Here and there

Brice Jones has found a papyrus fragment of John for sale on ebay - see here (it all looks plausible to me). [not for sale anymore - withdrawn from the auction]

Winchester Cathedral is trying to recover illuminations stolen from the twelfth-century Winchester Bible.

The British Library has published a list of the 1220 manuscripts with new digital images in A New Giant List. Meanwhile the British Library is now allowing personal digital photography of items in the collection (applauded by Roger Pearse).

Among the top selling books and manuscripts at auction in 2014 were a number of biblical related manuscripts, including the editio princeps of the Hebrew Torah printed on vellum ($3,871,845)

Duke University is returning a tenth-century Greek manuscript to Greece (not sure what it is a manuscript of, doesn’t look like a NT, but I could be wrong).

Meanwhile some responses to the ill-informed on-line article about the Bible at “Newsweek” can be found from Mike Kruger (two parts, with comments from the author of the article); Ben Witherington; Darrell Bock (two parts); Pete Enns; Dan Wallace [up-dated here] (I’m not sure how this online “Newsweek” relates to the respected old print magazine, the ownership looks murky). 

Galatian Papyrus on Sale

Brice Jones (The Quaternion) has identified a Galatians (2:2-4, 5-6) manuscript for sale on eBay, here.  I am going to make sure we archive the image here in Münster.  Thanks, Brice!   I have to disagree with Jones, Suciu and Choat on what Brice qualifies as a "likely" dating of the papyrus.  Correctly, one could argue that our datable 4th-5th century Coptic codices have documentary qualities such as this, but the inverse assumption is dangerous and factually untenable.  In other words, we should not assume that all Coptic codices from later centuries must resemble those  high-quality monastic codices of Sohag, Hamuli and Saqqara, and that no later codices were written with documentary qualities.  I am hoping that younger scholars will be conservative than previous generations, and will avoid dating Coptic (and Greek) manuscripts to the 4th-5th centuries just because they are ugly and written on papyrus.  I would need to examine further samples, but epsilon and kappa have traits here that may reflect Alexandrian majuscule influence -- indicating a likely date later than the 6th century (contra alpha, which is clearly following a Biblical majuscule style).

Could this be a writing exercise?  Consider the spelling anomalies which Brice mentions, and I note also the spelling ⲧⲉ which has been corrected to ⲇⲉ.  The ductus suggests documentary qualities (epsilon's horizontal stroke, position of tau, eta written with one continuous stroke).

With regard to the Turkish seller, I have been wondering if this is the source for the Green foundation papyri.