An-Ting Yi, "From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship" (de Gruyter, 2024)

May 21, 2026

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The Codex That Wasn't Always King

In 16th-century Europe, the most important Greek New Testament manuscript now known to scholarship sat largely ignored in the Vatican Library—not because scholars didn't know about it, but because the man who first encountered its readings dismissed it as a "Latinized" corruption. Desiderius Erasmus, the great humanist scholar, called Codex Vaticanus a bad manuscript. Modern textual critics have long treated this as an embarrassing failure of judgment, but An-Ting Yi's book From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) asks a more interesting question: what if Erasmus's evaluation made perfect sense within his own context? The answer reveals that scholarly authority is not discovered but constructed—built over centuries through access, method, institutional power, and printing technology.

Erasmus and the Problem of Perspective

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introduction and Guest** - Host Amissa Bakuri introduces Dr. An-Ting Yi, author of "From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship," a study of how scholarly authority is constructed around a famous biblical manuscript.
2 (04:23) **Motivation for the Book's Approach** - Dr. Yi explains why she shifted focus from the manuscript's content to the history of how it has been judged by scholars.
3 (09:18) **Reframing Erasmus's Rejection of Codex Vaticanus** - The first chapter re-examines the common criticism that Erasmus failed to recognize the manuscript's value in the 16th century.
4 (15:34) **Restricted Access as a Core Theme** - The tightly controlled access to the Vatican Library is central to explaining why Codex Vaticanus had little impact for centuries.
5 (24:36) **Power and Privilege in Textual Criticism** - Dr. Yi confirms that institutional power, connections, and privilege heavily influenced who could study the manuscript.
6 (29:48) **Resisting the "Progress Narrative"** - The book intentionally avoids telling a simple story of scholarship moving closer to the truth as methods improved.
7 (35:32) **How Manuscript Value Shifts with Method** - Dr. Yi uses a metaphor to explain why a manuscript's perceived value is not fixed but changes with the scholarly lens.

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Show Notes

Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) published by De Gruyter in 2024, Dr An-Ting Yi shows that this status was anything but inevitable.
Rather than focusing on the manuscript’s text, Dr Yi traces how Vaticanus gradually became authoritative. For centuries, it was known but rarely usable, constrained by restricted access, archival control, and scholarly methods that could not yet make sense of it. Only with nineteenth-century methodological shifts and, crucially, with its first printed edition did Vaticanus acquire the authority it now seems always to have had.

The book’s core insight is simple and powerful. Manuscripts do not possess fixed authority. They gain it through methods, institutions, and infrastructures. Well argued and meticulously researched, Dr Yi’s study is less about a single manuscript than about how scholarly canons are formed, stabilised, and remembered. From Erasmus to Maius invites readers to rethink not only textual criticism but also the construction of academic authority.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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