New Series “Papyri and the New Testament”

I just discovered today that Brill has a new series called “Papyri and the New Testament” edited by Peter Arzt-Grabner, John S. Kloppenborg, and Christina M. Kreinecker. Here’s the publisher’s summary:

Papyrology has always interested scholars of the New Testament and of Christian origins, mainly because of the discovery of papyrus copies of texts from the Christian scriptures. However, what documentary papyri, ostraca, and tablets indicate about issues of everyday Greco-Roman life has also much to contribute to the understanding of early Christ groups. These issues include ancient economy and agriculture, labor and social relations, reading cultures, administration, and a variety of other topics. The PNT series is designed to introduce students and teachers to the value of this material. The volumes provide introductions, evaluations, and conclusions. Many documents are presented in their entirety with an English translation and commentary. The authors cover the state of papyrological research and supplement it with their own conclusions and updates, making the series also of interest to scholars of Papyrology, Biblical Studies, Ancient History, and Classics.

The first two volumes are scheduled for release this year.

The first volume is More Light from the Ancient East: Understanding the New Testament through Papyri edited by the series editors. The title is an obvious ode to the pioneering volume by Adolf Deissmann.

The first volume of the new series “Papyri and the New Testament” introduces students, teachers, and scholars to the value of the study of papyrological documents and their impact on the understanding of early Christ groups. Papyri, ostraca, and tablets document the social, economic, political, and multilingual circumstances of the Greco-Roman period and are the best sources for understanding New Testament times. Compared to the first studies devoted to this topic about 100 years ago, the amount of available material has grown twentyfold. In addition, the days have passed when papyri were found exclusively in Egypt: a significant number of texts from Israel, Syria, North Africa, Britain, Switzerland, and other Greco-Roman regions demonstrate that these sources shed light on general conditions throughout the Roman Empire. The volume both introduces the main issues of comparing papyri with New Testament texts and presents many comprehensive examples.

The second volume is Letters and Letter Writing by Peter Arzt-Grabner.

New Testament letters are compared with the private, business, and administrative letters of Greco-Roman antiquity and analyzed against this background. More than 8.000 letters – preserved on papyrus, potsherds or tablets from Egypt, Israel, Asia Minor, North Africa, Britain, and Switzerland – have been edited so far. Among them are not only short notes by writers with poor writing skills, but also extensive letters and correspondences from highly educated authors. They testify to the high art of Paul of Tarsus, who knew how to make excellent use of epistolary formulas or enrich them with new variants, but they also show that some New Testament letters clearly fall outside the framework of standard epistolography, raising new questions about their authors and their genre. The introductions and discussions offered in the volume reflect the current state of research but also offer new results. Over 130 papyrus and ostracon letters are newly translated in their entirety.

New Article on Revelation Papyri

P.Oxy. LXVI 4500 (GA 0308) 

By now, many of you will have been tired (or worse) of my yappings about Revelation manuscripts. I’m sorry, I can’t help it and, what doesn’t help matters, the text of Revelation also happens to be the main focus of my day job. Anyway, one of the disadvantages of working extensively on a single manuscript is that it’s easy to lose the sense of wider context—socio-historical, textual, material, etc. I certainly felt this way during my PhD and so, while working through my analyses of P.Beatty I did my best to get acquainted with the wider manuscript tradition, particularly its earliest strata. An off-shoot of these ancillary investigations was an extended seminar paper I gave at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal in 2016, followed by a much more condensed SBL paper last year. Especially in the latter, I tried to address some socio-historical claims that have been made concerning the papyri* of Revelation (individually and as a group). My main purpose, however, was to bring the evidence under fresh scrutiny and provide a general overview.

I’m happy to report that a revised version of the paper has just been published and I’m told it works magic if you have problems with insomnia: ‘The Greek Text of Revelation in Late Antique Egypt: Materials, Texts, and Social History’, ZAC 22 (2019) 400–21.

*Note that ‘papyri’ here is taken in the broader sense as used by papyrologists, thus including texts written on other materials as well. 

Trismegistos Words: New Tool for seaching Documentary Papyri

There is a new tool in town for searching morphological analysis of 5 million words in the Duke Database of Ducmentary Papyri. I’ve only been able to have a brief play around so far (on αὐθεντέω which has only five occurrences [4 of which are very late]), but I thought you might be interested to hear about this and try it out.

