Jewish and Christian Books in the First Millennium in Indiana

David Lincicum, Hildegund Müller, and Jeremiah Coogan are running a working group at Notre Dame on Jewish and Christian Books. Jeremiah tells me the group is open to all comers and that if you RSVP soon enough, you may even get free lunch! What’s not to love? (Except the polar vortex sweeping Indy right now.) Here’s the info:

Overview 

Books do more than contain texts. They are objects, always implicated in economic, ritual, and readerly matrices of production, collection, and use. We never encounter texts disembodied, apart from the material constraints and paratextual interventions that enable their physical existence. Nor do books read themselves. They are manipulated by reading communities with specific reading practices.

This working group seeks to develop an ongoing conversation about material texts and reading practices in Judaism and Christianity of the first millennium CE. Christian and Jewish communities have often oriented themselves around books and reading. Attention to material texts thus enriches our understanding of both traditions and their interactions with one another.

The group is organized by David Lincicum, Hildegund Müller, and Jeremiah Coogan. For further information or to be included on the working group mailing list, please contact Jeremiah Coogan (jcoogan2[at]nd.edu).

Spring Schedule

• 25 January | Book Discussion: Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) | 12–1.30pm in 106 O’Shaughnessy 
• 15 February | Andrew King (Notre Dame), “The Big Data of Intertextuality and the Book of Deuteronomy” | 12–1.30pm in 106 O’Shaughnessy 
• 1 March | Hildegund Müller (Notre Dame), “The Early Transmission of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos” | 12– 1.30pm in 106 O’Shaughnessy 
• 12 April | Paul Wheatley (Notre Dame), “Behind the Veil of Translation: Onomastics, Interpretation, and Revelation” | 12–1.30pm in 106 O’Shaughnessy 
• 31 May | Conference: “The Material Gospel” (details forthcoming) Lunch will be provided for midday seminars; an opportunity to RSVP will be sent to the working group mailing list.

The Source of Scott Carroll’s Mummy Masks?

Image source

Brent Nongbri has been writing some very good posts lately on his blog about Scott Carroll and the papyri he has been showing at various events. But today, Brent has followed that with an even more startling post exploring where Scott Carroll got all those infamous mummy masks from.

Readers of this blog will remember that Carroll claimed, in our comments section, that Dirk Obbink tried to sell him a “first-century Mark,” a claim the Egypt Exploration Society has strongly denied ever since. But many of us wondered why Carroll would make such a thing up. Well, now Nongbri has found Scott Carroll also claiming that Christ Church Oxford, where Obbink works, is a source of those mummy masks. Here is Brent’s conclusion:

In any event, the close association between Pattengale, Carroll, and Professor Obbink (as well as the Green Collection and Oxford) has long been known, and Professor Obbink appears to still be on the Museum of the Bible payroll. What was news to me was Carroll’s suggestion that Oxford was a source of the mummy masks that he was purchasing (his usual practice in describing provenance in these more recent videos is to say the material comes from “families” looking to sell things).

Scott Carroll has also suggested that Professor Obbink offered at least one artifact from the Egypt Exploration Society’s collection for sale (the Oxyrhynchus papyrus P.Oxy 83.5345, a fragment of the Gospel According to Mark). Professor Obbink and the Egypt Exploration Society have both denied Carroll’s claims in regard to that papyrus. Now we would seem to be in a similar situation with regard to the Green Collection mummy masks, in that all we really have connecting the Green Collection masks to Oxford is the word of Scott Carroll. And once again, it is the Green Collection and the Museum of the Bible that could shed light on these questions by offering some transparency in their acquisition records for these artifacts.

You can read the full post with what Brent has been able to piece together from videos and online matter. 

The ‘Anonymity’ of Hebrews in Minuscule 104

The NA27 has a helpful feature that was sadly removed from the NA28 and that is a selection of subscriptions to the NT books. These often contain information about authorship and even the location of writing. In preparing to teach Hebrews, I noticed this particular subscriptio cited for minuscule 104. According to NA27, the subscriptio for Hebrews reads: πρ[ος] Ε[βραιους] εγ[ραφη] Εβραιστι απο της Ιτ[αλιας] ανονυμως δ[ια] Τιμ[οθεου], or “to the Hebrews, written in Hebrew from Italy anonymously through Timothy” (cf. Clement acc. Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.14.2–4).

A number of other manuscripts include the reference to Italy and to Timothy but, so far as the NA27 goes, only 104 adds that it was written in Hebrew and anonymously so. It’s that last part about anonymity that grabbed my attention and turned me to the manuscript. GA 104 is also known as BL Harley MS 5537 and, per the BL catalog, was copied by Ioannes Tzoutzounas (Ἰωάννης Τζουτζούσας), hieromonk of the Asekretis Monastery in Artanion, in May 1087. When I checked the images of the manuscript, however, I found to my surprise that Hebrews is anything but anonymous. On the first page of Hebrews, the book is clearly titled “Epistle to the Hebrews by the Apostle Paul (του αγιου Παυλου).” Turning to the end of the book, I found I wasn’t getting the whole story from the NA27 there either. Because the subscriptio also names Paul as the author.

If you zoom in, you can see the full subscriptio is του αγ(ιου) απο(στολου) Παυλ(ου) επιστολ(η) προς Εβραιους εγραφη Εβραιστι απο της Ιταλιας ανονυμως δια Τιμοθ(εου), or “by the holy apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews, written in Hebrew, from Italy anonymously through Timothy.”

