The volume is the result of a workshop back in 2022 in which I was fortunate enough to participate. It was a somewhat unusual seminar in the sense that we were all assigned a topic to explore, and it turned out to be quite illuminating for me. I have a chapter in the book that is just called “Maintenance,” and it discusses the care of papyrus rolls from the point of production through the life of the roll. I have discussed some of these topics on the blog in the last few years with posts on such things as parchment covers for bookrolls, the storage of rolls, and the alleged stands for holding open scrolls. My chapter touches on these topics and also discusses things like repairs of papyrus rolls and the people who carried out such work.
This essay surveys the surviving evidence for the maintenance of books (papyrus rolls) from the Mediterranean world under Roman rule. After a discussion of an especially well-documented case of damage and repair of papyrus rolls in an archive in Roman Egypt, the essay turns to the steps taken during the manufacture of papyrus rolls to prevent such damage from occurring and the options for mending rolls when such damage occurred. This examination involves literary, documentary, and iconographic evidence that illustrates the storage, transportation, use, and repair of books. The essay closes with an investigation of what we can know about the people, both enslaved and free, who performed these tasks of maintenance. The surviving textual and material evidence that lets us see the results of this labor only rarely allows us to glimpse the people who carried out this work.
If you don’t have institutional access, send me a note, and I can send you an offprint.
Thanks to the editors for organizing this stimulating workshop and seeing the papers through to publication.
Detail of a sarcophagus of a Greek physician reading a papyrus roll with other rolls stored in a cabinet in the background; image source: The Met
Many of us had wondered who purchased the Crosby-Schøyen Codex when it was up for sale through Christie’s last year. Now we know (via an August 5th article by Emily Belz at Christianity Today):
“The Green Collection, connected to the Museum of the Bible, revealed that it purchased the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, which contains what is perhaps the earliest complete versions of Jonah and 1 Peter, at an auction last year.”
The article mentions plans to digitize the codex and make it available online.
Addendum (6 August 2025): I see the Museum of the Bible has its own announcement about acquiring the codex here.
A nearly complete bifolium of the Crosby-Schøyen codex; image source: CNN
The codex sold last year for a reported cost of £ 3,065,000 (about $3,900,000 USD at the time).
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:
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.
For some time now, the Rylands Library at the University of Manchester has hosted good digital images of P.Ryl. Gr. 3 457 (a.k.a. P52), the fragment of the Gospel According to John. I recently visited the University of Manchester’s LUNA viewer to see what the permissions currently were for these images, and it seems that the library made new images in 2019 and again in 2024 (the 2024 images seem to have been taken in normal light and on a light table).
These new images are excellent. One can really zoom in and see the details of the script and the surface of the papyrus.
I remember being thrilled with the digital images that the library supplied for me back in 2004, which were very good by the standards of the time. Thanks to the Rylands Library for keeping up with improving photographic technology.
Thanks to C.R. van Tilburg and Jean Putnams for sending scans of issues 10 and 11 of The Bulletin of the Bezan Club. Thanks also to John Muccigrosso for improving the quality of some of the pdf files.
These files now make the set complete. Thank you to everyone who contributed to making this resource available!
Thanks to Jean Putmans for tracking down a copy of volume 12 of The Bulletin of the Bezan Club. This, as far as I know, was the last issue of the Bulletin. The issue contains several comments that indicate another volume was expected (“Our next issue…” etc.), but it seems that it never appeared. I had assumed that events in Germany in 1938 had led to the dissolution of the Club. But I recently saw that Alessandro Falcetta, the biographer of Rendel Harris, has made an intriguing alternative suggestion:
“The twelfth issue of the bulletin was published in 1937. The secretary of the club, Plooij, had died in 1935 and had been replaced by Johannes de Zwaan of Leyden, a former student of Rendel’s at Woodbrooke. Several other members had also died, including Mingana, and obituary notices had almost become a fixed feature of the bulletin. Rendel had turned eighty-five and for the first time there was no contribution from him. He was no longer a driving force behind the club. Now, it was de Zwaan’s job to carry on the bulletin, but, though he had plans for a new issue, he never came to publish it. Probably, the reason was that the bulletin had to give way to a new enterprise. In 1937, during a conference in Edinburgh, de Zwaan met [with] Herbert G. Wood,… George Boobyer and other scholars. There he proposed to them the idea of forming a New Testament society. The following year, a number of scholars met at Carey Hall…and formalized the foundation of the Societas Novi Testamenti Studiorum (SNTS), of which de Zwaan was elected first president. The SNTS is today the most important association of its kind. One wonders whether de Zwaan had in mind the Bezan Club when he outlined his project in Edinburgh.”1
A second feature of volume 12 that stood out is a curious coincidence. The issue contains three articles by none other than Robert Eisler (1882-1949), whom I mentioned in a recent post in connection to his (baseless) identification of a marble bust in Copenhagen as a portrait of the Jewish historian Josephus. In the Bulletin, Eisler has written a (sort of?) obituary for Arthur C. Clark (1859-1937), Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1913-1934, an article on Paul and the “pillars” in Galatians, and an article on Acts 19:14. This seems to be Eisler’s first appearance in the Bulletin (he is not listed on the first page among the members of the Club).
