Another Second-Century Fragment of 1 Corinthians?

In the middle of my vacation, one of our followers, Darrell Post, informs me of two new papyri, which will soon be registered in the Kurzgefasste Liste (update: likely as two new parts of P129 and P131 respectively).

Both manuscripts are held by the “Stimer Family Collection” in Camarillo, USA.

Apparently this is the collection of Andrew Stimer who is connected to Scott Carroll (see Brent Nongbri’s blogpost), and who sold several “Dead Sea Scrolls” to the Museum of the Bible, which have turned out to be fake manuscripts (see items 18, 77-79 in the list of unprovenanced post-2002 DSS maintained by the Lying Pen project).

I suspect it will take time before we learn anything about the provenance of these two items (if we will ever know). Also keep an eye on Roberta Mazza’s blog, because I expect her to blog about Stimer and his stuff.

The first papyrus is dated to the second century in the Liste(!) and preserves 1 Cor 7:33-38 (recto. 8 lines) and 1 Cor 9:10-17 (verso, 11 lines).

The second papyrus (three fragments) is dated to the early third century and preserves Rom 9:21-22 (recto, 3 lines) and Rom 10:3-4 (verso, 3 lines).

At this point there is no reference to any editio princeps so I assume the dating of both papyri is provisional.

I have not checked whether the manuscripts offer any interesting variant readings – I must not work too much on my vacation – but perhaps readers would like to check the images and comment.

Update: In the comments, co-blogger Elijah Hixson draws attention to Brent Nongbri’s blog (again) who in this post earlier this month pointed out that they are fragments of the two distinct manuscripts owned by the Greens and registered as P129 (1 Corinthians) and P131 (Romans). Now we also know who the owner is (Stimer).

Update 2: Greg Paulson of the INTF in Münster informs us that the entries in the Liste/NT.VMR (which appeared as P141 and P142) were provisional only and that the staff “are still reviewing whether these two fragments are parts of P129 and P131 at the Museum of the Bible and hope to make a determination soon.” I have edited the original blogpost and removed the references to P141 and P142.

Update 3: Greg Paulson has informed me that the INTF has not yet decided whether to assign any GA numbers to these. They are currently working to first ascertain if the fragments are authentic. All the information in the VMR was only meant for internal evaluation and has not yet been verified. The INTF has removed the entries form public viewing for now to avoid confusion. In the meantime, you can contact Greg directly with questions.

Hurtado on The Early Text of the New Testament

Larry Hurtado has had time to work his way through the 21 contributions of C.E. Hill & M.J. Kruger (eds), The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford: OUP, 2012), and concludes his positive review:

This volume (though expensive!) is now probably the most up to date analysis of earliest evidence about the state and transmission of NT writings in the second century CE.  Given the limitations of our evidence, scholars are required to make the best inferences they can.  This volume provides essential resources in doing so, and largely shows that we can with some confidence posit that the NT writings, essentially as we know them, were copied for both ecclesial and private reading.

 At the SBL, two other scholars told me in passing that they were reviewing the book, one of which were Brice Jones, and the other one I cannot remember.

Speaking of the early text of the NT, one issue that I have described as controversial is whether the text of Codex Vaticanus – the single manuscript which is probably closest to the text of NA28 (96% similarity in the Catholic Letters) – goes back to a recension or rather reflects a strict transmission.

In Eldon Epp's “The Twentieth-Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism,” in Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (ed. E. J. Epp and G. D. Fee; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 103, he noted that with the publication of P75, the issue of whether the “Neutral” (or Alexandrian) text or text type is the result of a recension or of a strict transmission was not resolved, but pushed back into the second century.

Now that I read through Eldon Epp's new chapter on "Textual Clusters: Their Past and Future" in the second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. Essays on the Status Questionis, 544, I note a small, but important shift:

That finding [of P75] was sufficient to render invalid any view of B as a mid-fourth century recension; rather, the B-text cluster had been moved back in time a century and a half and strongly solidified. Also, the long history of NT textual recensions, in the technical sense, clearly had been terminated.

