This will be the first of a few posts about some recent articles of mine that have just been published. The first is a piece jointly authored by AnneMarie Luijendijk and me. The full article is available (open access!) here:
It is the outcome of an excellent session that was part of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Cultural and Textual Exchanges: The Manuscript Across Premodern Eurasia, organized by Paul Dilley and his colleagues at the University of Iowa.
AnneMarie and I gave a general overview of Christian codices among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and then focused on two pieces, P.Oxy. 1 2, a papyrus bifolium containing the beginning of the Gospel According to Matthew in Greek and P.Oxy. 7 1010, a parchment leaf from a codex containing 6 Ezra.
In connection to P.Oxy. 1 2, we cleared up some confusion about the dimensions of the page (Aland and Turner disagreed on the width by a centimeter) and the contents of the bifolium (O’Callaghan misunderstood some physical features of the papyrus and reported incorrect information about its contents that has made its way into reference works). Finally, we explored the implications of a codicological reconstruction that would fold the bifolium in the direction opposite from that which is usually assumed, which would potentially make the piece the outermost bifolium of a single-quire codex.
For P.Oxy. 7 1010, we worked through the problem posed by the page numbering (or is it foliation?) on the leaf and revisited possible connections to a personal letter from Oxyrhynchus, P.Oxy. 63 4365.
It is always a pleasure to think about Oxyrhynchus materials with AnneMarie, and thanks to Paul for the invitation to participate in this seminar.
Variant Readings 