A third interesting aspect of this volume is the last article: “The textual relations of Codex Bezae in Matthew by Miss Ad. H.A. Bakker.” This would be Adolphine Henriette Annette Bakker (1907-1984), author of A Study of Codex Evang. Bobbiensis (1933). She is listed among the members of the Club on the first page of this issue along with “Mrs. Sylva New-Lake,” i.e. Silva Tipple New Lake (1898-1983). So, it seems that by at least as early as 1937, the Club had admitted women as members.
The other issues of the journal can be found here.
Alessandro Falcetta, The Daily Discoveries of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter: A Biography of James Rendel Harris (T&T Clark, 2018), 455. ↩︎
On the early history of the SNTS, see this page and its link to an article by G.H. Boobyer. ↩︎
The seven-book composition by the historian Josephus describing the sacking of Jerusalem goes by different names in the Greek manuscript copies:
Περὶ ἁλώσεως
Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἱστορία περὶ ἁλώσεως
Ἰουδαϊκὸς πόλεμος πρὸς Ῥωμαίους
Josephus, Jewish War, beginning of Book 3 in BSB Cod.graec. 639 fol. 125v
In the Latin tradition, these books were known to Jerome as captituitas Iudaicae (Comm. in Isaiam 17), but the appear under the title De bello iudaico in the manuscripts (when they are not sequentially numbered as a continuation of the Antiquitates)
English editions settled on The Jewish War (or the The Judean War in the ongoing Brill edition).
Images (of varying quality) of several of the important Greek manuscripts of this work are available online.
The oldest manuscript by far is a fragmentary leaf of a papyrus codex usually said to have been produced in the third century, Vienna, Austrian National Library G 29810 Pap (MPER N.S. 3 36):
I’m very happy to report that my colleague Dr. Mina Monier has been awarded funding from the Research Council of Norway for a four-year project examining gospel harmonies, texts that weave together the narratives of the four canonical gospels. The project, Unconventional Gospels, will focus on the understudied gospel harmonies of eastern Christian churches.
In some ways, the article buries the lede. The The AI experiments mentioned in the title are interesting, but the most important material is certainly the new radiocarbon analysis of some 30 manuscripts. The actual radiocarbon data is absent from the article itself but is presented as one portion of a lengthy (95 page) appendix that is available here.
This is a very exciting study. The team carried out multiple analyses for each manuscript, so we can have a good degree of confidence in the results. There is also a detailed description of the cleaning and analysis procedures, which is a very welcome development that will be helpful in planning future AMS tests on parchment manuscripts. This is also (to the best of my knowledge) the first published report of direct CO2 analysis of parchment (which allows analysis of very small samples), so this is very exciting!
Of the 30 manuscripts tested, valid results were obtained for 26. The results were something of a surprise. In 17 of these 26 cases, there is at least some overlap between the palaeographic dates assigned by the editors of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series and the radiocarbon results, but in 9 cases (a third of the samples), there was no overlap at all. In most cases, the radiocarbon ranges are earlier than the proposed palaeographic dates. So, these results create some potential problems for the typology of Jewish scripts that is associated with Frank Moore Cross. Part of the problem is that Cross’s typology works with unrealistically narrow ranges, sometimes assigning scripts to intervals as small as 30 years (less than the working life of some scribes known from Egyptian data). If the palaeographic dates were expanded to a more sensible one-century range, there would be more overlap between the palaeographic dates and the radiocarbon results.