Trismegistos is pleased to announce a new database: TM Words (www.trismegistos.org/words). It contains the just under 5 million words contained in the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri. The new database is the result of work by Alek Keersmaekers, who started from the XML-version available on GitHub on 19 September 2016. He used a stochastic machine-learning approach for tokenisation, part-of-speech-tagging and lemmatization [I had to look all of these up too ;-)]. The accuracy is about 95%, which seems high, but also means that there are still about 250,000 errors of morphological interpretation in the database, some of which very obvious for humans. We would be very grateful if you would communicate errors you notice by giving us a ’thumbs-down’ and clicking the 👎 icon after each attestation. On the basis of that feedback we can improve the database further.

We have made the online version as user-friendly as possible, with many possibilities for filtering and automated weighed-dates charts. This obviously is very demanding for our server, and we hope that the system won’t crash as a result. In any case for some large datasets (very common words) you may need to wait half a minute or more.

A special feature is the possibility to look for attestations of words in specific genres of texts. This is only possible through cooperation with Joanne Stolk, who has undertaken a rough classification in the margin of her work on TM Text Irregularities.

Finally: all of this is only possible thanks to the existence of the DDbDP and papyri.info. In the future we hope to work together with them to share all information and make the lemmatisation available there as well. This will be a non-trivial matter, because of the dynamic nature of the text in the DDbDP. Nevertheless it is an urgently needed effort to prevent the creation of multiple versions of the same text. For that reason we will share all corrections as much as possible, and new readings should of course continue to be entered through the Papyrological Editor.

Lists of Greek New Testament Manuscripts on Wikipedia

One of our readers, Darrell Post, has made a magnificent update of the Wikipedia articles for the Greek New Testament manuscripts divided into papyri, uncials and minuscules (three parts). These pages promise to be great resources.

Papyri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

Uncials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_uncials

Here Darrell has indicated the manuscripts also photographed in UV light.

Minuscules (three articles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_minuscules_(1%E2%80%931000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_minuscules_(1001%E2%80%932000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_minuscules_(2001%E2%80%93)

Updates to the minuscule page include an additional pass through the column for digital images, adding light grey shading for microfilm images, tan color for high-resolution color images hosted locally but not available online, and then gold color for links to new high resolution color images available online.

The highest GA number is now 2936.

Some numbers have been stricken from the K-Liste. By Darrell’s count there are 2,847 distinct manuscripts numbered. Of those 2,847, nineteen have been classified as destroyed, and 53 are described as either lost or with an unknown owner. 

The new total is 2,775 minuscule script manuscripts that could be available for modern color imaging.

By Darrell’s count 553 of the 2,775 (or 20%) have now been color digitized (roughly 20%). A large number exist on microfilm, and these are available online now at the INTF or other hosting locations like the National Library of France or the Vatican Library.

In the course of his work, Darrell further reports that he has found two manuscripts shown as “owner unknown” on the K-Liste. The first is GA 2324, known as the Hoffman Gospels. Darrell found it among the Yale University collection here.

The other is 2771, which is Lambeth Palace Library MS2795 here.
Darrell has notified the INTF. 

Thank you Darrell for your hard work on this!

Looking for advice on “Categorizing MSS”

Good morning from St Paul, where we finally got some rain on our parched gardens,

I am re-writing a textbook for beginners on TC of the Bible. The OT part was pretty good, but the NT part needed to be re-done. I’m now in the section that introduces some of the important MSS. We only introduce the most commonly discussed ones and otherwise suggest to the reader to go to the other established resources like Metzger & Ehrman, Parker, Aland & Aland, and the GNTs.

Originally the book had charts, one each for the papyri, majuscules, and minuscules.

Here are the first lines of the papyrus chart:

Table 4.1: Important New Testament Papyri
Number	Date	Textual Tendencies	Contains	Name/Collection
𝔓1	3rd century	Alexandrian	Matt 1:1–9, 12, 14–20	P. Oxy. 2, Univ. of Penn.
𝔓4, 64, 67	Early 3rd century	Alexandrian	Portions of Luke and Matthew	P. Oxy. 208, British Lib., Oxford
𝔓13	Early 3rd century	Alexandrian	Portions of Heb 2; 10–12	P. Oxy. 657
𝔓20	Early 3rd century	Alexandrian	Jas 2:19–3:9	P. Oxy. 1171
𝔓22	3rd century	Independent	John 15:25–16:2, 21–32	P. Oxy. 1228
𝔓23	ca. 200	Alexandrian	Jas 1:10–12, 15–18	P. Oxy. 1229
𝔓24	3rd century	Alexandrian	Rev 5:5–8; 6:5–8	P. Oxy. 1230
𝔓27	Early 3rd century	Alexandrian	Portions of Rom 8–9	P. Oxy. 1355
𝔓29	Early 3rd century	Possibly Western	Acts 26:7–8, 20	P. Oxy. 1597

There are about 30 total papyri listed.

