The Chester Beatty Library Expedition: Guestpost by Peter Malik

The following is a report by Peter Malik, who was invited to join the CSNTM expedition to photograph the Chester Beatty papyri – photos which have just been published on-line (see previous post). A nice videoclip from the expedition in which Peter appears has also been published by the CSNTM.

* * *

At the end of July 2013, I was privileged to join the CSNTM team led by Dan Wallace and spend a couple of days (July 29–31) at Chester Beatty Library, studying P47, the earliest extensive manuscript of the book of Revelation. The invitation to join was due to friendly supportive efforts of one of the ETC’s Blogmeisters, Dr. Tommy Wasserman, who—without my prior knowledge of his cunning plans (!)—essentially set everything up, so I could come to CBL and study the MS while Dan and his team would be shooting it.

Besides simply being interested in the NT MSS in general and in the early papyri in particular, the main reason why I went to CBL to inspect P47 is that this MS is the main subject of my doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Peter M. Head (the other Blogmeister). Quite surprisingly, very little has been written on P47. Royse (Scribal Habits, 359) tells us that “[t]here have been remarkably few studies devoted to P47, and most of the attention given to it has concentrated on its textual relationships,” and Parker (Introduction, 234) further observes “[t]here seems to be no thorough palaeographical study of this codex.” Hence, I decided to take this challenge (at this partially) and take a closer look to see if more could be said about this MS, its scribe, and its text.

During my brief stay, I tried to check the discrepancies I found (having studied the images at VMR) especially in the editio princeps, Comfort & Barrett, and Royse. From the high-resolution images and, moreover, from the autopsy it soon became clear that much more can be seen in the MS than from Kenyon’s great, but dated edition.

Besides having fun with simply seeing the real thing in its own right, main highlights of the trip included several unspotted corrections (mostly of one letter), being able to observe much more transparent signs of scribal re-inking (at times virtually untraceable in the editio princeps, though now quite clearly visible in the images), and Dan’s kind offer to make microscopic and UV photographs of the more problematical spots. All I can say now is that I’ve got a lot of material to work with, and I know already that I’ll have to come to CBL again! I also can’t forget to mention that the new images produced by the CSNTM folks (finally on both white and black backgrounds) are of much superior quality to those made previously, so there’s a lot to be excited about in that regard as well.

Overall, it was all great fun. Among others, I owe my gratitude to those above mentioned folks, who made this trip possible, including my supervisor, who encouraged me to pursue this project as well as to see the MS. I also thank my college (Peterhouse) for providing all the necessary funding.

News from CSNTM: Chester Beatty Papyri On-line

PRESSRELEASE FROM CSNTM:

We are pleased to announce that as of Nov 8, high-resolution digital images of the Chester Beatty Papyri have been posted online at csntm.org:

http://csntm.org/News/Archive/2013/11/8/ChesterBeattyPapyri

These papyri are among the oldest manuscripts of Paul's letters, Mark's Gospel, and the book of Revelation, as well as some of the oldest copies of the Septuagint.


Daniel B. Wallace, PhD
Executive Director
Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
www.csntm.org

Call for Papers: Culture in Christian Egypt 284-641 AD

An invitation to a conference in Egypt, Cairo 1-2nd April 2014 about "Thought and Culture in Christian Egypt 284-641 AD.
It will be hold at Ain Shams university, Faculty of Arts. Fees of the conference are 250$. The organizing committee will offer 3 days free accommodation (breakfast and lunch), transfer from and to the Airport, and file of the conference. The accommodation will be at the Guest House of the university (single or double rooms with bath).
The themes of the conference are: The Political thought. The religious thought. Arts and culture. The literary and papyrological sources. Abstracts must be sent by 20th December 2013 and the complete papers by 20th March 2014 . Contacts: Professor Dr. Tarek M. Muhammad. e.mail: tarekmansour@art.asu.edu.eg or tarekmansoureg@yahoo.com
Languages of the conference are Arabic and English. [From Papy-List]

Textual History and the Reception of Scripture in Early Christianity

SBL Press recently announced the following volume:

Johannes de Vries and Martin Karrer, editors, Textual History and the Reception of Scripture in Early Christianity: Textgeschichte und Schriftrezeption im frühen Christentum (Septuagint and Cognate Studies 60; Atlanta: SBL, 2013).

