Review of The Story of the Bodmer Papyri

My review of James M. Robinson, The Story of the Bodmer Papyri: From the First Monastery's Library in Upper Egypt to Geneva and Dublin (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013; ISBN 9780227172780) has been published in Review of Biblical Literature:







The conclusion of the review:

Stories of manuscript discoveries are always exciting, and this account of one of the most valuable treasure troves of biblical and other manuscripts is no exception. In my opinion, Robinson convincingly establishes the connection between manuscripts in the Bodmer and Chester Beatty libraries as well as a number of other collections, primarily Mississippi, Cologne, and Barcelona. Although Robinson’s investigations in Egypt are likely to be influenced by rumors and exaggeration and the exact extent of the “Dishnā Papers” is impossible to establish, his main proposal of a common discovery is thoroughly backed up with documentation and hard evidence from the manuscripts themselves.

On the other hand, the book is poorly edited and betrays many traces of several layers of revision and scattered updates, not only by Robinson, who “composed the book two decades ago” from several earlier publications and new material, but, more recently, also by K. C. Hanson, who edited and published the book (vii). The resulting unevenness is all the more annoying in a book that presents the reader with many names, dates, and details about the manuscripts, which are repeated back and forth, sometimes with variation, which creates confusion.

For example, we are told in the introduction (6) that the Vatican Library was given P. Bodmer XIV–XV (P75) in 2007, a piece of information that may give the reader a sense that the book is brought up to date. In the next sentence, another manuscript is mentioned, “the Savery Codex (then the Crosby Codex of the University of Mississippi),”

 Read the whole review here.

An Amulet Referring to the Last Supper in John Rylands Library

The Daily Mail reports today (September 3rd, 2014) that Dr. Roberta Mazza, Research Fellow of the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester, recently made a significant re-discovery in the vaults of John Rylands Library. She found a papyrus amulet from Egypt dated to the sixth century. The apotropaic text was written on re-cycled papyrus (traces of a grain tax receipt have been identified on the reverse side with multispectral imaging). The amulet contains biblical passages from Psalm 78:23-24 and Matthew 26:28-30 and others. The text includes:

Our God prepared a sacred table in the desert for the people and gave manna of the new covenant to eat, the Lord’s immortal body and the blood of Christ poured for us in remission of sins.

The news story claims that this is the first example of an amulet referring to the Christian Eucharist in the context of (apotropaic) magic, which I assume is correct. However, several other statements are erroneous (as usual when things get in the media), for example:

The papyrus contains some of the earliest documented references to The Last Supper.

It is also one of the first recorded documents to use magic in the Christian context.

Some Christians still use passages from the Bible as protective charms, so the amulet marks the beginning of a trend in Christianity [my italics].

An image of the amulet is available here.

A variant unique to cited text

When a substantial chunk of the Bible is cited in some ancient work and within the manuscript tradition of this work new variants happen, do they count for anything? Well, at the very least they give us another fresh set of stuff to study.
Take this example from Kosmas Indikopleustes, citing Acts 17:26, εποιησεν τε εξ ενος παν εθνος ανθρωπων (He made out of one the whole human race):

The last word on line 2 is εποιησε, line 3 continues with τε εξ αιωνος παν εθνος αν̅ων (He made from eternity the whole human race). ενος (of one) and αιωνος (of eternity) differ phonetically only in the added syllable /o/ in the latter. Phonetics made the error easier, context did as well: the whole of the context is devoted to arguing that heaven is 'eternal'.

Image is from Plut. IX.28, but there is also another Kosmas manuscript with the identical error. Until we find a Greek biblical manuscript with this variant, most of us will never see this one again (except for the poor student who is going to study the text of Kosmas's bible - any takers?)

Doodling in New Testament manuscripts: 0189

Whilst preparing the slides for my paper at the BNTC conference for this coming Friday, I was delighted to find the oldest manuscript of Acts GA 0189 online. Normally I have some inkling of what is happening on a manuscript page, but what is happening in the upper margin on the recto (left of the page number) stumps me.

My best guess so far is that it is a dog with sunglasses.

Is there anyone with a more reasonable suggestion?

Postdoctoral job opening at ITSEE in Birmingham

Hugh Houghton who leads the COMPAUL project at ITSEE in Birmingham announces a job opening:

There is a vacancy for a postdoctoral research fellow to work on the COMPAUL project at the University of Birmingham, investigating the earliest commentaries on Paul as sources for the biblical text.

We seek a scholar with expertise in classical or biblical Greek, an interest in the New Testament and experience of working with electronic and online corpora. The principal duties will be the analysis of early Greek commentaries on Paul and the creation of a database of biblical quotations.
The research fellow will join an established team working in the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham.

The appointment will start from 1st October 2014, or as soon as possible thereafter. The post is initially for 12 months, with the possibility of extension.