The obvious problem here is how something can be called “anonymous” when we’re told who the author and the amanuensis (?) are! A check of the dictionary (in this case, Brill’s GE), offers a solution in that the adverb ἀνωνύμως simply means “without a name.” That definition would fit well with the book of Hebrews, which never names its author within the text. (There’s a side lesson here about the danger of “false friends.”)

A couple of observations. The first may be obvious, but it is that the scribe’s own subscriptio requires that we clearly distinguish between the text and paratext of Hebrews. The rubrication and accompanying decoration do that too, of course. But it’s surprising to see that the subscriptio itself doesn’t make sense unless we keep that distinction firm. The text of Hebrews is ἀνωνύμως (without a name) whereas the very paratext that tells us this, just as clearly isn’t. Here the paratext is secondary—and must be read as such—otherwise it becomes self-contradictory.

The second observation is that this description should expand our conception of “anonymity.” ἀνωνύμως does not mean here that the author of the book is unknown; it means only that his name is unstated in the book itself. I draw attention to this because when it comes to other books like the Gospels and their alleged anonymity, we should not conflate unnamed authorship (ἀνωνύμως) with unknown authorship. For more on that matter, see Simon Gathercole’s recent article in JTS.

Beyond these two observations, I mostly thought it was a fun subscriptio and shows the unexpected things you learn when you go beyond the Nestle-Aland apparatus.

New Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary

By now, some of our ETC readers may have heard about a new venture that John Meade and I are co-directing at Phoenix Seminary called the Text & Canon Institute.

A number of confessional institutions in the U.S. have professors doing research on the Old or New Testament text, or work on the Biblical canon. But Phoenix Seminary seems unique to me in that we are doing detailed work in all three areas. The desire to leverage this unique combination for the church and the academy has led to this new Institute. The mission is to

encourage research and publication of scholarly work on the history of the canon and the text of the Bible (1) by fostering and supporting scholarly research, academic colloquia, conferences, and professional presentations on biblical and related ancient texts, traditions, languages, methods of textual criticism, and the history of the canon and (2) by serving the church through publications and public events that illuminate the integrity of the Bible’s textual history and canonization.

There is more info about the Institute here along with the list of our advisory board members, among whom are several ETC contributors. We hope to have more to announce in the near future, but for now readers can sign up to get updates at the previous link.

2019 Gorgias Book Grant

Win $500 of Gorgias Press titles through the 2019 Gorgias Book Grant

The Gorgias Book Grant is an important part of our efforts to support young scholars in the humanities. Every year, Gorgias chooses two graduate students to receive an award of $500 worth of Gorgias titles (each) for demonstrating excellence in their fields.

2019 Grant Field: Any field within the scope of Gorgias Publications
Application Deadline: May 31, 2019

Eligibility

1. Candidate must be enrolled in a graduate program (Master's or Ph.D.) in an accredited university or an institution of learning in the field of the grant.
2. Candidate must be a student in good standing.

Application Process

To apply, please email the following to Gemma Tully (gemma@gorgiaspress.com)

1. A letter indicating your interests in your field and plans for the future.
2. A two-page description of your thesis, or a one-page description of your course work in the case of course-based programs.
   Send the following items by mail to: Gorgias Press LLC, Book Grants Program, 954 River Rd., Piscataway, NJ 08854.
3. Official transcripts of the previous 2 years of university education. If the institutions you come from do not give out transcripts, please contact us to make alternative arrangements to satisfy this requirement.
4. Two letters of recommendations from professors familiar with your work (one must be your current supervisor in the field of the grant).

Please bear in mind that all documents, except for official transcripts, should be in English.

In order to be considered for the grant, please submit all documents by May 31, 2019 (snail-mail documents should be postmarked by the due date). We’ll announce the lucky winners in July 2019.

Coherence at 1 John 4.19

To follow up from yesterday’s post, here is the textual flow diagram and local stemma for 1 John 4.19/5 in INTF’s CBGM. Reading a = omit; b = αυτον; c = τον θεον; d = τον κυριον. 

In this diagram, none of the readings have perfect coherence as all show at least one witness needing a source outside its own attestation. In particular, reading a leads to b once and vice versa. But still, not bad coherence as a whole. Reading c has quite bad coherence, developing from b multiple times and maybe from a a few times as well. Reading d develops from b which is no surprise. Witness 6 is noteworthy in that it has close ancestors with reading b and c, suggesting that either could lead to the shorter reading as I said before. But 617 with reading b is closer and so more likely as a whole.

If we keep the same CBGM dataset but set the initial text (A) at this point to reading b instead of a, the coherence gets worse for a and becomes perfect for b. In short, more support for b and less for a.

To make things more interesting, here is the same attestation and local stemma but now from my custom version of the CBGM where the initial text (A) is defined as the Byzantine text across the entire Catholic Letters. Here we get perfect coherence for reading b and see it leading to the other three.

As with other types of evidence, the evidence from coherence is a balance of probabilities, but here it does give more support to reading b as the initial text than I expected it to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s enough to overturn other evidence for reading a, but it’s at least enough to make me reconsider it. It would be most ironic if this were a place where the CBGM supports Maurice Robinson’s Byzantine Priority position!