By Brent Nongbri

What exactly do we know about the earliest Christian manuscripts?  Where do they come from?  How old are they?  How is it that we know this information?  While these issues might seem like the kind of puzzles specialists would have solved long ago, in fact they are live questions very much in need of answers. For the last several years, I have been working on a monograph that provides an up-to-date introduction to the major collections of the earliest Christian books. As a result of my research, I have established that much of what we thought we knew about these manuscripts is mistaken.

While biblical scholars have done a thorough job studying the texts contained within our earliest Christian manuscripts, there has been much less attention dedicated to thinking about these books as three-dimensional archaeological artifacts.  Our most important early Christian manuscripts were found as parts of ancient collections of books, but most scholarship neglects this context in favor of the isolated study of individual manuscripts, or even individual texts within a single manuscript. This lack of consideration of the context of the books’ discoveries has resulted in implausibly early dates being assigned to a number of important manuscripts.  In fact, despite the useful data sometimes provided by other factors such as the archaeological context of the collections, the codicology of the manuscript (its size and layout), and the binding techniques used to assemble the books, early Christian manuscripts are most frequently dated only by means of palaeography (i.e., the comparative analysis of handwriting) which is a problematic enterprise. Much of my work over the last few years has been an attempt to rectify this situation and to increase our appreciation for early Christian books by showing that they are more than just carriers of texts.

Establishing Dates

One of the great difficulties of working with early Christian manuscripts is that it is often hard to know when they were produced. While many Greek manuscripts written after the eighth century contain colophons (notes from scribes reporting the date when the manuscript was copied), earlier manuscripts lack such information and must be dated by other means. By far, the most common method for assigning a date to an undated literary manuscript is palaeography. While the comparative analysis of handwriting can place a manuscript’s composition within a broad range of dates (say, one or two centuries), palaeography relies on a number of questionable assumptions about how handwriting styles change. And when it comes to biblical manuscripts, palaeography is often deployed as though it could achieve far more precision than is actually warranted by the limited body of comparative evidence, with some scholars suggesting that a manuscript could be placed in a 25-year window on the basis of handwriting alone. Going back to 2005, I’ve written a series of articles challenging the way scholars have used palaeography in assigning dates to specific manuscripts and pointing out the highly subjective nature of the enterprise. One might think that these matters could now be settled by the use of radiocarbon analysis. To some extent, this is true, and more radiocarbon dating would be ideal. But, while the basic science behind radiocarbon dating is sound, the reporting of the results is sometimes not as careful as it should be. For that reason, sometimes radiocarbon testing can lead to as many questions as answers. Even here, there is still more work to be done.

“Trashy” Christian Books

Determining the dates of manuscripts can sometimes be easier if they have been scientifically excavated and have a clear archaeological context. Unfortunately, it is only in the last century or so that this kind of detailed archaeological work has become the norm. In earlier times, record keeping was less rigorous and precise find spots of artifacts have often been lost. But when we know that early Christian manuscripts were dug from specific sites, we can still gain some helpful context for understanding them. One such site is the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Oxyrhynchus was occupied from Pharaonic period, but it really flourished during the Christian era. Little remains now of the ancient city, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the large trash mounds inside and outside the city walls were excavated, and hundreds of thousands of fragments of papyrus and parchment were recovered. Most of these fragments contained “everyday” writing: receipts, letters, tax documents, etc. But many contained literature, both classical works and Christian material. My forthcoming book will contain the first comprehensive survey of the Christian literature recovered from Oxyrhynchus. Much of the material remains unpublished, but over 150 pieces of Christian literature are known to have come from the site. The profile can reveal some of the reading habits of Oxyrhynchite Christians. The most popular texts were the Gospel according to Matthew (15 copies) and the Gospel according to John (14 copies). The next item on the list, however, is a bit of a surprise—the Shepherd of Hermas (10 copies). These scriptures came in all shapes and sizes. We have leaves from large format books (as much as 30 cm tall and 22 cm wide) and leaves from books that were less than 9 cm tall. Some were copied by writers of limited skill, while the handwriting of other samples rivals that of the finest specimens that have survived from antiquity. And we can see that these scrappy remains often must have come from substantial volumes, such as some fragmentary leaves of 1 and 2 Thessalonians known as P.Oxy. 13.1598. The fortunate preservation of two page numbers lets us know that these leaves occupied pages 207-210 of this codex, so it must have contained more texts, probably a collection of Paul’s letters. And it’s also fascinating to remember that these fragments were found in the ancient trash heaps. These were scriptures that people had thrown out along with other household garbage. So, another part of my study has been the archaeology of the trash heaps. I have been working through archival records in order to reconstruct the archaeology, and to establish which manuscripts were found together in the same context. There is more work to do in this area, but the results promise to be interesting.

