A Telling Terminus Technicus in Codex Bezae’s Latin Text of Acts

ABSTRACT The Latin column of the Acts of the Apostles in Codex Bezae exhibits a very rarely attested Latin term, optio carceris, used to describe the jailer of Paul and Silas in Philippi. This is a military rank used only by the urban garrisons of Rome, as well as the two urban cohorts sent from the capital to garrison the provincial cities of Lyons (Lugdunum) and Carthage. It is attested epigraphically during the principate, but no later. This article connects this observation to the longstanding acknowledgment of the antiquity of this codex’s text, and to the traditional—but much more controversial—association between the codex and ancient Lyons.