New Book Information
Peter R. Rodgers, Text and Story
Narrative Studies in New Testament Textual Criticism
ISBN: 13:978-1-61097-304-5
Order from:
Pickwick Publications
Wipf and Stock Publishers, Inc
199 West 8th Avenue, Suite 3
Eugene, OR, 97401 – USA
(541) 344 – 1528
FAX (541) 344 – 1506
Alin Suciu has identified a ms of Jer 21-22 in Coptic amid a British Museum acquisition from Christie's. Details here. [via Jack Sasson]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Bible was one of the most copied texts in the Christian world. As a sacred text, it was widely commented, rewritten and put to various uses in different contexts and with different purposes. It reflects the various changes that writing systems and technologies underwent; not surprisingly, it was the first book to be printed. Wherever one looks, the Bible gave rise to the most sophisticated expressions of the medieval craft of book-making.
Biblical texts and manuscripts have for a long time attracted the attention of philologists, exegetes and historians; however, things are different when it comes to the artefacts that gave the Bible its material existence. Although the production of biblical books in certain periods and a few exceptional manuscripts have already been studied in detail, we are still very far from being able to build a historical typology of biblical books. To achieve this aim, it seems necessary to adopt a global and a comparative perspective. Therefore, a particular effort needs to be made to highlight the manner in which the difficulties involved in the material process of making the sacred book have been resolved at different points in time and in different countries.
This conference intends to establish the state of the art with respect to Bible making from late Antiquity to the fifteenth century, while also opening up new perspectives for future research. In order to promote a comparative and comprehensive approach to these issues without losing focus, the conference will concentrate on Bible making in the West (both in Latin and in the vernaculars) as well as in the Byzantine and Hebraic parts of the Mediterranean world.
The conference organizers look forward to receiving proposals that centre on the material aspects of Bible books and especially those that adopt a wide-ranging approach; reports on finished or ongoing research are both welcome. Case-studies on isolated textual witnesses will only be considered if they shed new light on production modes and technical aspects that can be shown to have a wider currency. Similarly, paper proposals addressing cultural aspects (e.g. contexts of production and reception), philological aspects (e.g. issues of text transmission, the set-up of books and prologues, paratextual features) or iconographic ones (e.g. the decorative apparatus) should preferably address their interaction with the books’ material aspects (structure of the volumes, lay-out, readability...).
Seeking to clearly define the thematic scope of the conference, we propose a pragmatic definition of the concept of “Bible book” as follows:
* the entire Bible text, or a part of it, organized on a book-after-book basis, with or without marginal comments, handwritten or printed (incunabula);
* the entire Bible text, or a part of it, prepared for liturgical uses (evangelical books, psalters), with the exception, however, of liturgical books which include non-biblical materials (missals, breviaries, books of hours).
Abstracts (maximum 500 words) are to be sent before 30 September 2011 to chiara.ruzzier@fundp.ac.be. Confirmation of acceptance will be given as soon as possible.
A small number of grants are available for junior scholars and PhD students who have no access to institutional funding. Please send your application (including a short CV) to chiara.ruzzier@fundp.ac.be.
CONTACTS:
Xavier Hermand: xavier.hermand@fundp.ac.be
Chiara Ruzzier: chiara.ruzzier@fundp.ac.be
Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix
rue de Bruxelles 61
B-5000 Namur
Belgique
It is very important that you read a later study which is focused on the question your raise, i.e., about a possible theme and “miscellaneous” vs. “composite”.... I wrote that later study together with Tobias Nicklas, didn’t I send you a reference to that? Anyway, my NTS article is mainly focused around the question how the codex was made up of several earlier collections - so that in itself speaks against one pervasive theme (which I point out). On the other hand, it is clear to me that the separate parts were produced in a proto-orthodox environment (if I may use the term “proto-orthodox”), in which Christology apparently is important. This does not mean that Christology is a theme - did I say that? There are liturgical connections between earlier parts of the collection, by the way. But, please read my other essay on the Bodmer Misc. Codex.Nevertheless, Jones suggests in his now published article that I have argued “for a general christological theme” of this codex (p. 12).
No, I don’t believe we should call it a composite. In the later essay we suggest that it is something in between. But read it an[d] come back.
