Bede and the Codex Amiatinus
The Codex Amiatinus, a pandect or one volume edition of the Latin Bible written by British scribes in 8th century Northumbria, recently returned to Britain after a 1300 year absence to star in the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition. The visit of this historic artefact was remarkable enough in itself. But more remarkable to my mind is the strong possibility that it contains a single word in the hand of the Venerable Bede himself – the great scholar-saint of Anglo-Saxon England.
First, some background. The Codex was a product of the flowering of scholarly and literary culture in Northumbria during the 7th-9th centuries AD. That culture was centred on the monasteries in the northeast, and especially in the twin Benedictine monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Born in 672, Bede, or Beda – the name can be interpreted as the Old English word for bid or “prayer” – was sent at the age of seven to Wearmouth as an oblate, in due course becoming a monk and a priest. When he was about 14 the plague killed everyone in the monastery except Bede and the Abbot, Ceolfrith. These two surviving monks faithfully sang the office until the community was restored.
Bede was an exceptional talent: a scholar, a linguist and a singer. He is best known for The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which tells the story of the colonisation of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, followed by their evangelisation, first by Christian missionaries from Ireland, and later by St Augustine and his monks, sent to Canterbury by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. For a work of this time it is remarkably scholarly, with Bede working diligently from the written sources to be found in the extensive monastic library. He also uses telling anecdotes gathered from the oral tradition. Most moving is the story of King Edwin of Northumbria, considering whether to become a Christian in 625, and the argument put forward by one of his thanes:
“O king, it seems to me that this present life of man on earth, in comparison to that time which is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at table in the winter with your ealdormen and thanes, and a fire was kindled and the hall warmed, while it rained and snowed and stormed outside. A sparrow came in, and swiftly flew through the hall; it came in at one door, and went out at the other. Now during the time when he is inside, he is not touched by the winter’s storms; but that is the twinkling of an eye and the briefest of moments, and at once he comes again from winter into winter. In such a way the life of man appears for a brief moment; what comes before, and what will follow after, we do not know. Therefore if this doctrine offers anything more certain or more fitting, it is right that we follow it.”
Bede worked hard to establish the Anno Domini system of dating from the birth of Christ. He wrote many works of history and biography, but in his own time he was probably best known for his works of exegesis and theology, as well as biblical commentaries. He makes it plain that his primary intention was to teach his students and posterity the thoughts and works of the Church Fathers. And this is where the Codex Amiatinus comes in.
Abbot Ceolfrith had travelled to Rome as a young man, and had brought back to Northumbria numerous works of scholarship, according to Bede, as well as a Latin pandect, but in an old translation. Thirty years later he ordered his scriptorium to produce three new pandects, but, as Bede carefully noted, in the newer Latin Vulgate translation by St Jerome. One copy would go to Wearmouth, one to Jarrow, and the third Abbot Ceolfrith proposed to take himself to Rome to present to the Pope.
Scholars disagreed at this time about the precise translation of part of the tale of Noah’s Ark in Genesis 8. As the waters of the great flood recede, Noah sends out a raven, and then a dove, to test the lay of the land. In the Hebrew original, the dove returns bearing an olive leaf and remains with Noah, but the Greek translation of the Septuagint adds that the dove then flew out again and did not return. The scribe of the Codex Amiatinus has written the then accepted Latin version “qui egrediabatur et revertebatur (“who went out and returned”). However an unknown but definitely non-calligraphic hand has inscribed “NON” above “revertebatur”, to conform with the Greek version.
Who added the critical negative? It must surely have been Bede himself. He was the great scholar of English Christianity, a shining adornment to the monastery, a man of great authority who had taught all the monks who laboured in the scriptorium. Above all, he had recently written a commentary on Genesis in which he had discussed the very point at issue, coming down in favour of the Greek version. And he was a scholar greatly concerned with accuracy. The other two pandects survive only in fragments, but the Codex Amiatinus was intended for the Pope himself, and it is not hard to imagine Bede’s eagle eye fact-checking and proof-reading it on behalf of his Abbot before it left the monastery on its long journey.
In 716 Ceolfrith was 74 years old, a great age for those days. He had decided to set off for Rome for reasons which will remain forever obscure. There was a new Pope and he may have hoped for some preferment. Or he may simply have wished to end his days in the Eternal City, which he had known 40 years earlier. The codex was inscribed, according to an anonymous life of Ceolfrith, “to St Peter from Ceolfrith, abbot of the English, from the furthest reaches of the earth.”
Poor Abbot Ceolfrith never got to Rome, dying on the road at Langres in eastern France. The codex, which would have been in the care of the late abbot’s retinue, then disappeared for centuries from the historical record. Almost certainly Ceolfrith’s sorrowing monks carried it to Rome and presented it to Pope Gregory II. Whatever happened in 716, by 1036 the codex found its way to Italy and was named in a list of relics held at the monastery of San Salvatore, Monte Amiata, Tuscany. There it remained for another 750 years, until the monastery was suppressed in 1782. Shortly afterwards it was given to the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, which, in 2018, lent it to the British Library.
There is much more one could say about the Codex Amiatinus; there is a lengthy discussion of it in Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. It is the oldest surviving complete copy of the Bible in the Latin Vulgate. Its austere but superb lettering in uncial script is an enduring tribute to the scholarship and taste of the 8th-century Northumbrian monks who created it. It is enormous and weighs about 75 pounds. The British Library scored a triumph by persuading the Laurenziana to lend it.
But the Library missed a trick by not displaying the page with that one little word – NON! – which thrillingly connects us to St Bede the Venerable, Doctor of the Church, father of English history and, dare I say, prototypical Geordie. His emendation charmingly demonstrates that nothing of real importance has changed in more than 1300 years.
