To discover the date when any ancient diagram or text was originally written, one starts by analysing the existing manuscript copies. This often allows one to construct a hypothesis about the history of the copying process. This hypothesis can be tested, and sometimes enhanced, by seeing if it is consistent with external historical data.
At each step along the way, one tries to push back the dating by proposing a terminus ante quem, the last possible point in time which the item of evidence under consideration would allow as a date of origin. This recent-first, earliest-last order will be employed in the discussion that follows.
Physical: The first such terminus ante quem is the date at which our oldest extant manuscript was penned. The Morgan Beatus, now kept in New York, is an artefact that was certainly made before the year 945, according to specialists including art historians who have written about that codex as a whole. It contains a 14-page version of the Great Stemma which resembles the other 18 extant copies in most key points. Another copy, no longer extant, was created in 943 [*]Klapisch-Zuber, 63..
Incorporation: Wilhelm Neuss (and Sanders) were among the first scholars who attempted to date the genealogy-of-Christ content in the Beatus codices [*] Jerome and Isidore are named in the decorative dedication to the Beatus Commentary, since they were among the patristic sources read by Beatus. But they are certainly not sources for the Great Stemma, and mention of them there should not mislead us into thinking that they are connected in any way to the other front matter in Beatus.. Neuss was presciently certain that the stemma could never have been the creation of Beatus the monk, but he assumed that it was an external resource that was incorporated into the Apocalypse Commentary under the editorial authority of Beatus himself in 786. [*]Zaluska does not represent the Neuss argument entirely accurately when she suggests he is speaking of the writing of the genealogy, rather than its incorporation in the Beatus codices.. The Neuss argument that Beatus himself, and not a later copyist, was responsible for the incorporation was later cogently attacked, although it cannot entirely be ruled out.
Scribal identity: Justo, a notary and scribe who died in 772, unwittingly copied a fragment of the Great Stemma when he commenced a copy of the Four Gospels which was later to be bound into the Codex Ovetense. Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela (1906-1962) noticed this clue [*]Ayuso Marazuela, 1943, 161: Justo's Gospel text began, Sicut Luchas evangelista..., a text found on the last page of the Great Stemma. The Gospels could be dated because Justo entered his name in a closing prayer at the end, and a later hand added the precise date of Justo's death. Unfortunately these pages of the codex are now lost and we must trust intermediary scholars on this matter.. He suggests that Justo's prototype may have been a badly damaged old bible which had had a Great Stemma frontispiece where everything except the 14th and last page had been torn out and lost by the time it came into Justo's hands.
Anthropology: Some manuscripts of the Great Stemma contain anthropological characterizations that are clearly related to the conflict that began with the Umayyad Islamic invasion of Visigothic Iberia in 711. These characterizations vary so much among the different recensions that it would be hard to argue they are not additions by later editors. In the Roda Codex, for example, Magog is described as the ancestor of the Moors (a quo leviunde est mauritunie filiibus futh dicitur / de isto natus mauri) while Gomer is described as ancestor of the Goths (de isto natus gothi). It is plausible to suppose that these glosses reflected contemporary beliefs when the document was edited, rather than deriving from its original authorship.
Overburden: The manuscripts we have today contain various accretions which have been layered onto the Great Stemma in the course of its transmission, including the anthropological observations noted above. A notable accretion is the Ordo Annorum, a text setting out the number of years from the Creation of the World up to the present moment at the time of writing, which was shortly after the year 672 AD in Visigothic Spain. [*]Ayuso Marazuela, 1943 is certain that the Ordo Annorum is by an author other than that of the Great Stemma. The Ordo Annorum proposes a chronology of biblical history in disagreement with that offered in the Great Stemma. The Ordo Annorum culminates with a statement that the time span from Christ's Incarnation to the start of the "present" reign of King Wamba (Vambani or Bambani principis) is 672 years.
The early 13th century San Millan Bible reproduces this text on the back of the 14th page of the Great Stemma, while the Plutei manuscript places this text in a band by itself on the final page of the genealogy. Other recensions quote only a single phrase from the Ordo Annorum, stating that Christ was born 5199 years after Adam. [*]Colligitur omnes tempus ab Adam usque ad Christum anni quinque milia CLXXXX novem. We can thus deduce that all our recensions reproduce, at one or two removes, an intermediate and now-lost Iberian Great Stemma manuscript dating from about 680.
