Subject: Where did the uncials go?

From: Timothy John Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 00:16:54 +0800 (WST)

Warning: this is a long post.

It's a strange thing that Robert Waltz brought up the question of where
the 8th century uncials went when he did. Last week I was looking at the
distribution by date of the pre-1000 AD MSS of Hebrews and was struck by
the hole in the 6th to 8th centuries. 

The following is derived from NA27 appendix 1, where cent. = century, n = 
total no. of mss dated to that century; nc = no. of (relatively) complete 
mss that seem to have survived unmolested; nm = no. of mss made of 
multiple fragments including palimpsests and mss with sizable continuous 
sections; and ns = no. of mss comprised of single fragments. The multiple 
fragments category is meant to include mss that do seem to have suffered 
bad treatment.

The age distribution of the papyrus mss of Hebrews is then:

cent.	n	nc	nm	ns

0	0	0	0	0
1	0	0	0	0
2	1	1	0	0
3	2	0	1	1
4	2	0	0	2
5	0	0	0	0
6	0	0	0	0
7	1	0	0	1
8	0	0	0	0
9	0	0	0	0
10	0	0	0	0

and the age distribution for the uncials (excluding 0280 which I donÕt 
have data for) is:

cent.	n	nc	nm	ns

0	0	0	0	0
1	0	0	0	0
2	0	0	0	0
3	0	0	0	0
4	3	2	0	1
5	6	2	2	2
6	3	1	2	0
7	0	0	0	0
8	0	0	0	0
9	8	5	3	0
10	4	3	1	0

Apart from an anomalous 7th century papyrus, there seem to be two 
extinctions: the first is of the papyri from the fifth century on, and 
the second is of the uncials during the 7th and 8th centuries. (The 
anomalous papyrus is p79. Having looked at it, I am surprised that anyone 
managed to identify it, let alone date it.)

The disappearance of the papyri can be explained as being due to the 
increasing popularity of parchment as a writing material. But the clear 
gap in the uncials for the 7th and 8th centuries requires a different 
explanation.

It may be that this is evidence of the Moslem conquest around 640 of 
Palestine and Egypt which, until then, had probably been primary ms 
production regions. However the survival of the uncials predating 640 
must be accounted for. The following leans heavily on speculation and 
hearsay. Nevertheless I beg your indulgence.

Ignoring single fragments, these older uncials are 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, 
015, 016, 048 and 0285. Assuming they were in Palestine or Egypt around 
640, how did they survive? 01 survived by finding its way to St. 
CatherineÕs Monastery, as did 0285. 02 survived through being adopted by 
the Patriarchate at Alexandria. 03 somehow escaped to Constantinople, 
possibly from the same place as 01 (Caesarea?), and ended up in the 
Vatican after Constantinople fell in 1453. 04 was washed and used for 
EphraimÕs sermons in minuscule script (more on this later). 048 was also 
washed and used for something else. I donÕt know the history of 06, but 
to survive it would most likely have found refuge in a safer 
north-westerly location or protection in a tolerated Christian 
community within the Islamic sphere. 015 made it to Athos but was 
seriously injured, while 016 hid in the sands of Egypt.

A mass extinction of Palestinian and Egyptian mss is a possible 
explanation for the ascendancy of the Byzantine text. The Palestinian and 
Egyptian copying workshops had been shut down, leaving only Byzantium to 
make copies of the text that had developed there. (Here I have made the 
postulate that refugees like 03 did not have the same status as 
Byzantines when it came to being exemplars. I have no evidence for this, 
except that there probably would have been more Byzantines than refugees. 
In fact mss like 1739 may well be descendants of refugees. Also, 
conformation of mss to the Byzantine text as found in the 7th century 
corrector of Sinaiticus, indicates a Byzantine standardisation in process 
at this very time.)

Now to explain the 200 year gap in uncials extending even to Byzantium. 
Perhaps Byzantium had never been a major copying centre but was forced to 
become one by the sudden Moslem conquest of the traditional centres. 
Accordingly the number of uncials would start at a low number and 
increase from the time of the conquest, which is what we see above. 
Perhaps the minuscule innovation was so complete that all of the older 
uncials were disdained as things of the past and used to heat ovens (cf. 
the wonderful story of TischendorfÕs discovery of Sinaiticus). The new 
writing style made for faster, more compact copying. Like slide rules and 
digital calculators, the old were neglected once the new arrived.

A weakness in the foregoing theory is that uncials exist after the 200 
year gap. In defence I note that many of the 9th and 10th C. mss are a 
mixture of uncial and minuscule writing. Others have the angular 
(Slavonic) type uncial script of regions further removed from the Moslem 
frontier.

As a final observation, it occurred to me today that there is a 
similarity between minuscule and Arabic script. Perhaps the cursive 
concept was borrowed from the Moslems. One possible advantage would be 
that minuscule mss would look more like Arabic mss, and so promote their 
survival in hostile environments.

Tim Finney

Baptist Theological College
and Murdoch University
Perth, W. Australia