God’s Library

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

So, it has been about a year since I started this blog. At that time, I was in the midst of finishing my last revisions to the manuscript of my book, and in my first posting, I described the blog as an outgrowth of this book project:

“I’ve just completed a book on that topic (God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts), which is due out next year. This was a really fun book to write. While researching it over the last few years, I encountered so many fascinating stories about Christian manuscripts (and the people who study them!). So, I’m planning on using this site primarily to share some of these interesting, entertaining, and just plain strange stories.”

I’ve still got lots of stories to tell, so the blog will go on. But in the meantime, but I’m happy to report that I received my author copies of the book today:

Nongbri Books

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Posted in Codices, Nag Hammadi | 10 Comments

E. C. Colwell on P52

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Brent Nongbri
E C Colwell

Ernest Cadman Colwell (1901-1974)

Back in 2005, I wrote an article on P.Ryl. 3.457, or “P52,” the small papyrus fragment of chapter 18 of the Gospel According to John kept at the Rylands Library in Manchester. I argued that the date generally assigned to the fragment on the basis of its handwriting (“first half of the second century,” or “circa 125 CE”) was overly narrow and that reasonably good palaeographic comparanda could be found among documents securely dated to the later second century and into the third century. As a result of this, I argued that P.Ryl. 3.457 should not be a factor in historical arguments about the date of the composition of John’s gospel.

At a conference in Manchester in 2014 I gave a paper that collected some new archival evidence on both the acquisition of this papyrus and the establishing of its date. The paper remains in a publication queue, but I was reminded today of an item of bibliography that had somehow escaped my notice when I was preparing that original 2005 article but that I luckily stumbled upon before the 2014 talk: E. C. Colwell’s review of the original edition of P.Ryl. 3.457 by C. H. Roberts in The Journal of Religion 16 (1936), 368-369. I thought I would highlight some of its salient lines: Continue reading →

Posted in Antiquities Market, Codices, Colin H. Roberts, P.Ryl. 3.457, Palaeography, Rylands Papyri | 11 Comments

“Ink & Blood” Back? (but with less ink?)

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve recently been doing some research on a few early Christian books that were on the antiquities market about a decade ago. There are a lot of interesting stories here. We’re all pretty familiar with the collection now known as the Museum of the Bible, which really got going in 2009. Part of its public debut was the traveling “Passages” exhibition, which I have discussed earlier on this blog. The “Passages” exhibition itself seems in some ways to have been built in the mold of an earlier road show of biblical antiquities, “Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible.” Continue reading →

Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Bruce Ferrini, Fakes and Forgeries, Oxyrhynchus Papyri | 14 Comments

The Moschos Ioudaios Inscription

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

One of the most interesting early Greek inscriptions involving a Jew/Judaean is the so-called “Moschos inscription” (or “Moschus inscription”), a record of a manumission found in 1952 during excavations at Oropos north of Athens. The inscription was recovered from the Amphiareion, a shrine to the hero Amphiaraos.  The inscription itself bears no date but is generally assigned to the first half of the third century BCE, which would make it among the earliest Greek inscriptions to mention an ΙΟΥΔΑΙΟΣ in the singular. I was having a hard time locating an image of the inscription online, but I recalled having scanned the publication some time ago. I was able to find the scan and have posted it here: Continue reading →

Posted in Inscriptions | 3 Comments

A Model of Nag Hammadi Codex III (and Some Thoughts on Large Single-quire Codices)

Posted on July 14, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

After I started out by making a model of Nag Hammadi Codex VI, the second Nag Hammadi book that I tried to make was Codex III. Like Codex VI, Codex III is made up of a single papyrus quire, but the construction of the cover of Codex III is slightly more complicated than that of Codex VI. The quire of Codex III was composed of 40 bifolia (two of which were in reality a single folio with a stub). So, this is a considerably thicker codex than Codex VI, which contained 20 bifolia. The construction of the quire thus required more materials and more time spent cutting the bifolia to size. Continue reading →

Posted in Book binding, Book covers, Codices, Nag Hammadi | 11 Comments

The Odyssey at Olympia?

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

An interesting news report is circulating about the discovery at Olympia of an incised clay tablet containing lines from Homer’s Odyssey. The ultimate source of the story seems to be a press release from the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, which presents the least garbled version of the report. The picture accompanying the story shows a bit of text text from Book 14, lines 8-13 of the Odyssey:

Olympia Odyssey

Incised clay tablet containing lines from the Odyssey; image source: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports

The tablet is tentatively assigned to the third century CE. So, the headlines describing it as “the oldest written record of Homer’s Odyssey” are of course a bit of an exaggeration. I am curious to learn more about the precise context of the find and the extent of the inscription.

 

Posted in Inscriptions | 1 Comment

A Model of Nag Hammadi Codex VI

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

As I was writing my book on early Christian manuscripts, one of the most helpful things I did was take up the construction of models of ancient codices. Going through the process of assembling a codex really forced me to understand the literature about ancient books much more thoroughly. I was fortunate to have access to an excellent leather store in Denmark, where I could buy goat skins and a handful of other supplies, and for my first project, I was generously given some good quality papyrus by a friend. I decided to start with Nag Hammadi Codex VI, a single-quire codex with a fairly simple leather cover. Continue reading →

Posted in Book binding, Book covers, Codices, Nag Hammadi | 6 Comments

Addenda to the Palatine Alexamenos Graffito

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

I posted several days ago about a recent visit to the Palatine during which I was able to see the new display of the famous Alexamenos graffito and the newly opened paedagogium in which the graffito was originally found. I returned to the Palatine hill today to visit the ongoing excavations at the Horrea Agrippiana. On our way out of the site, I stopped by the paedagogium again to snap a few additional photos only to find that a new barrier had cut off access to the rooms of the paedagogium: Continue reading →

Posted in Graffiti | 1 Comment

A Marble Relief of a Priest of Cybele

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

It’s always a pleasant surprise to visit a familiar museum and find a “new” piece. It happened to me the other day at the Capitoline Museum. Earlier this year, there was an exhibition on Johann Joachim Winckelmann (actually, it was mainly on the history of the Capitoline hill in the eighteenth century). That exhibit is now over, but in a ground-floor room of the Palazzo Nuovo (in a section of the exhibit that I completely missed) were some of the didactic materials from the exhibition along with some pieces of sculpture. I was surprised to see among them the famous relief of the priest of Magna Mater: Continue reading →

Posted in Capitoline Museum, Find Stories, Sculpture | 4 Comments

The Palatine Alexamenos Graffito

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Brent Nongbri

Just about every introductory book on early Christianity will have an image, usually a drawing or a significantly enhanced photograph, of the famous “Alexamenos graffito,” a depiction of a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. The image, discovered in 1856 on the southwestern slope of the Palatine hill in Rome, is generally thought to evoke the experience of Christians in the Roman world in the age before Constantine. Usually assigned to some point in the third century, it is among the earliest depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus and a Christian worshipper.

Alexamenos

Detail of the Palatine Alexamenos graffito (June 2018)

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Posted in Graffiti | 10 Comments