The final collector may have had one particular theme in mind, but more probably this person somehow found a common denominator in the texts, and, therefore, Martin’s original proposal of an apologetic collection does not have to be dismissed as being too general a characterization. In fact, several characteristics typical of incipient orthodoxy are prominent in the texts, especially in the area of Christology.And in the conclusion of the same article:
Several scholars have suggested that there were certain theological reasons for the composition, and, indeed, the texts of the codex betray the influence of incipient orthodoxy, but to single out one specific theme is problematic, since the codex is made up of several earlier collections.I hope it is clear by now that I have not argued for *one single theme* uniting these writings and motivating that they were collected together. I did say, as Jones points out in his article, that a collector may have seen a “common denominator” in the texts. I think it is clear, however, that “one particular theme” is not the same thing as *a final collector* seeing in these texts (brought together from earlier collections) “a common denominator.”
Lying behind the title ‘composite’ given to these two codices [including the Bodmer codex in consideration] that scribes did not care to waste writing material and would wish to fill any free pages left over at the end of a codex. Even if the matter chosen as filling was too long, in a quire of multiple gatherings additional gatherings could be added if required. (Typology, 81).So, is this the kind of sole (pragmatic) motivation lying behind the collection of writings brought together in the Bodmer codex under consideration? “– I mustn’t waste any writing material when copying this work I want to copy (and/or collect).” I think not.
What expectations do modern readers generally have of books and the contents of books? When we go to the bookstore and browse, we usually find inside the covers one novel, or one biography, or a manual over one kind of technical equipment; the book is probably written by one author or maybe by more than one author but collaboratively, as in the collective novel. But there are other models: a book can hold the collected works by one and the same author, or a choice of those works (or just part of one work—when the work in its entirety is too long to fit into just one volume). It can be a collection of essays by different authors but over a common theme. It could cover, say, Polish poetry from the interwar period. Whenever there are more than one text in the book, we can easily find a common denominator [sic!] for the text collection. What we do not expect to find is a book which contains one text on computer programming, followed by one text on effective bargaining, followed by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, followed by an enumeration of household remedies against migraine or ulceritis. I might, as a reader, be interested in all of these things, but they do not belong in the same book.
There was a time, however, when a book could cover subjects as diverse as those mentioned above. (p 38)
[...]Note the focus here on the reader’s expectation and function.
The coherent miscellany is but one variety of many in the area of multitext books, and if we wish to assess how these books reflect on the reading habits and transmission of texts, we must see to the whole field. We do need to take into account these other appearances of multitext books: the school exercises, the re-use of manuscripts, and the later additions of new text(s) to a scroll or codex. It has to do with the expectancy of the reader (and of the scribe): what you have seen in other places, namely in composite books, seems less farfetched when you are up to create a “miscellany proper,” i.e. an intentional copying of different authors and texts into the same container. What is crucial is the function of the book. (p. 41)
The reason why it is so important to establish the structure or stratigraphy of multitext books is the large variation in how handwritten books were created, and also the fact that codices are not stable entities. They can be—and often are—rebound, and concomitant changes in the structure can take place: parts of the original book may be lost or deliberately left out, other parts may be added, the internal order of the quires may be confused, or new texts may be added on blank pages long after the primary text or text collection was created. To analyze the text(s) in such a manuscript without awareness of the “archaeology” is a precarious undertaking. It is problematical to draw any conclusions as to how texts belong together. Likewise one cannot unconditionally assume that facts of origin and date in one part of the manuscript are transferable to other parts: this has to be established for each part individually. (p. 43)Nyström also refers to the terminological confusion of these very terms, “composite” vs. “miscellany” (and others):
Many of the terminological discrepancies originate in different ways of dealing with this complexity. An obvious example is the term miscellany or miscellaneous codex which seems to have been given as many definitions as there are scholars in this area. Should this term cover all kinds of multitext books, both the structurally homogeneous and the composite codices? Should it designate only the contentually heterogeneous or should we include other possible text combinations as well: different texts by the same author (corpora), different kinds of texts which have a common use (e.g. liturgical text collections)? Would collections of excerpts qualify, or must the texts be complete? I have tried to avoid this problem by using the overall term “multitext book” for the whole field, regardless of structural differences and regardless of how similar or diverse the texts seem.I wholly agree with Nyström that there appears to be significant confusion about these terms. If we, however, use “miscellany” in contrast to “composite” as I did in my NTS article, I maintain that the Bodmer codex under consideration is something more than a composite, and that it was produced in basically the same proto-Orthodox Christian circle. In another NTS article by Barbara Aland on the same codex, “Welche Rolle spielen Textkritik und Textgeschichte für das Verständnis des Neuen Testaments? Frühe Leserperspektiven,” (NTS 52 [2006]: 303-318), Aland, actually goes further than I did, as she comments on the codex and the reception of its collected texts (again note the focus on the reader’s/user’s perspective) concluding:
Some prefer to use the term miscellany in contrast to the composite, so that the miscellany would always be monomerous or at least homogenetic, i.e. produced in the same circle and approximately at the same time.
