A forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.
I recently came across this short video of Craig Evans interviewing Larry Hurtado. It appears to be made during the production of Evans’ new documentary, Fragments of Truth (see Peter Gurry’s review here). The date of P52 comes up, and Hurtado briefly explains why he thinks it is “among the earliest New Testament manuscripts” but not necessarily the earliest New Testament manuscript.
Hurtado’s position isn’t new or unusual, but I find it helpful to draw attention to another voice among those who reject specifically early or narrow dates for P52. He has gone on the record before about what he thinks of the date of P52 (on his blog here, or in various articles, some of which are in his recent collection of essays, Texts and Artefacts).
The John Rylands Library is running an exhibit through August 2018 called The Alchemy of Colour. They even have a series of short YouTube videos describing non-invasive ways that multi-spectral analysis can shed new light on manuscripts. The videos are a delight to watch.
One of the videos shows that cow’s urine was used for a particular yellow pigment—demonstrated by a yellow dress glowing under the blacklight. It sounds almost scandalous, but if you are familiar with ancient recipes for making inks and dyes, it really is no surprise. Earle Radcliffe Caley’s 1926 translation of P.Leiden X, for example, has six references to urine as an ingredient. The video that excited me, however, was a short discussion of the colour purple:
In the video, Cheryl Porter gives a great description of some of the ways purple was made and the significance the colour had in antiquity. She mentions specifically that purple was often equated with power. That has led some to suspect that purple Gospel books could have had political significance.
Rather than a discussion of the colour purple, however, I wanted to use the opportunity afforded by the video to point readers to some of the work being done by Maurizio Aceto. You might ask why Aceto appears in a video about the use of purple in manuscripts, especially because he doesn’t say anything about the colour.
Photo credit: John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog,
“Purple is the new black“ (2 November 2017)
The reason is that Aceto has published several articles in recent years on the use of non-invasive scientific testing to learn about ancient artefacts, and purple codices have been subjects of a number of them. In one of his publications (“First Analytical Evidences of Precious Colourants on Mediterranean Illuminated Manuscripts“), he and a team of researchers used Raman spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry with fibre optics (FORS) to identify the inks and colourants in the Vienna Dioscurides and Vienna Genesis manuscripts of the sixth century.
In another study (“Non-Invasive Investigation on a VI Century Purple Codex from Brescia, Italy”), Aceto led a team of researchers who used XRF, FORS and a couple of other non-invasive techniques on Codex Brixianus, a sixth-century Latin purple codex. This second article I mention was especially interesting, as Aceto et al. demonstrate that Tyrian Purple was not the main source of the purple dye, but they suggest that the codex might have been dyed by a process known as top-dyeing. The parchment was first dyed with a cheaper purple substitute, and then a thin layer of more expensive Tyrian purple was added on top of the lesser-quality dye. It was a way to save money without completely losing the colour of the more expensive dye. (Let me add that his suggestion about the possibility of top-dyeing applies only to Codex Brixianus, not necessarily to the Greek purple codices from the same era.)
I give the information for some of Aceto’s publications below. If you like manuscripts and dabble in science (or vice versa), they are interesting reads. Scientists like Aceto have a whole toolbox of equipment that can be used to study manuscripts that easily goes unnoticed by scholars concerned with the texts those manuscripts contain. Besides, science is fun!
Aceto, Maurizio, Angelo Agostino, Gaia Fenoglio, Ambra Idone, Fabrizio Crivello, Martina Griesser, Franz Kirchweger, Katharina Uhlir, and Patricia Roger Puyo. “Analytical Investigations on the Coronation Gospels Manuscript.” Spectrochim. Acta A 171 (January 15, 2017): 213–21.
The Daily Mail reports today (September 3rd, 2014) that Dr. Roberta Mazza, Research Fellow of the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester, recently made a significant re-discovery in the vaults of John Rylands Library. She found a papyrus amulet from Egypt dated to the sixth century. The apotropaic text was written on re-cycled papyrus (traces of a grain tax receipt have been identified on the reverse side with multispectral imaging). The amulet contains biblical passages from Psalm 78:23-24 and Matthew 26:28-30 and others. The text includes:
Our God prepared a
sacred table in the desert for the people and gave manna of the new
covenant to eat, the Lord’s immortal body and the blood of Christ poured
for us in remission of sins.
The news story claims that this is the first example of an amulet referring to the Christian Eucharist in the context of (apotropaic) magic, which I assume is correct. However, several other statements are erroneous (as usual when things get in the media), for example:
The papyrus contains some of the earliest documented references to The Last Supper.
It is also one of the first recorded documents to use magic in the Christian context.
Some Christians still use
passages from the Bible as protective charms, so the amulet marks the
beginning of a trend in Christianity [my italics].
J. K. Elliott has written a piece in Times Literary Supplement 29 October on the collection of biblical MSS in John Rylands Library in Manchester ("Manchester bibles").
Here is an extract:
A. S. G. Edwards’s Commentary article (January 29) on the digitization of forty Middle English manuscripts in Manchester’s John Rylands Library as part of an ongoing programme paid due respect to Manchester’s medieval English texts. But its holdings of biblical materials are also particularly noteworthy, and many of them qualify for various superlatives. The Library’s biblical manuscripts – the largest number in Britain outside London, Oxford, and Cambridge – are regularly consulted and their distinctive readings cited in most modern critical editions of the Bible.
Two of its treasures are particularly well known and regularly seen by visitors to its newly refurbished building in Deansgate. One (P.Ryl. 457) is the famous papyrus fragment containing four verses of John 18 and known to New Testament scholars as P52. Experts are generally agreed that it was written by the mid-second century, and thus this tiny fragment is not only our first witness to this Gospel, but the oldest example of any New Testament text in the world – and probably the earliest Christian writing extant. The other is a papyrus portion of Deuteronomy in Greek (P.Ryl. 458).
One can access the whole article by signing up for a free trial of TLShere.