According to the publisher’s description, “The essays in this volume summarize an international research project on early Christian citations from Israel’s scriptures. These quotations are not only theologically significant but are also part of the textual history of the Septuagint and adjacent textual traditions of the Greek and Hebrew Old Testament. The essays discuss relevant manuscripts (Bible codices, papyri, etc.) up to the fifth century, signs and marginal notes (e.g., the diplé) that were used in the ancient scriptoria, and the specifics of the reception history in early Christianity from Matthew to 1 Peter and from the apostolic fathers to Theophilos of Antioch.” The front matter, including “Table of Contents” and the “Introduction,” are available at: http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/060460P-front.pdf. 

The volume is one product of a working group based at Wuppertal. Other results include a publically-accessible database (www.kiho-wb.de/lxx_nt,) which, according to the Introduction, “lists the New Testament quotations and the related texts from the Septuagint / Hebrew Bible based on the oldest available manuscripts (papyri and main codices up to the 4th and 5th century). It integrates the notations of the quotation markers (introductory formulas, diplés) and lists the parallels to the quotations from those scriptures additionally incorporated into the great codices of the 4th and 5th centuries (Barn., 1/2Clem., Herm.). The original authors and editors of the main codices are represented in separate lines. The net result is a comprehensive tool for examining the origin of the Biblical canon, one which helps elucidate the textual development as it began with the oldest witnesses and concluded with the latest (sometimes Medieval) emendations.” (p. 7). This promises to be a very useful and time-saving database.

A notable conclusion (with considerable implications) reached by the working group is that “the New Testament had less of an influence over the Septuagint than the earlier scholars had assumed. The transmission of the books of the Septuagint and the New Testament occurred, in large measure, independently to at least the 5th and 6^th centuries” (p. 8).

British Library post Images of Early Christian texts on papyrus

The British Library has posted some nice images recently (announced here).

Egerton Papyrus 2 (P. Lond. Christ. 1/P. Egerton 2, the Egerton Gospel)

 

Papyrus 1531 (P. Oxy. IV 654, fragment of the Gospel of Thomas)

Papyrus 2052 (P. Oxy. VIII 1073, fragment of the Old Latin Genesis)

The other day after a lecture one of the students gave me a gift: 

So it is interesting to note that both Roberts' edition of P. Ryl. Gk. 457 (P52) and Dodd's very full study of P. Egerton 2 (published the year before in 1935) were published in the same issue of BJRL. This is a kind of picture of the fact that the increasing amount of canonical NT material on papyrus has been matched by an increasing amount of non-canonical material preserved in the same sources. 

It is also interesting that despite the ticks on the front cover the articles have never been read here (the pages are still uncut).

 

Reply to Parker's Review of The Early Text(s) of the New Testament

I have recently read David Parker's review of The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. Hill and Kruger; OUP, 2012) with great interest, since I have contributed to that volume with an essay. The review has just published in the current Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 64/2 (October) 2013, pp. 642-45.

However, I became suprised with the generally negative critique, although Parker concludes with the reservation that, "These shortcomings in the conception of the volume should not deter anyone from reading and benefiting from individual contributions to which it has given rise."

Parker brings up three main critical points in his review, and I will attempt to give a response to each of them in this blogpost, in particular to the second and third points, as they relate to my own contribution (I assume the editors Hill and Kruger will respond somewhere else, and speak for the whole volume and for their introductory chapter):

First of all, Parker complains that the focus of the volume is difficult to discern.  Whereas the editors say it "intends to provide an inventory and some analysis of the evidence available for understanding
the pre-fourth-century period of the transmission of the NT materials, some MSS in Section II are dated after 300 and Section III lack reference to third-century writers, in particular Origen."