Deluxe Christian Books

While the majority of the remains of early Christian books are highly fragmentary bits like the scraps from Oxyrhynchus, a few of our earliest manuscripts do survive in a remarkable state of preservation. Among these examples are several books in the collection assembled by the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer (1899-1971). A number of these books, now preserved at the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, are complete or nearly so. Many of the books resemble each other in terms of format and handwriting and seem to have been part of a single ancient collection of books from somewhere in Upper Egypt. But because these books emerged from the antiquities market, one of the challenges is figuring out which of these books belonged to the ancient collection. In this case, we don’t really know anything about the actual excavation of the books, so we must turn to “museum archaeology,” going over acquisition records and tracing the activities of the antiquities market, along with close study of the manuscripts themselves, to try to establish the provenance of the books. At present, it seems that about 20 books at the Foundation belong to this ancient collection. Because the books are so well preserved, we also have the opportunity to look at their contents in greater detail. They present sometimes surprising combinations. One parchment codex probably of the fourth or fifth century contains the Gospel according to Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Romans in Coptic. Another papyrus book in Greek perhaps copied in the third or fourth century contains parts of the biblical book of Daniel and book 6 of the historian Thucydides. One of the most famous pieces in the collection is a papyrus codex of the Gospel according to John in Greek known to specialists as P.Bodmer II. It created a sensation when it was published in the late 1950s both because of its excellent condition and because of the date to which the editor assigned the codex: “about the year 200.” Subsequent scholars would argue it could be as early as the first half of the second century, just decades after the composition of the gospel itself. It was thus regarded as an extremely early witness to the text of John’s gospel. But these dates were all based on comparative analysis of handwriting. The type of work I have been doing is trying to recontextualize P.Bodmer II and others as a part of the larger ancient collection. For example, the pages of P.Bodmer II are roughly square in shape, about 16 cm high and 14 cm wide, and in fact nine other books in the Bodmer collection are also about 14-16 tall and 14-16 cm wide. These books are usually assigned to the fourth or fifth centuries. Furthermore, the handwriting of P.Bodmer II has a number of similarities with the handwriting of another work that seems to be part of the same find, a copy of the martyrdom of Phileas—a text that must have been copied at some point after the death of Phileas, which took place in 305 CE. So, both the handwriting and the page format of P.Bodmer II would be at home in the fourth century. If this dating is correct, then the assessment of the text-critical value of this copy of John’s gospel will need to be revisited. In the course of these studies at the Fondation Martin Bodmer, I’ve also made some fun incidental breakthroughs, including the discovery of a lost leaf from an early papyrus copy of the paschal sermon of Melito of Sardis and the identification of papyrus fragments of the work of the playwright Menander.

Digital Humanities, Actual Books

Another result of this work is an ongoing collaboration with the Fondation Martin Bodmer and the University of Geneva’s Bodmer Lab to digitize all of their early Christian papyrus and parchment manuscripts and make them freely available online. At this point, we have produced catalogue entries for all of the manuscripts and hope to see the website go live in March of 2018. Writing the catalogue entries for these books meant that I had gain a thorough understanding of ancient book production. So, while I was spending a good deal of time in the library trying to learn all I could on the topic, you also may have seen me in my office with a needle and thread, working to build models of ancient books using genuine materials (papyrus, goat skin, reed pens, etc.). To build a book from scratch forces you to understand everything about its construction—all the decisions that the book maker had to face and all the potential things that can go wrong when making a book! This first-hand knowledge of book-making also helps when working with fragmentary material (like the Oxyrhynchus papyri). It becomes much easier to look at the scrappy remains and imagine the whole book from which these broken leaves must have come.

I have also tried to pass on these skills, along with an increased awareness of these earliest Christian artifacts in general, to a younger generation of scholars. In an intensive PhD course I recently offered here at Aarhus, a group of doctoral students closely studied several of the most important collections of early Christian books before spending a day working with ancient materials to copy texts and make miniature papyrus codices. I have very much enjoyed this environment of international collaboration during my time here in the Department of Theology at Aarhus.