I apologise for the very short notice, but the deadline for applications is: 7th September 2014.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to H.A.G.Houghton@bham.ac.uk
Applications must be made online through the portal at https://static.wcn.co.uk/company/birminghamuniversity/internet.html
A job description may be downloaded from http://www.download.bham.ac.uk/vacancies/jd/44515.pdf

I should point out that this is a terrific chance to join a leading team of specialists in New Testament textual criticism as well as electronic editing.

See also this previous post.

Greek Palaeography in Oxford

This is a guest post by Peter Gurry who just came home from the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography in Oxford:

* * *

Last week was the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography hosted by Lincoln College in Oxford. This year’s program was run by Georgi Parpulov and a small cadre of other instructors.

The program ran for five days and concluded with a review exam on Saturday morning. The students were organized into groups of nine with each group led by a seasoned palaeographer. The majority of time was devoted to deciphering various Greek hands starting with Codex Bezae and quickly jumping to manuscripts from the 8th–15th century (so almost all minuscules). My own group spent time with about 30 manuscripts and I assume most of the other groups were the same. The focus was decidedly on matters of palaeography and codicology, so there was very little translation.

Nigel Wilson giving hands-on instruction at Christ Church library.

The late mornings were spent at either Christ Church library or the Bodleian examining manuscripts of roughly the same time period as in our reading groups. We got to examine a number of Psalters and Gospel books but the highlight was seeing a book of patristic excerpts presented to Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) that had been commissioned by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. At something like 2.5 feet tall by 2 feet wide, I was told it was the largest Greek book in the Bodleian’s collection.

Georgi Parpulov explaining codices in the Christ Church library.

The evenings were given to lectures from Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Hugh Houghton (University of Birmingham), Ilse de Vos (King’s College London), and Elisabeth Jeffreys (Oxford).

Nigel Wilson opened the series with a lecture on “The Rewards of Palaeography.” The main reward, he said, was filling in some lacuna in our present knowledge by finding previously unknown texts such as the sermons of Origen found a few years ago or the Archimedes Palimpsest, by finding an older copy of a known text, or of correcting the work of previous scholars.

On Tuesday, Hugh Houghton gave an energetic talk on “Digital Editing and the Greek New Testament” that was meant to introduce the work being done on the Editio Critica Maior. He gave a brief overview of the CBGM and noted its role in helping establish the “earliest attainable text” (his term). He also gave us quick demos of the software currently being used at Birmingham to collate MSS and to construct variation units from those collations. If I heard correctly, the collation software is already implemented on the NT.VMR website, but this was the first I’ve seen of the additional software that they are using to demarcate variation units. One interesting feature I noted was that the software displays a warning message whenever the editor combines variants into a variation unit in such a way that it misrepresents one of the witnesses in that particular unit. It all looked quite impressive in the demo and I’m eager to know more about how it works. I was also interested to learn from Houghton that there are already plans to build a fresh version of the CBGM software at Birmingham as well. It will be worth watching to see what innovations such a project might produce; might we finally see a version that will allow others to construct their own local stemmata? Whether or not we can hope for such a development, there is clearly a very fruitful collaboration happening between text critics and computer scientists at Birmingham and we can all hope that continues. In all, I think Houghton did a great job presenting some of the developments happening in our discipline to text critics working on other texts. I left with the feeling that now is an exciting time to be working in this field.

On Thursday night, Ilse de Vos spoke to us on “Dealing with an Abundant Textual Tradition,” a talk which introduced us to her editorial work on the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem. This collection of 137 questions and answers about Christianity is extant in some 250 witnesses in Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Arabic, and several other languages. What caught my attention was how helpful she has found phylogenetic methods to be especially in tracing the textual transmission of the Quaestiones. Although she hasn’t been able to root her phylogenetic tree yet, she has been able to identify a number of different manuscript groupings and even to connect some of these groups to various translations. For her this has raised the question of whether her critical edition should focus on reconstructing the original Greek text of the Quaestiones or should instead focus on the Greek text from which some of the more interesting translations were made.

A Psalter

The final lecture was given on Thursday evening by Elisabeth Jeffreys on “Editorial Problems in Byzantine Homilies.” Jeffreys is currently working on an edition of the homilies of James of Kokkinobaphos which exists in two remarkably similar copies, often agreeing with each other even at the level of punctuation. It struck me as a good example of the kind of skill Byzantine scribes could achieve.

The week gave me a much greater respect for the discipline of palaeography and a much better sense of how such work is conducted. Particularly with the Byzantine period where so many dated manuscripts are extant, I can see little reason for skepticism about the dates offered by those who specialize in this discipline. All-in-all it was a great week and I would highly recommend that those interested in textual criticism take part the next time around. Many thanks to Georgi Parpulov and the other instructors for putting on such a valuable course.