This short note addresses a number of problems in a recent article by Philip Payne, published in this journal.Footnote ¹ My conclusion is that Payne's views are almost entirely to be rejected. His recent article is actually the latest instalment in a series of at least six contributions, the earliest of which dates from 1995 and already mentions the ‘bar-umlauts’ Payne now calls ‘distigme-obelos’.Footnote ²

Payne's main contribution to research on Codex Vaticanus is to draw attention to the frequent occurrence of two combined dots in the margins of the manuscript. These dots are, if the now-current convention is followed, called ‘distigme’ (singular). There are hundreds of such ‘distigmai’ (plural) in the New Testament part of the manuscript. Payne further advanced the hypothesis that the distigmai signal places of textual variation: the person who put a distigme next to a line did so in order to mark it as a place where a variant reading was known to him or her.

Here the problems begin. Though the hypothesis, first advanced in 1997, has found wide acceptance, it should be stressed that methodological control is difficult to achieve here. The margins of the New Testament part of Vaticanus do contain the distigmai, but never together with a variant reading. The suggestions current-day scholars can offer for identifying specific readings remain speculative. For this reason it would be extremely unwise to follow Payne's suggestion to attach in a critical apparatus a notation such as B^.. to specific variants.Footnote ³ Because of their enormous number it is often not difficult to list at least some variant reading at any given location.Footnote ⁴ Still, there are numerous places without a satisfactory candidate for the reading that might be hinted at by a given distigme.Footnote ⁵ Payne explains away this difficulty by assuming that variants unknown today have to be at stake, but this solution is just an expression of embarrassment.Footnote ⁶

The communicative value of the distigmai is an important issue as well. They signal something, but for whom? Since only the signs are there, who would be able to decipher them? And what purpose do they serve? An obvious possibility is that their meaning is comparable to signs such as the exclamation marks and triangles that some modern readers write in the margins of the books they – hopefully – own. In this scenario the markings may not have been intended to convey anything beyond personal notes or reminders, and their interpretation is not the reconstruction of a lost collection of once-shared knowledge, which is difficult enough, but the even more difficult cracking of a code intended to make sense to one individual only. The latter would be a nearly impossible task.

The situation is even more complicated, for so far an element has been taken for granted that is by no means obvious, namely the unity of the distigmai as a set.Footnote ⁷ Are they from a single person, or group, and from a single brief period in time? It seems at least possible that the inverse is true, and that various persons entered distigmai in the long history of the manuscript. In that case, the problems involved in the interpretation, or decoding, of the distigmai would only be compounded.

Related to these questions is the problem of dating. Essential to Payne's argumentation is an early date for the distigmai, even contemporary with the production of Vaticanus itself. He maintains that they – or at least most of them – were entered by the original scribe. However, his demonstration of this antiquity is not conclusive. Its main pillar is similarity in ink colour, described as ‘apricot’. In reality the dots show various colours, and are so small that conclusions cannot be certain.Footnote ⁸ Having seen the manuscript itself and not only the expensive facsimile or the high-quality online images does not alter this fact.

Neither does the occurrence of distigmai in another manuscript from the fifth century constitute proof of their antiquity, for two reasons: in LXX G, the manuscript to which Payne refers, the signs may be more recent as well, and even if it could be shown that they are early there, such a datum would only imply that distigmai can be early, not that they invariably are.Footnote ⁹

Payne's most recent NTS article gets more specific, by including the so-called paragraphoi of Vaticanus in his discussion. In the manuscript, as in many others, some sort of section division is found, in two ways: (1) by means of spacing in an otherwise continuously written text; (2) by means of paragraphoi, small bar-shaped markings below (part of) the first letter of a line extruding into the left margin of the column. To judge by their nature, spacing is introduced by the original scribe, whereas in Vaticanus the paragraphoi seem to be later. Payne now moves to a special set of markings created by him, namely instances where a distigme at the left of a column coincides with such a paragraphos. Such occurrences in a text with numerous distigmai and numerous paragraphoi are to be expected, and their total number of about thirty is well within the range of statistical probability. Payne would not deny this, but he still singles out a set of eight of these coincidences and christens them ‘distigme-obelos symbols’.Footnote ¹⁰ For these places, and for these places alone, he takes what everyone would regard as a paragraphos, and reinterprets it as a so-called obelos, that is, a mark that signals words or lines for omission.

