At the New Testament Textual Criticism Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting November 21, 2009 Peter Head presented a paper entitled, “The Marginalia of Codex Vaticanus: Putting the Distigmai in their Place.” This paper argued that all of the Vaticanus Distigmai should be dated to the sixteenth century and were penned by Juan Gines de Sepulveda. The famous aphorism derived from H. L. Mencken aptly describes Head’s thesis: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

I have written a response to Peter Head and updated it several times.

The latest update is available in the March 17, 2010 post.