Brent Nongbri Responds

Some of you may recall my recent post where I mention my recent article that briefly disputes Brent Nongbri’s case for P18’s greater likelihood of being a codex. Following this, Brent concocted a twofold response, which is as eloquent as it is amicable. In Part 1, he engages with Charlesworth’s response published last year and in Part 2 with mine. I won’t be writing a rejoinder and would encourage our readers to read Brent’s posts for themselves. He summarises the points of contact very accurately and, since both his and my piece were written in more tentative terms, the debate pretty much ends up in weighing the probabilities. I for one remain unconvinced by the counterproposal, but, once again, I am impressed by how Brent is able to interact with opposing views with civility and fairness. (Another good example of this is Brent’s latest post concerning Ryan Kaufman’s counterproposal concerning the ending of John 20 in P66.)

I might note, however, that I was quite intrigued by (parts of) Steven Goranson’s comment under Brent’s second post quite interesting. Let me quote it in full:

I am undecided whether it is a roll or a codex, and excuse me if I missed something, but concerning the paragraph ‘Yes, but the specific point at issue is “fragments of what were once more extensive rolls” that preserve no more or less than a single column of writing on both sides. How common is that? (It’s an honest question–I don’t know the answer.) If our Exodus/Revelation papyrus is indeed a portion of a reused roll, it would seem to be a very happy coincidence indeed that this surviving portion of the roll preserves exactly a single column of text on each side.’ I would comment that if one column from the *middle* of a roll were preserved on the recto, then the chances of a nearly-matching column on the verso would be smaller than the chances of a match if indeed this piece were a roll end. That it holds the end of Exodus and the beginning of Revelation (assuming the top edge, with room for initial Rev. verses, is missing) might suggest (but not prove) the end of a roll. After all, if using a similar margin, one side of the column already aligns as a given (unlike in a mid-roll scenario), so if similar column width was used, the match of columns may not occasion much surprise. Also, though I may be on thin ice, let me go further: aren’t Exodus and Revelation both scroll-prominent books, and scribes knew that? So, given a choice…

Although I’m not sure I’d call Revelation a ‘scroll-prominent book’ (it does involve a comparatively higher proportion of papyri, the numbers are so small that it’s very hard to make any convincing generalisations), I think the main force of Goranson’s argument lies in the fact that the beginning followed by the ending of another work in a fragment like this would speak in favour of a re-used roll. To this I might add that portions of the roll closer to the centre (i.e. ending of the → side) are more likely to get preserved than outer parts—for obvious reasons. This would fit nicely with the situation in P18, provided that the roll wasn’t rolled up the opposite way upon re-use. Here I must confess that I don’t really know how this was done or whether there are any studies that deal with this. I would thus gladly echo Brent’s observation that ‘we really do need a thorough survey of reused rolls’. I couldn’t agree more. How’s that for a doctoral thesis topic? 

Was P18 a Roll or a Codex? A New Article with Pictures in It!

It’s a well-known feature of the early Christian textual transmission that the vast majority of manuscripts are in codex format. There are a few odd-balls in the mix, one of which is P18 (P.Oxy. VIII 1079; BL Pap. 2053 verso; LDAB 2786), a fragment containing portions of Rev 1.4–7. On the opposite side of the fragment (→), there’s the ending of the book of Exodus, published separately as P.Oxy. VIII 1075 (Rahlfs 909; LDAB 3477).

The presence of an ending of a different work on → led Arthur S. Hunt, the fragment’s principal editor, to conclude that P18 is a re-used roll. And this conclusion had been widely accepted until Brent Nongbri disturbed the status quo with his 2013 article. There, Brent posits that, instead, our fragment is likely to have been once part of a composite codex.

In the course of my investigation into the papyri of Revelation, I ended up revisiting this problem and wrote a little piece, which has been published in the latest issue of NTS (it’s in fact the first issue of the 2019 volume, so perhaps we’re dealing with a bit of realised eschatology, pace Rev 1.19).

For the article, see now ‘P.Oxy. VIII 1079 (P18): Closing on a “Curious” Codex?’, NTS 65 (2019) 94–102.

How Present Technology Changes Our View of Past Technology

I’ve been thinking more recently about the significance we attach to technological developments. Think, for instance of the shift from scroll to codex or the change from handwritten books to books printed with movable type. Most readers here will be familiar with some of the significance found in these changes. Did the codex form reinforce the canon for instance? Was it a way that early Christians distinguished their sacred from non-sacred writings? Did Christians become more concerned with textual accuracy with the invention of the printing press? Etc.

These are good questions and it is worth reflecting on the ways new technologies affect or, alternatively, reflect Christian beliefs and practice. But I confess that I sometimes feel skeptical about how much significance is ascribed to them. One reason is because of something Alan Jacobs has written about, which he calls the tendency to “fetishize” past technologies. Here he is in 2015 reflecting on this tendency in Books & Culture (sadly defunct now):

Any given technology changes its meaning when alternatives to it arise: candles began to mean something different when gas lighting appeared; gas lighting began to mean something different when electrical light appeared. Associations form in the public mind with particular times, places, social groups—mental links that would have been impossible to forge without the clarifying power of contrast. This is not to say that technologies have no meaning until alternatives turn up: but the more universal they are, the less likely we are to reflect on them. The comment (I have heard it attributed to Huston Smith) that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles is something that no one would have thought of before the advent of other forms of lighting.

Thus when digital technologies of reading and writing arose, soon thereafter people became intensely reflective about what had preceded them: books, paper, pens and pencils. E-readers make the distinctive features, the characteristic conformation, of books stand forth vividly; a world in which everyone types becomes a world in which pens can be fetishized.

The attention vector of any particular technology goes something like this: from ubiquitous and largely unreflective use to the subject of specialized scholarly research to the topic of personal and idiosyncratic reflections. So the history of the book became a serious scholarly subdiscipline starting in the second half of the 20th century, and emerged onto the general public scene near the end of that century: Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1996) marked, more clearly than any other single book, that emergence... [the rest is pay-walled, sadly.]

I think Jacobs is right and the point is important because we may be tempted to see more in the shifts mentioned above than is deserved. In the case of early Christians and their “bookishness,” for example, I would like to know whether or not they thought of this as distinguishing them from other contemporary groups. If not, then might this be something we are reading into the past because of what Jacobs calls a fetishizing of previous technologies?

Well, I need to keep thinking about it. But it’s something to be aware of at least.

Early image of Christ holding a book

The BBC reports the find of a glass plate in Spain (here). It mentions a 4th century date for this artefact, which may be true or not. The reconstruction is interesting:



The central figure holding the cross is in all likelihood a depiction of Christ, while the two others I would take as the angels present at the resurrection, not unlike the Gospel of Peter. What is interesting though, is that Christ holds a small codex in his hand, while both companions each seem to hold a scroll.