Fazit: Wir fassen in dem Sammelcodex des 3./4. Jh ein Kapitel aus der frühen Rezeptionsgeschichte der gesammelten Texte. Wenn wir die Signale der Texte und ihrer Zusammenstellung beachten, weisen sie uns auf die Absicht des Sammlers hin. Er hat die Texte im Sinne einer produktiven Rezeption gelesen und durch seine sinnschöpfende Zusammenstellung bestimmte theologische und ethische Aussagen an seine Adressaten vermittelt: Abweisung der Häresie, Preis des Gottes und Erlösers Christus, Trost für die Leidenden in seiner Nachfolge. Historisch gewinnen wir damit eine neue ‘Quelle’ für das Christusverständnis des 3./4. Jahrhunderts. Textkritisch gewinnen wir das Verständnis für einen frühen Schreiber. Wir können davon ausgehen, dass er an den besprochenen Stellen die Gottheit Christi bewusst betonen wollte. (p. 310)I have not been as bold as Aland about the motivation and identification of the final collector (I did propose the scribe of P72 as one possible candidate), but I do maintain that the Bodmer codex under consideration is definitely something more than a composite as Turner defines the term; as I conclude in the subsequent essay co-written with Tobias Nicklas, Theologische Linien im Codex Bodmer Miscellani?, in Tobias Nicklas and Thomas J. Kraus (eds.), New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and their World (Boston: Brill, 2006), 161-88, here freely translated from German:
If you compare the Bodmer Misc. Codex with other “Sammelcodices” – particularly with those from the same extensive finding [probably a Pachomian library] – then it occupies a middle position between codices which individual texts have been brought together rather consciously, united by one specific [leitenden] theme, and those [individual texts] which display no connection. (p. 185)
The narrow dating of some of the early New Testament papyri and the methodological approach that is used must be brought into question in the light of the acknowledged difficulties with palaeographical dating and especially the use of assigned dated literary papyri. The thesis of this paper is that the way forward in dating New Testament papyri, or for that matter any undated literary papyri, is first to locate the manuscript in its graphic stream and using, on the whole, dated documentary papyri belonging to the same stream, come to an approximate understanding of where in the history of the stream the manuscript lies. The following New Testament Papyri will be so treated: P52, P67+ and P46.Some interesting new articles and reviews over at TC journal:
In 2010, Uppsala University Library nominated Codex Argenteus, the 'Silver Bible' for inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Senior librarian Lars Munkhammar who is a specialist on the codex was responsible for the nomination process.
One of the scholars who was as referee in the nomination process is a good friend of mine, Carla Falluomini, currently Associate Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Sassari. Carla has worked on Gothic MSS and texts (see here), currently she is working with two colleagues, Antonio Piras och Magnus Snaedal, to compile an of the Gothic Bible. Of particular interest is also her work on a new assessment of the text-critical value of the Gothic Version (some preliminary remarks are available here).
The Codex Argenteus, which preserves Wulfila’s translation of the Gospels into the Gothic language, is now on the United Nations “Memory of the World” Register. 188 folia of the original 336 survive; 187 preserved in the Uppsala University Library, Sweden (catalog number: D.G.1) [http://www.ub.uu.se/arv/codex/faksimiledition/contents.html] plus one folium in the Historisches Museum der Pfalz, in Speyer, Germany.
This is the surviving part of a luxury codex, written in silver ink on purple parchment, with some key words in golden ink (such as the first three lines of the Gospels of Luke and Mark – the beginnings of Matthew and John are lost – the first line of the Ammonian sections and their paragraph signs, the first line of the “Pater noster”, and the contractions of Evangelists’ names in the Eusebian canons tables). It contains the four Gospels in the order Matthew-John-Luke-Mark (but the text itself agrees with the early Byzantine text). The bottom of each page contains the canon tables. The script is extremely uniform and precise. Fourteen marginal glosses are present, written in silver ink.