I think Parker is correct about a lack of focus, which probably reflects the freedom given to each author. As the editors point out in the introduction, "the editors have not asked the individual authors . . . to endorse one approach or method over another" (p. 18). Further, Parker is entirely correct in his latter observation – there is an omission in terms of patristic authors. However, I do not understand the problem with including manuscripts (papyri) dated after 300, first because the dates themselves are seldom exact. Let me take an example from my own chapter where I write in a footnote concerning the dating of P110: "The first editor W.E.H. Cockle dates P110 to the 4th cent. but at the same time notes the similarity of script to P45 (3rd cent.) and P. Flor. II 108 (ante c. 260). The evidence points to the first half of the 4th century" (p. 87, table 5.1, note j).

Further, I am certain that Parker is aware of the importance of tracing textual trajectories between the early papyri and later MSS. For example, it would be a serious omission to speak about the early text of Luke and John (chs. 7-8), while not mentioning Codex Vaticanus (B 03) because of its date after 300.

Parker's second point is as follows:

The book does not address methodology for comparing and analysing the witnesses, beyond adopting the terminology of the Aland handbook as updated in its second edition and by Barbara Aland in an article of 2002 (manuscripts are listed under the categories of ‘Strict’, ‘At Least Normal’, ‘Normal’, ‘Free’, and ‘like D’ on p. 11).

Parker then proposes that Hill and Kruger have confused this method with the Coherence Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) – "a serious misunderstanding" – when they refer to it as the "Münster approach" to classify early manuscripts "in three major groups" (although the editors are well aware of the CBGM to which they refer on p. 8 n. 38).

To this I would reply that one thing does not have to exclude the other.  The Alands' approach to analyzing early, in particular small, papyri and categorize them as "strict," "normal," or "free" should not be seen as a relic from the past now made redundant by the CBGM. In fact, Barbara Aland's last doctoral student, K. S. Min used the method to analyze over a dozen papyri in his excellent dissertation on the earliest transmission of the Gospel of Matthew, published in 2005 in the ANTF series (a series now edited by Parker). By that time the CBGM had been applied for many years. Arguably, this method of analysis, as described by Barbara Aland in the Festschrift for Delobel, New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Leuven, 2002), pp. 1-13, and elsewhere, can justifiably also be labeled a "Münster approach" (although I would personally avoid it).

To take this one step further, one could actually question whether the other Münster approach, now in vogue, the CBGM, is a suitable tool for analyzing the text of fragmentary papyri. As Gerd Mink, the inventor of the method himself states in a very helpful essay, "Problems of a Highly Contaminated Tradition: The New Testament. Stemmata of Variants As a Source of a Genealogy for Witnesses,” in Studies in Stemmatology II (ed. Pieter van Reenen, August den Hollander and Margot van Mulken; Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2004), 71:

Badly fragmented witnesses certainly present a very special risk. The genealogical relationship between a fragmentary witness and another witness is determined on the basis of its limited text supply. As the distribution of prior and posterior variants in a text can be very different it is possible that an entirely different picture would have resulted from the complete witness, if it had been preserved. 

It is perhaps not a coincident that it is possible to exclude fragmentary MSS when running the CBGM software. In an extensive presentation (downloadable here) of his method as applied to the Catholic Letters, Mink explains further how the method does not take fragmentary MSS into account, and it seems like many papyri actually fit the criterion he indicates:

The pre-genealogical and genealogical data used rests upon the entire corpus of the Catholic Letters (not upon single writings). When agreements with a given witness are checked or potential ancestors are searched for, smaller fragments are excluded. Smaller fragments are those which share less than 50% of the variant places in the given witness.