In terms of the individual results, the one that is really eye-catching is the analysis of 4Q114, a manuscript with portions of the book of Daniel:
As the authors write:
“Sample 4Q114 is one of the most significant findings of the 14C results. The manuscript preserves Daniel 8–11, which scholars date on literary-historical grounds to the 160s BCE. The accepted 2𝜎 calibrated range for 4Q114, 230–160 BCE, overlaps withe the period in which the final part of the biblical book of Daniel was presumably authored.”
This is quite interesting. Anyway, these are just my first impressions. There is a lot of useful data here that will take some time to digest.
I’ve written before about the reopening of the museum at Ostia Antica in 2024. One of my favorite displays there involves material from what is now known as Tomb E 200 from Isola Sacra–an interesting sarcophagus with equally interesting contents.
This sarcophagus was uncovered in 2008 on private property north of the excavated archaeological park at Isola Sacra. The Guardia di Finanza thwarted would-be looters, and the sarcophagus was excavated with its contents intact.
The Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra in situ in 2008; image source: Bondioli et al. 2018
The sarcophagus found inside a damaged structure and was set on its rear side with its front facing upward. The body inside the sarcophagus has been identified as that of a five or six year-old child. Among the materials inside were two gold rings, one of which is inscribed with Greek letters spelling out μυστικ on a foot-shaped bezel.
Inscribed gold ring from sarcophagus in Tomb E 200 at Isola Sacra; image: Brent Nongbri 2025
Inside the sarcophagus near the remains of the child’s head was a corroded bronze coin datable to the late first or early second century CE (a coin in the mouth for Charon?). There was also a bent iron nail, a type of artifact often found in Roman burials.
Both the sarcophagus and its lid are elaborately decorated with imagery relevant to the topic of manuscripts and readers. Although some imagery associated with reading is common on Roman sarcophagus reliefs (for instance, a bust of the deceased holding a closed papyrus roll), the density of the imagery on this particular sarcophagus is notable.
Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image: Brent Nongbri 2025
The central figure in the main relief on the front is Athena, who is flanked by the nine muses and Apollo. But it was the imagery on the short ends of the sarcophagus and the lid that really caught my eye.
The two short ends of the sarcophagus are especially rich. On one side, a seated figure on the left holds an open papyrus roll in one hand and reaches out to receive what looks like another papyrus roll from the outstretched hand of the seated figure on the right, who holds a closed papyrus roll in his other hand. In the center of the scene between the two figures is a case for holding papyrus rolls (a capsa or scrinium).
Left end of the Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image Brent Nongbri 2025
On the opposite side, two standing figures each hold papyrus rolls in their left hands, while the figure on the left lifts the top off a capsa to reveal bundles of papyrus rolls.
Right end of the Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image Brent Nongbri 2025
Most interesting to me is the lid. Between the two theatrical masks on the corners of the lid are two scenes, each with a pair of reclining men. The two men on the left sit on either side of what looks like an open papyrus roll in a holding stand of some kind.
Left side of the lid of the Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image Brent Nongbri 2025
Similar devices are sometimes shown standing atop a pedestal, as on the well known tombstone of Abeita in the British Museum. Here it sits on a low table or box, perhaps another capsa. The figure on the right holds what looks like a closed papyrus roll in his right hand (an early publication, Germoni 2009, identified the object as a writing instrument, but I am not so sure).
On the right side of the lid, a parallel pair of men recline. Between them are two objects.
Right side of the lid of the Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image Brent Nongbri 2025
The lower object between the two figures seems to have a latch, which is characteristic of capsae. The upper object has a dangling strap also characteristic of some depictions of capsae.
This is a fascinating artifact, with its attention to detail and clear interest in the imagery of reading and learning. I wonder: What is the story behind the burial of a child in a sarcophagus with this kind of iconography? What is the significance of the inscribed ring?
And one last small detail that just delighted me about this piece: Look at Athena’s little owl at the bottom of the sarcophagus. It’s perfect:
Athena’s owl on the Sarcophagus of the Muses from Isola Sacra; image: Brent Nongbri 2025
Sources:
Bondioli, Luca, et al. 2018. “L’infante e il sarcofago delle Muse dall’Isola Sacra,” in Ricerche su Ostia e il suo territorio, edited by Mireille Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Nicolas Laubry, and Fausto Zevi. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.efr.3712.
Germoni, Paola. 2009. “Fiumicino-Isola Sacra: Vecchi e nuovi rinvenimenti.” Bulletino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 110: 398-404.
Variant Readings 