels — Codex Sinopensis, designated O in the New Testament apparatus — is a sixth-century purple Gospel codex now reduced to forty-three folios from Matthew, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The manuscript was acquired at Sinope on the Black Sea in 1899 by a French naval officer and entered the Paris collection the same year. Like its more famous sister, the Rossano Gospels, the Sinopensis is written in gold uncials on purple-dyed vellum — the imperial luxury medium reserved for ceremonial display copies. The Sinope manuscript preserves five surviving miniatures including the Feeding of the Four Thousand and the Healing of the Two Blind Men of Jericho, each framed beneath the relevant Gospel text and accompanied by Old Testament prophetic figures in the same typological pairing seen in Rossano. John Lowden and Kurt Weitzmann argued that Sinopensis and Rossanensis belonged to the same workshop tradition — perhaps a Syrian or eastern Anatolian scriptorium producing imperial codices for export across the Byzantine east. The text type is Byzantine, in close agreement with the bulk of the medieval tradition. Sinopensis demonstrates that the luxury purple codex was not a single isolated production but a recognized genre of late antique Christian book art, of which only a handful survives.

Sources: Kurt Weitzmann, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (Braziller, 1977); John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Phaidon, 1997); Henri Omont, Notice sur un très ancien manuscrit grec en onciales des Évangiles (Bibliothèque nationale, 1900).