The Speyer folium, discovered in 1970, is important from the text-critical point of view, because it attests the so-called Longer Ending of Mark. The high quality of the manuscript suggests that it was made for a person of high rank – probably King Theoderic himself – and/or the Gothic royal Church. It may therefore be assumed that the codex was produced in the Ostrogothic capital Ravenna (Italy), in the first third of the sixth century. Similar to the Codex Argenteus is the Codex Brixianus, a purple manuscript of the Latin Gospels (f/010), written in silver ink in North Italy in the first half of the sixth century. It contains, at the bottom of each page, canon tables that resemble those of the Argenteus. The text – Old Latin with many Vulgate readings – shows several peculiarities shared only with the text of the Argenteus (the Gothic text seems to have influenced the Latin one). The codicological and textual similarities lead to the assumption that the Codex Brixianus is copy of a bilingual Gothic-Latin Bible, of which the Gothic part is represented by the Codex Argenteus.
The history of the Codex Argenteus is uncertain. The common view is that St. Liutger, a disciple of Alcuin, brought the codex at the end of the eighth century (possibly 795) from Italy to his newly founded Werden monastery. In 1554 (or perhaps earlier) it was found in the German monastery of Werden an der Ruhr, near Cologne, by Georg Cassander and Cornelius Wouters. At the beginning of the 17th century the codex was in Prague, in the collection of Rudolf II. It was then taken by the Swedish army in 1648, during the Thirty Years’ War. After passing through several hands, in 1662 the codex was purchased by the Swedish high chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, who in 1669 gave it to the Library of Uppsala University.
In a comment to the previous blog post, the question was raised regarding variation in the order of books in NT manuscripts. Two good resources re this issue include Bruce Metzger’s book on the NT canon (OUP, 1987), which includes a section on variations in the order of books (and also groups of books) in the NT, and an appendix in the back of at least two, probably three (and perhaps all four) of the volumes by Reuben Swanson on the text of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corithians, and Galatians. In this appendix Swanson lists the order of books in a substantial number of NT manuscripts (papyri, majuscules, and minuscules).
Examples of unusual arrangements among the MSS Swanson lists include 33, which in its current state presents this sequence: the text of the OT Prophets is followed by (starting at the top of a right-hand page) 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Gal, Eph, Phil, Col, 1 Th, 2 Th, Heb, 1 Tim, 2 Tim, Titus, Philemon. Then comes (starting on a fresh page) a section of 8 pages containing a prologue for the Catholic letters; hypotheses for James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John (presumably, as the heading is only partially readable; there does not appear to be a hypothesis for Jude); hypotheses for Romans, 1 Cor (?; heading obscured/unreadable), 2 Cor, one hypothesis with an obscured/unreadable heading, Phil, Col, 1-2 Thess, 1-2 Tim, Titus, and Philemon. Then comes (beginning on the same page as the hypothesis for Philemon) the text of Acts, Jas, 1 Pet, 2 Pet, 1 Jn, 2 Jn, 3 Jn, Jude, Romans, Matt, Mark, Luke, John.
The unusual position of the gospels is due to a binder’s error, acc. to Scrivener; the gospels orginally followed the Prophets. The position of Romans after Jude, however, is not the result of a binder’s error; Romans begins on the same page on which Jude ends. There is one more oddity about Romans in 33: its strongly Byzantine textual character (if I read the information in Text und Textwert correctly) is significantly different from the textual character of the other Pauline letters in the manuscript. Did the scribe of 33 work from an exemplar that was missing Romans, which was then added in later (from a different exemplar) at the end of the manuscript? In all, a most curious situation.
At the time that Codex Sinaiticus was made, around the middle of the 4th century, there was no agreement as to which books constituted the Bible, or the order in which they should be arranged. Indeed, before this date there had been no concept of the Bible as a single volume, containing all those texts familiar to modern readers.
To create Codex Sinaiticus required the collaboration of arguably four scribes (designated by modern scholars A, B1, B2 and D), working from approximately thirty exemplars. In order to expedite the process, the scribes would have copied different parts of the text at the same time, dividing the work between them. For example, Scribe D is known to have copied Genesis and portions of Matthew, Mark and Luke (in addition to other books of the Bible); while Scribe A produced large chunks of the Old Testament, and most of the New Testament, including Acts.