Hence, when Eldon J. Epp in his important essay "Textual Clusters: Their Past and Future," in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (eds. B. Ehrman and M.W. Holmes; NTTSD 42; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 564, asks what is the appropriate method for identifying the D-cluster ("Western" text), he questions the usefulness of the CBGM, since it does not take into account fragments (the D-cluster contains the fragmentary P38 and P48).

On the other hand, Epp gives a rather positive evaluation of Alands' system of classification for the papyri in another essay in the same volume, "The Papyrus Manuscripts of the New Testament," in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 27, 

Yet, this classification system, with its considerable relativity, is not without value, for it reflects the general scribal process. For example, the close textual relationship between P75 and Codex B . . . does show a 'strict' connection with their respective exemplars–and with others along that line of transmission.

The final and probably most severe point of criticism in Parker's review concerns the second section of the volume, including my own essay:

I find it really remarkable, and a serious flaw, that none of the contributors to Section II seems to pay attention to, or in some cases even to be aware of, the Text und Textwert series (I except the chapter on the catholic epistles). These volumes make it possible to compare a witness with any other witness in a systematic manner, and to take an important step towards an overview of the textual history of a work. They are far more valuable, since they provide hard facts, than the Aland categories. The first volumes were published in 1987. How can what purport to be articles dealing with contemporary scholarship ignore them?

I have several objections to this harsh criticism, especially if it is applied to my own essay, "The Early Text of Matthew" (pp. 83-107). First of all, in my introduction, I explicitly point out that "numbers and percentages are more important than corresponding labels like "free," "normal," and "strict" and that "the validity of the results ultimately depends on the size of the sample and the specific nature and pattern of textual variation–variants should be weighed as well as counted" (p. 84). In my opinion, I use a proper method providing facts as hard as they can be in this business.

More importantly, I do not see how I could have used Text und Textwert in order to analyze most of these small papyri. When I wrote my chapter, I of course had to relate it to Min's recent and extensive examination of the Matthean papyri, and I felt that I could improve on some aspects, and in a few cases I came to slightly different conclusions regarding the classifications. But then I basically had to use the same method on the material.

In Min's case, Barbara Aland, director of the very institute that produced the Text und Textwert series, apparently did not see the need to use that tool either, because Min never refers to it in his monograph, as far as I can tell. Instead, as I have pointed out, Min uses the method of analysis which Aland continued to develop and describe (long after the development of the CBGM and the Textwerttool).

If we turn to one of the most significant examinations of NT papyri, that of James R. Royse in his magnus opus, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (NTTSD 36; Leiden: Brill, 2008), he does not use the Text und Textwert tool either, as he analyses six of our most significant and extensive papyri. On the contrary, he is entirely occupied by examining how well the scribe copied the exemplar. In his introductory chapter on methodology, we may further note that he gives a rather positive evaluation of Barbara Aland's method of analysis (pp.60ff), although he chooses to analyze the singular readings only (which is particularly useful when dealing with larger papyri).

In Parker's recent essay, “Understanding How Manuscripts are Related” in Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament. The Lyell Lectures, Oxford, Trinity Term 2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65-100, in which he describes ways of understanding relationships between MSS, he does not explicitly mention the Text und Textwert tool (although the index claims so), albeit there is a brief reference to "comparison of textual data in test passages in the Gospels." Instead, he rightly focuses on the CBGM, referred to as the "Münster Method."

Apparently, Parker concentrates on the method he thinks is most useful to apply to the material in order to solve the research question. In my own essay in the volume under review, I have tried to do the same thing. I did not mention (nor used) the Text und Textwert tool because I preferred to use a different "Münster method" which I find more suitable for analyzing early (and mostly fragmentary) papyri.

I sum, I think Parker is correct when he identifies a general lack of focus in the volume under review; this is because the individual authors were given great freedom in terms of method and approach. Further, Parker has rightly identified the omission of references to third-century writers (e.g., Origen), but I object to the other points of criticism.