Sinaiticus

The first thing to notice about the end of Mark in Sinaiticus (besides noticing that verses 9-20 are absent) is that it is was not
written by the same copyist who produced the surrounding pages. The text of Mark 14:54-Luke 1:56 is written on a "cancel-
sheet," a four-page replacement. The second thing to notice is the remarkable decoration which follows Mk. 16:8. To see the
actual decoration, made with black and red ink, visit the Codex Sinaiticus website. By itself, this decoration does not seem
significant, but if you compare it to the other decorative lines made by this copyist (at the end of the books of Tobit, Judith,
and First Thessalonians - which you can also see at the Codex Sinaiticus website), it is uniquely emphatic.

The format of the text itself in these two columns -- columns 9 and 10 of the four-page (16-column) cancel-sheet at the end of
Mark in Sinaiticus -- is another unusual feature. The average column in Codex Sinaiticus contains about 635 letters. The text
on the cancel-sheet was written compactly, however, from the top of column 4 to the 10th line of column 5, with the result that
column 4 contains 707 letters! If the copyist had continued to write that compactly, the cancel-sheet would have had plenty of
room for Mark 16:9-20. However, the text from 15:19 (which appears in the cancel-sheet at column 5, line 11) onward has
been stretched so as to fill more space than it normally would. Something strange is going on here! Did the copyist begin to
write the cancel-sheet with the intention to include 16:9-20, and then change his mind?

That possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. But probably something else was going on: he wished to fit the text of Luke 1:1-
56 into columns 11-16, and he wished to fit the text of Mark 14:54-16:8 into columns 1-10. He figured that it would be easy to
fit the text from Mark into 10 columns. The challenge would come in Luke, where he would have to drastically compress his
lettering. So, being apprehensive about making a mistake, he began writing the cancel-sheet in column 11. Only after
correctly finishing the text of Luke 1:1-56 so that there was a smooth flow into the text on the following page did he go back
and write the text of Mark 14:54-16:8 in columns 1-10. Having just used compacted lettering to write Luke, he inattentively fell
into the same sort of lettering as he wrote the text of Mark. At 15:19 he realized what he was doing, and he began at that point
to compensate by slightly expanding his lettering, aiming to finish the text of Mark in column 10 so as to not leave a blank
column on the page. This would have worked, but he was so focused on his lettering that he accidentally skipped a large
piece of Mark 15:47-16:1 (as well as the Greek equivalent of the phrase "of Nazareth" in 16:6). With that piece missing, if the
copyist had written normally, 16:8 would have ended in column 9. He salvaged the situation by drastically expanding his
lettering in column 9, so that he had enough text to put the final three lines of 16:8 in column 10. (The same goal -- to make
the text reach column 10 -- explains why the copyist spelled out the name "Jesus" in 16:6 instead of abbreviating it.)

I think that's what happened here. But whether my theory about this is correct or not, it seems obvious that the pages
containing Mark 14:54-Luke 1:56 made by the primary copyist did not contain Mark 16:9-20. The main copyist, had he been
writing Mark 16:9-20 using his normal lettering, would have reached the end of column 10 with 206 letters to go. What about
the Short Ending? It could have fit under Mk. 16:8 in column 10, in the original pages, so this must remain an open question.
However, there is strong evidence that Sinaiticus was made at Caesarea, where Eusebius mentioned copies with the Abrupt
Ending, and copies with 16:9-20, but said nothing about the Short Ending. Also, since the lettering of Luke 1:1-56 is
consistently compressed in the cancel-sheet, the likelihood is that the cancel-sheet was produced because the main copyist
had accidentally omitted a large portion of text (about 336 letters) somewhere in Luke 1:1-56. So, while the cancel-sheet-
maker availed himself of an opportunity to express his opinion about how Mark should end (by drawing the emphatic
decoration after 16:8, not shown in this picture), there is no clear evidence that the main copyist's exemplar was significantly
different than the exemplar used by the maker of the cancel-sheet.

The cancel-sheets in Codex Sinaiticus share some special traits with
the pages of Codex Vaticanus made by one of its copyists. The
lettering, the spelling of proper names, the use of the ">" mark as a
space-filler, and the choice of sacred names to abbreviate are
remarkably similar -- so similar that it seems more plausible to
suppose that a single individual is responsible for the pages in
Vaticanus with these features, and for the pages in Codex Sinaiticus
with these features, than any alternative. Dr. J. K. Elliott has
recently concurred in this assessment. So at this particular point,
Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus not only represent a single
narrow transmission-stream, but the narrowness is reduced to the
judgment of one individual copyist -- possibly Acacius, who was
bishop of Caesarea after Eusebius died in 340. Jerome mentions
that Acacius preserved on parchment the text of papyrus copies
that were decaying. Jerome does not explicitly say that Biblical
texts were involved, but for a bishop they would naturally be a high
priority.

Adding to the feasibility of this theory, the following may be noted:

(1) the opening chapters of John are from a "Western" exemplar,
unlike the rest of the book. This indicates that Sinaiticus was made
from at least one damaged/decayed exemplar.

(2) According to Jerome, Acacius had only one eye, and this may
explain the higher-than-usual rate of parableptic error in the pages
he produced (that is, instances where the copyist skipped lines, or
repeated the same lines).

(3) As bishop of Caesarea, Acacius would have been acquainted
with the Eusebian Canons, and with exemplars that did not contain
them. This may explain why the Eusebian Canons in the margins of
the Gospels in Codex Sinaiticus are imperfectly and incompletely
presented. The text of Codex Sinaiticus includes the interpolation
at Matthew 27:49, and does not include Mark 15:28; neither of
these features is accounted for in the Eusebian Canons. The
realization that the Eusebian Canons did not precisely fit the
Gospels-text of Codex Sinaiticus may have elicited the removal of
the Canon-Tables from the codex in a final stage of its production.

(4) As J. Rendel Harris pointed out in the appendix of his book
"Stichometry" (which can be downloaded at Google Books), the
main copyist of Codex Sinaiticus provided some indications that he
wrote at, or in the vicinity of, Caesarea.