Robinson on the Bodmer Papyri

Another book I picked up at SBL was James M. Robinson, The Story of the Bodmer Papyri: From the First Monastery's Library in Upper Egypt to Geneva and Dublin (Eugene OR: Cascade Books [Wipf and Stock], 2011 - yes that is the date printed in my copy as purchased in Nov. 2010).

It is an unusual book as the main story part was composed 'two decades ago' according to Robinson in the preface and has not been revised or up-dated (in fact 'two decades ago' is already perhaps a bit optimistic as internal evidence suggests a composition date of closer to 1980). The outline of Robinson's story has already been known in his paper 'The Pachomian Monastic Library at the Chester Beatty Library and the Bibliotheque Bodmer' (which is republished here but without the photographs found in the Occasional papers of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (1990) edition).

So this was state of the art research, and tells the story of Robinson's interviews with the various characters involved in finding, selling and purchasing the manuscripts, but is now twenty years old (not even the bibliography of editions of the Dishna texts has been up-dated with e.g. P. Bodmer XXXVIII in 1991 or P. Bodmer XXX-XXXVII in 1999). It is nevertheless definitely worth a read; and there are loads of interesting details. Two things I noted were that P. Bodmer XVII (P74) was not from the same original collection (p. 21); and that the rebinding of P. Bodmer XIV-XV (P75) likely rendered it impossible to read (since the binding thongs did not go throguh the centre of the spine but through the front and back covers near the nner margin, with the result that the book couldn't be opened out enough to read the text at the inner margin; p. 32).