As an aside, it should be mentioned that more than a sixth of the distigmai are found not at the left but at the right of the text column. This is typically the case for those distigmai attached to the rightmost column of right-hand pages, or, in other words, to the sixth column of the manuscript's openings. Payne now only considers cases where paragraphos and distigme are physically close, that is, when the distigme is found at the left of the column. This observation alone points to a degree of arbitrariness in Payne's selection.Footnote ¹¹

In any case the term ‘distigme-obelos’ should be abandoned as soon as possible, for it denotes a text-critical marking that does not exist but is only the fruit of Payne's imagination. His argumentation at this point is highly problematic. To begin with, the function of the obelos at these places would only be additional, since most of the eight paragraphoi singled out by him occur at places where there is also a space in the text, which then as often is reinforced by a paragraphos. Further, there is no clue for concluding that a paragraphos doubles as an obelos.Footnote ¹²

Surely, Payne thinks he has found such a clue in what he regards as significant differences in length of the horizontal strokes, but here all sorts of alarm bells should go off since we are talking only fractions of millimetres in a text that is handwritten. The assumption of a conscious, consistent and recognisable system in such naturally variable phenomena ought to be a non-starter. Indeed, on closer inspection the differences turn out to be insignificant. And that is even if one overlooks another basic error. Payne applies his measurements only to the small set where paragraphoi and distigmai go together, but if these combinations are coincidental to begin with – which he assumes as well for at least most of these – then not only the variations in length of the paragraphoi that happen to be accompanied by a distigme should have been taken into account, but those of all. In this far larger set the lengths of the paragraphoi vary considerably, even beyond the range Payne finds for his small subset, and as a matter of course this variation carries no meaning at all.Footnote ¹³

Problems also beset Payne's interpretation of the presumed obeloi, and his dealing with 1 Cor 14.34–5, the text that matters most to him. In the other seven places the presumed obelos would have an unusual meaning, namely to signal the presence not of an omission but of an addition in some other manuscript. And even here his listing of the possibilities is not convincing. At Mark 5.40 (1284 C 12) he gives αὐτὸς δὲ Ἰησοῦς as an addition after κατεγέλων αὐτοῦ in f ¹ etc., but in those manuscripts αὐτὸς δὲ Ἰησοῦς actually substitutes the following αὐτὸς δέ.Footnote ¹⁴

Only in 1 Cor 14, then, would the presumed obelos have its usual meaning of marking a portion of the text as absent elsewhere. Such a lack of methodological control is astonishing. One cannot build a pattern on seven instances with an inverted meaning and one with the common one, especially if the last instance is the entire point of the demonstration. To make matters worse, the distigme in 1 Cor 14 is actually one line too high, namely next to the last words of v. 33. The paragraphos here shows the break between τῶν ἁγίων and αἱ γυναῖκες, which moreover coincides with a colon.

There actually exists a plausible interpretation of this particular distigme, unrelated to the paragraphos and to the following verses. Whereas the common Greek text is ὡς ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τῶν ἁγίων, some Greek manuscripts (F G etc.) have an additional διδάσκω.Footnote ¹⁵ The distigme here could just be a personal reminder by someone who compared the Greek text of Codex Vaticanus with a manuscript such as F 10 and had found this additional διδάσκω (‘in my view’). If so, it is only related to the end of the line and thus the end of 1 Cor 14.33.

This short note has not been written in order to refute or disparage the case that the mulier taceat passage in 1 Cor 14 might be an interpolation. That discussion has its own scholarly merits and weight. My purpose here has been more limited: Payne aims to construe objective external evidence for the existence of manuscripts now lost that did not contain 1 Cor 14.34–5. As shown, this effort fails in the case of Vaticanus. His argumentative steps and results should be rejected.Footnote ¹⁶ A category of text-critical markings such as ‘distigme-obelos’ does not exist.

In the case of Codex Vaticanus Payne has been on a combination of a right track and a wrong track from the beginning. He seems to be correct on the text-critical status of the distigmai, even though their date and the identification of variant readings are clouded in uncertainty, but he is consistently led astray by his interpretation of the coincidental combination of distigme and paragraphos.