Now I heard that Brent Nongbri has just proposed (at the SBL in Chicago) that P75 might be dated to the fifth century(!), so perhaps the recension issue will see a revival. On the other hand, there are many other papyri attesting to a strict text (á la Alands), and, as Epp puts it (p. 553), "the B-cluster is supported also by third- and fourth-century pastristic sources, and with impressive secondary Greek and versional members," so I don't know.

Update: I might have misunderstood Nongbri's proposal; it might have been the fourth century. We will have to wait for the publication.

Text and Transmission in the Second Century

Over at Earliest Christianity, Tim Henderson summarizes the essay by Michael Holmes, "Text and Transmission in the Second Century” recently published in The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace in Dialogue which we have blogged about here.

For a description of Tim Henderson's upcoming monograph – the published version of his dissertation on the Gospel of Peter to be published my Mohr Siebeck – see his own "shameless promotion".

Martin Hengel on the NT Text in the Second Century

I am currently reading through Martin Hengel’s The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ and Hengel has a bit to say on the textual tradition of the Gospels in the second century (pp. 26-31). He maintains that the Gospel texts were still to some degree “fluid” and were influenced by a “richer” parallel tradition evident from harmonizing supplements. He contends that Mark is the most effected by this parallelizing and Matthew was the strongest influence. Hengel also asserts that in the first half of the second century (before Justin), the words of Jesus were not quoted too frequently and there was a lack of concern with quoting them exactly. This style of free quotations is also applied to Paul and the Old Testament. He writes: “In other words, as a rule the first Christians often quoted from memory and were fond of adapting the text to the catechetical situation”. In addition, people not only used the original texts but also prepared extracts from the Old Testament, the new Christian scriptures, and even from ‘apocryphal’ material, i.e. the testimonia or eklogai. Christian teachers had this freedom because they were “inspired by the eschatological gift of the Spirit of God, who was the true expositor of the biblical text”. The use of texts was pragmatic and situational rather than precise.

Hengel goes on to say that this does not mean that the textual tradition in the manuscripts was arbitrary. He thinks we should differentiate between oral tradition/catechetical praxis and the transmission of the text by early scribes. Hengel even posits early Christian scriptoria around the turn of the century in places such as as Rome, Ephesus, or Antioch. Christians rapidly built up their own means of codex production. Hengel states: “The text of the Gospels is the best transmitted in the whole of antiquity: about six Gospel papyri go back to the period around 200 or the second century AD, and a further nineteen to the third century”. He rejects the notion of a chaotic diversity brought into line in an orthodox way. Instead, he writes: “The relative consistency of the Gospel text despite all the appearance of its running wild up to the end of the second century may be connected with constant reading in worship, which on the whole required fixed forms of text. Liturgical usage is more ‘conservative’; the same goes for the scribal customs in the early Christian scriptoria. The difference at precisely this point from the often romance-like apocryphal literature, say the apostolic acts, but also the Gospel of Thomas, in which the Greek fragments and the Coptic translation are often substantially different, is striking. Once again: no ancient text is as well attested as the Gospels.”

A few comments: (1) I think Hengel is plotting a middle ground between Birdsall and Koester on the stability of the Gospel texts in the second century; (2) I do not at all think that Jesus’ words were quoted infrequently since reading the Apostolic Fathers convinces me otherwise (esp. Ignatius) as these authors were “red letter Christians” and often prefaced Gospel quotes with “As the Lord said”. (3) I’m a bit more ambivalent about Christian scriptoria and the charismatic teachers, specifically as to whether or not we can really speak of the former as conservative and the latter as creative, sounds too general to me. (4) I’d also be interested to read more about early Christian testimonia collections and their effect upon the textual tradition. Apparently a good place to start is Martin C. Albl, And Scripture Cannot Be Broken: The Form and Function of the Early Christian Testimonia Collections. Novum Testamentum Supplements 96. Leiden: Brill, 1999.