Scriptural references: Our principal dating evidence relies on those elements in the unamended versions of the Great Stemma which are drawn from the Latin biblical and apocryphal texts in use before the Latin Vulgate Bible was translated by Jerome. Simplifying, we can take 400 as an approximation of Jerome's "publication date" and assume that the Vulgate came into general use over the following 150 years [*]On the speed at which the new pushed out the old, see Fischer's article, ‘Zur Überlieferung altlateinischer Bibeltexte im Mittelalter’, Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis, 56 (1975), 19.: This would make it highly unlikely that the Great Stemma could have been created after 550 because of its extensive use of features that draw on idiosyncratic Vetus Latina texts and early Christian legends. These elements include:
Peregrinus: Ayuso Marazuela promoted in his writings a hypothesis that a variety of additions to Spanish bibles, including the Great Stemma, might have been drafted by Peregrinus, a shadowy Iberian scholar and theologian who was active about the year 450. Very little is known about Peregrinus other than the fact that he edited a single Priscillianist text, effectively so as to reconcile it with mainstream Catholic belief, and that he is described in the author credit for that text as a bishop. Ayuso's argument that Peregrinus had a hand in various enhancements to Spanish Bibles, including drawing up the Great Stemma, is essentially one by elimination: Ayuso names the known bible scholars of Late Antique Iberia, and by ruling each one out arrives at Peregrinus as the only possible author remaining. Although his scholarly account of the issue is illuminating, the argument is not a very convincing and lacks evidence. In terms that seem usually vituperative for an exchange among two eminent Catholic priests, Bonifatius Fischer (1915-1997) assailed Ayuso's attribution of the bible edits to Peregrinus as "absurd." [*]Zaluska 1, 241 summarizes the debate. Ayuso Marazuela asserted that Peregrinus worked from a copy of the Liber Genealogus in the 5th century, drawing up what was essentially a new recension of it in graphic form..
Influences: While we can discount the specifics of the Peregrinus hypothesis, its general direction is persuasive. Certain anomalies in the Great Stemma offer clues to the mindset of its author and the range of books he had access to, and could thus at least offer hints about the environment and date and when he worked, even if his identity is unlikely to be ever established.
There is a broad similarity between the Great Stemma and the Origo humani generis, a work which Monceaux dates to about 397 and which appeared in other recensions over the next 30 years. Its more common title is the Liber Genealogus, which is the title I use here for convenience [*] Monceaux suggests the Origo humani generis was a Latin adaptation of Hippolytus’ world chronicle composed in Gaul or Italy (Monceaux, P. Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne depuis l’origines jusqu’a l’invasion arabe. Paris: 1901-23, vi. 250).. The Liber presents the same information as the Great Stemma, but in text form, and adds curious brief characterizations of the persons mentioned as well as some lengthy analysis. In my collation of the Great Stemma text I have noted the section numbers of matching names and passages in the Liber Genealogus.
Some passages in the Liber and Great Stemma are so similar that it has been suggested the Great Stemma's author must have used the Liber as a source [*]See the passage quoted by Zaluska.. However at the end of the day, we cannot say which of the two works is the younger. The Liber converts the story into elegant Latin, and is more embellished, and it is conceivable that it filled a need for a textual retelling of the Great Stemma. Nor can we exclude the possibility that the authors of the two works may have worked in mutual ignorance, merely drawing from a common fund of Vetus Latina names and Christian legend. The ultimate source of the material is in fact Greek [*]Ayuso makes this point, saying that both the Liber and the Stemma are, at least indirectly, the fruits of Greek rather than Latin learning..
Theology: More study needs to be conducted of the theological standpoint embraced by the Great Stemma's author. Aspects for study include his interest in the mysterious "translation" (to heaven?) of Enoch (perhaps influenced by the apocryphal Book of Enoch) and his partial defence of Lot's drunken incest, as well as his adoption of the Joachimite account of Christ's ancestry. The latter suggests a connection to the patristic period which identified Mary as the "new Eve" and became increasingly radical in defence of the Virgin Birth.
Metrics: The number of reproduction cycles required to achieve our earliest existing witnesses late in the first millenium of the Christian Era should also be considered. We have seen above one instance in which a copy had seemingly been destroyed by heavy use, neglect or fire when the notary Justo had the remnants in his hands in about 760. Whether they are bound into bibles, Beatuses or chronicles, all the witnesses derive from some single earlier archetype,which itself was clearly defective and was not the document drawn up by the author. One supposes that apart from the author's version, several accurate copies could have been created in a first cycle of reproduction. In a second cycle, at least one faulty reproduction was made. By the time a third cycle of reproduction began, the original, the first-cycle versions and all but one of the second-cycle versions must have been unavailable for some reason, since all 19 versions in existence today draw on the single faulty reproduction.
The key fault in this lost intermediate archetype, the muddling of the Southern Kingdom royal wives, is discussed on a separate page of this website. There are other evident errors such as the omission of any roundel for Rehoboam (1Ki 11:43), an oversight which is inconsistent with the obvious care throughout the document to give every male person a roundel of his own.
The layout of the stemma itself strongly suggests that the original— and probably any direct copies from the author's manuscript— was not a document cut into sections and spread over several pages of a book, as we see it today, but drafted as a single large chart. If so, that chart is less likely to have been drawn on parchment (which must be stitched together to make big sheets and tends to be impracticable as a scrolls material) and is more likely to have been penned on papryus (which is easier to manufacture in large sheets).
The evident disappearance of the early models by the time that the 10th-century copies were made could be explained by the fact that scrolls of papyrus are physically vulnerable and do not age well. The high degree of corruption in the surviving 9th and 10th century orthography also implies transcription from very aged models containing damaged, faded or unfamiliar script.
All of these factors suggest a timespan in the order of centuries between the original authorship and the scribal copying that took place in 943 or 945.
[to be continued]
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