Hill—Irenaeus, the Scribes, and the Scriptures 129these scribes initiated a practice which, while it never achieved the universal usage of
the nomina sacra, was continued in parts of the Christian scribal tradition. We might
say it is perpetuated today in our present critical editions of the New Testament by
italicizing the Old Testament citations in the Nestle-Aland text and by putting them in
bold type in the UBS text.
The quotation diplai in P.Oxy. 405 also “point” us to what seems an untapped
source of information about scribal practices and beliefs. Every layer of scribal activity
provides another opportunity for mistakes, and this one is no exception. We have seen
inadvertent non-dipling, perhaps inadvertent or ill-advised dipling, and erroneous
marking of the sources (ΗΣΑΙΟΥ where we should have had ΜΙΧΑΙΟΥ in Sinaiticus,
q. 74, f. 1v).
In manuscripts in which they are used, quotation diplai can provide an avenue of
access to the scribe’s, or the scribe’s community’s, conception of canon. That is, the
scribe, or someone instructing the scribe, has to decide which quotations to mark
and which not to mark. We have noted the treatments of 1 Enoch in Vaticanus and
Alexandrinus. Another example is the citation of an unknown prophetic writing in 1
Clement 23.3, “Far from us be that which is written, ‘Wretched are they who are of a
double mind, and of a doubting heart; who say, These things we have heard even in the
times of our fathers; but, behold, we have grown old, and none of them has happened
unto us.’” The scribe of Alexandrinus does not mark this text with diplai, even though
Scriptural texts are marked in the same context. The presence of the diplai in P.Oxy.
405 (as well as in P.Mich. 764 mentioned above), if they may be assumed to function
like all other diplai in early Christian writings, are thus significant evidence against the
thesis espoused by some that no ideas of canonicity existed among Christians before
the fourth century.
The marking of scriptural quotations in some manuscripts also provides one more
way of linking certain manuscripts to others and thus can also help us with the trans-
mission history of documents and with textual criticism. For instance, in Codex Alex-
andrinus it seems we can say that this scribal activity was also a copying activity, and
not the independent, interpretative activity of the individual scribe. We have observed
the irregularities of Alexandrinus in the Gospels, where diplai are used only sparsely,
and sometimes in an unusual form. Since this variance is evidently not due to a change
of scribes, it would seem that it is attributable to a difference in the exemplars used.
Now, it is well known that the Gospel text in Alexandrinus is of a different quality
from the rest of the New Testament. Metzger and Ehrman say of Alexandrinus, “In the
Gospels it is the oldest example of the Byzantine type of text... In the rest of the New
Testament (which may have been copied by the scribe from a different exemplar from
that employed for the text of the Gospels), it ranks along with B and ) as representative
of the Alexandrian type of text.”^78 The varying form and occurrence of dipling provides
an independent conclusion that confirms the hypothesis based on textual complexion
that different exemplars were used by the scribes. That is, the “Byzantine” exemplar(s)
for the Gospels did not contain diplai (at least not consistently) but the “Alexandrian”
exemplar(s) for Acts, Paul, and the Catholic Epistles and 1 Clement (Revelation con-
tains no Old Testament quotations) did contain them. The evidence of the diplai also