When I hit the papyrus chart I wrote the following to the editor:

“Table 4.1: Important New Testament Papyri. I find myself wondering if this ought to be included. The main reason for it would be to provide the textual tendency of many of the papyri, but most textual critics are now frowning on the over-simplicity of assigning each MS to a text type. If we don’t list the textual tendencies, I don’t really see a reason for the chart at all. We can refer the reader to the more extensive list of NT MSS in the back of the NA28. This would lead to a similar decision about the other charts for the majuscules, etc.”

He wrote back the following:

“I know tables and charts tend to oversimplify, and I want our text to address the text type categorization issue directly. However, there may still be heuristic value in identifying what text type those MSS have been traditionally associated with. That is, we are indicating the classification solely as a help for the reader who might come across those categorizations if they read previous scholarship on NT TC. Our text will prepare them for the reality that those are now not as widely accepted, but knowing of them may help them evaluate future work that appears stuck in the past methodologically.

“I think some of the charts are helpful but perhaps too long to include in the chapters themselves, so I was considering moving them to appendices. They could also be edited to not be presenting as “important papyri” but maybe more as “representative papyri.” That is, giving students a quick reference for well-known MSS.”

My request from you my colleagues is to hear not only your opinion on whether papyri ought to be categorized. I am going to try to talk him out of that. (Though his point about students encountering previous scholarship is valid.) But also whether such a chart is helpful in a book for beginners. Please stay in the beginners mindset when you evaluate this.

Responses much appreciated. Amy

PapPal: New Resource for Ancient Paleography

In a comment to the previous post on a reassessment of the date of the early NT papyri, Christian Askeland mentioned a new resource for the study of ancient paleography, PapPal, which certainly deserves to be mentioned in a main post. 

Here is the announcement by one of the developers, Rodney Ast of the Unveristy of Heidelberg: 

We are pleased to announce the launch of PapPal (www.pappal.info), an online resource for the study of ancient paleography.  The site currently gathers thumbnail images of over 2500 dated Greek documentary papyri from collections around the world, which can be displayed either in gallery or slideshow mode.  Links direct users to full images and further information at the host sites and to metadata and transcriptions at papyri.info.   At the moment, there are only a handful of ostraka included.  In the coming months we will be adding more of them, as well as dated Latin documents.   I hope that you will take some time to explore the site and send me your comments.
Work on this project has been made possible by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the context of the University of Heidelberg's Cultural Research Center 933.  Material Text Cultures: Materiality and the Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies, with further support from the Institute for Papyrology. 

Kind regards,
Rodney Ast

“Theological Palaeography”? Reassessment of the Dating of NT Papyri

A very controversial issue is the date of the early papyri of the NT. On his blog, Larry Hurtado summarizes a very important recent article on the subject of “theological palaeography”:

Pasquale Orsini & Willy Clarysse, “Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates: A Critique of Theological Palaeography,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 88 (2012): 443-74.

Abstract :The date of the earliest New Testament papyri is nearly always based on palaeographical criteria. A consensus among papyrologists, palaeographers and New Testament scholars is presented in the edition of Nestle-Aland, 1994. In the last twenty years several New Testament scholars (Thiede, Comfort-Barrett, 1999, 2001 and Jaroš, 2006) have argued for an earlier date of most of these texts. The present article analyzes the date of the earliest New Testament papyri on the basis of comparative palaeography and a clear distinction between different types of literary scripts. There are no first-century New Testament papyri and only very few papyri can be attributed to the (second half of the) second century. It is only in the third and fourth centuries that New Testament manuscripts become more common, but here too the dates proposed by Comfort-Barrett, 1999, 2001, and Jaroš, 2006 are often too early.

I have compiled a small table demonstrating that the critique for a general tendency to date early in “theological palaeography” is not applicable to the Nestle-Aland edition. In spite of some significant differences, we see that seven papyri or uncials are still dated potentially to the second century (P30, P52, P4+64+67, P90, P104, 0171, 0212) . However, now three papyri in the second-century range in NA, are dated to the third century by Orsini and Claryssee (P77, P98 and P103), one uncial in the second-century date in NA is assigned to the fourth century (0189). Conversely, Orsini and Claryssee assign two papyri and two uncials in the second-century range (P30, P4+64+67, 0171, and 0212) which NA has dated later. Perhaps the most significant difference here is 0171 which Orsini and Claryssee think is 125 years earlier!

GA no.	P30	P52	P4+64+67	P77	P90	P98	P103	P104	0171	0189	0212
N-A date	200–300	100–150	200–250	150–250	100–200	100–200 (?)	150–250	100–200	300–350	150–250	200–300
O-C date	175–225	125–175	175–200	250–300	150–200	200–250	200–300	100–200	175–225	300–400	175–225