Tags: ‘Pater
Noster’in three Latin manuscripts (Codex Amiatinus,
Codex Sangallensis, Sangermanensis/BNF MS
11553), in the Gutenberg
Bible, in Biblia
Sacra Vulgatæ editionis (1590); Anglo-Saxon school of miniatures; lauding
God
‘Pater Noster’ in a few
manuscripts/old books available online
I am convinced that
words do have power. And
I am not the only one because such a belief underpins, say, the recitation
of prayers, of mantras, of incantations,
of curses and so forth. I shall leave for a future entry some of the main
explanations that have been put forward as to why this is the case as my
intention here is to provide Christians with what
must surely be the most powerful prayer at their disposal.
‘Pater Noster’,
which means ‘Our Father’ in Latin, are the first two words of the prayer
Jesus taught his disciples during his sermon on the mount. Matthew
records
(vi: 9-13) that Jesus’s
disciples had asked him for guidance on how to pray and that Jesus obliged
by giving them a prayer that is not only short and simple, but also
beautiful and replete with meaning.
However, no exegesis is to follow below as I am only interested in giving
those who will come across this page some links
to digitised versions of various Bibles written in Latin
where a reader willing to decipher a few strings of words in a foreign
tongue (and with little punctuation) will nevertheless quickly come to
recognise the text of a prayer that must have
been recited billions and billions of times during the 1,500 years
or so it was part of the Roman Catholic liturgy – hence the power
it
must have over its vernacular
counterparts.
[‘Shame on you, misguided Vatican II reforms’, I am tempted to say to
myself.]
Pater
noster,
qui es in cælis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat
regnum
tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cælo et in terra.
Panem
nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita
nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne
nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.
The above is a personal rendering (owing to Italian copyright laws) of the
version in the Codex Amiatinus,
the earliest complete version of the Latin Vulgate text of the Bible to have
come down to us, as it appears on folio 808v, top left column [look for the
word ‘PATER’ in red]: http://mss.bmlonline.it/s.aspx?Id=AWOS3h2-I1A4r7GxMdaR#/oro/1615.
The Codex Amiatinus
(housed at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in
Florence, Italy) is simply so beautiful that I would love to be
able to peruse the facsimile available from the Italian
publisher Lameta Editore: https://lametaeditore.com/codex-amiatinus.
Take the time to click on the first few ‘thumbnails’ of the beautiful miniatures
adorning this unique Bible available in digitised facsimile format at http://mss.bmlonline.it/s.aspx?Id=AWOS3h2-I1A4r7GxMdaR&c=Biblia%20Sacra#/book
as they are characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon
school of illuminated manuscripts (since the Codex
Amiatinus
is believed to have been
produced in Northumbria, in the north-east of England).
Probably a century and a half older is the fragment of ‘Pater
Noster’ contained in the
Irish manuscript preserved at the famous library of the cloister of Saint
Gall, Switzerland, MS 1395, also known as Codex Sangallensis.
I have looked at the first 113 pages of the manuscript online, but I have
failed to identify with certainty the fragment mentioned by Cuthbert
Hamilton Turner in his ‘The oldest manuscript of the Vulgate Gospels’ (see https://archive.org/details/MN41398ucmf_6/page/n69/mode/2up)
– although I would not be surprised if it were the fragment displayed at https://www.e-codices.ch/en/csg/1395/7/0/.
Do not miss these beautiful miniatures that embellish this very old
manuscript of the Gospels: https://www.e-codices.ch/en/csg/1395/422/0/
(a Celtic cross); https://www.e-codices.ch/en/csg/1395/426/0/
(‘Peccavimus’ [‘we have sinned’] decorative initial); https://www.e-codices.ch/en/csg/1395/418/0/
(a representation of Matthew).
Now, after Italy and Switzerland, let us go to France, to the collections of
the French National Library, Department of Manuscripts, to be more precise.
Ms
latin 11553, also known as Codex Sangermanensis
(because the MS originated from the scriptorium of the abbey of St Germain
des Prés in Paris), is believed to have been copied in 810 from a Bible
dating back to the fifth century (Ctrl + f ‘11553’ in https://web.archive.org/web/20201128130245/https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744733.001.0001/acprof-9780198744733-chapter-10).
‘Pater Noster’
appears starting from the very last line of the left column up to the middle
of the sixth line in the top right column of folio 96: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9065958t/f193.item.
Be warned that the Caroline minuscule script in which Sangermanensis
was copied makes the text a little difficult to read if you have never had
any experience with mediæval manuscripts.
So much so for mediæval manuscripts, now let us take a look at two printed
versions of ‘Pater Noster’,
starting with the most obvious candidate: the Gutenberg
Bible. The Gutenberg Bible preserved at the Harry Ransom Center,
which is part of The University of Texas at Austin, is one of only five
complete copies in the USA. To me, the page which has ‘Pater
Noster’ (fourth line from
the top of the right column) seems to have fared so well over the course of
more than five centuries that if it were not for the ownership history
displayed right below each page of the Bible I might have been tempted to
think that I was looking at a modern reproduction rather than at a fifteenth
century incunabulum (a book printed before 1501): https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll100/id/3719.
To conclude, we shall now take a look at Biblia
Sacra Vulgatæ editionis, Sixti V Pontificis Maximi jussu recognita et
edita, which in 1590 officialised the text of the Vulgata [https://archive.org/details/vulgatasixtina/page/n943/mode/2up].
This
time, I am pretty confident that the text of ‘Pater
Noster’ will be easy to
spot...
No? What about trying to do so when the page is displayed as a single item?
https://ia802903.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/24/items/vulgatasixtina/Vulgata%20Sixtina_jp2.tar&file=Vulgata%20Sixtina_jp2/Vulgata%20Sixtina_0943.jp2&id=vulgatasixtina&scale=16&rotate=0
Is the text still difficult to find? OK, here is the answer: ‘Pater
Noster’ starts on line 13
from the top right column.
So I hope that you have enjoyed our short excursion into the world of
mediæval manuscripts written in Latin displaying the prayer most important
to Christians, namely ‘Pater
Noster’.
On a final note, remember that there were even
freemasons like the famous Italian magus and con man Cagliostro who
believed that we
should be lauding God for as many as four
hours a day.
And I
shall say nothing here about the power collective
prayers can unleash...
Hopefully, more on both subjects in future entries.
Other
links
[Sacred and profane illuminated manuscripts from Switzerland’s libraries] https://www.e-codices.ch/en/about/expo2020;
https://e-codices.ch/newsletter/archive/issue-42.html;
https://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=3091;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Prayer#Comparisons_with_other_prayer_traditions;
http://cal-itsee.bham.ac.uk/itseeweb/vetuslatina/mss-nt.htm;
https://www.bl.uk/medieval-english-french-manuscripts/articles/places-of-manuscript-production.
Lausanne, 24th January 2021
