P52 on the Joe Rogan Experience: Fact Check

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

I’m not a regular consumer of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” but I was compelled to check it out when I heard that the podcaster was chatting about P.Ryl.Gr. 3.457, a.k.a. P52, the small fragment of a papyrus leaf containing a bit of chapter 18 of the Gospel According to John. The occasion was a conversation with a Christian apologist.

Joe Rogan with a facsimile of P52

The interview contained a number of standard apologetic talking points, and so it’s not surprising that the general topic of papyrology and the specific topic of P52 comes up (along with a facsimile and a reconstruction of the leaf). I’ve studied this fragment pretty carefully over the years (articles in Harvard Theological Review in 2005 and New Testament Studies in 2020), so I’m fairly familiar with the scholarship. Unfortunately, the apologist makes a number of false or misleading claims, so for anyone who might be interested, here is a brief fact check.

  • “Discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s” False. The piece was among several chosen and bought for the Rylands library by Bernard Grenfell in 1920. C.H. Roberts published the piece in 1935.
  • The codex is “almost exclusively a Christian convention”: False. We have many codices that contain non-Christian material.
  • “Most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.” Misleading. We don’t really know where this piece came from because it was bought on the antiquities market and not scientifically excavated. It’s possible that it comes from Oxyrhynchus, but Grenfell was buying from dealers elsewhere in Egypt in addition to the area of Oxyrhynchus.
  • “There’s still debate about the dating of this” papyrus. True.
  • “But the unanimous consensus is that it’s comfortably second century, potentially beginning of the second century, which means that, this is found in Egypt; John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus. So it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, copied and then end up in this manuscript, which means at minimum, you’ve already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century, comfortably.” Very much debatable. This is the same story that was being told pretty much from the time of the publication of P52 in 1935. In older versions, the date of the papyrus was usually given as “circa 125 AD,” but here the rhetoric is a bit more slippery: “comfortably second century, potentially beginning of the second century.” But for the logic to work, that “potentially beginning of the second century” has to become “definitely beginning of the second century.” But the dating of P52 is not at all certain; it is just based on handwriting analysis, and there are good parallels for the script of P52 in papyri from the late second century and even the third century (see my 2020 New Testament Studies piece).

The fact is that we don’t know the date of this piece with confidence. So, trying to use P52 to establish a first-century date for the composition of the Gospel According to John doesn’t work. I don’t have a horse in the race when it comes to the time of the composition of John, but I would stand by the words I wrote back in 2005:

“P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel.”

The interview also has some misleading statements about P75 (a.k.a P.Bodmer 14-15, a.k.a. Hanna Papyrus 1). I’ve written a bit about the different scholarly views on this relationship and offered my own take on things (Journal of Biblical Literature 2016).

It’s good to see early Christian manuscripts being discussed in a popular setting, but it would be even better if the information was accurate.

Posted in P.Ryl. 3.457, Palaeography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

A Fake Lead “Codex” in Rome?

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

Among codices that supposedly date to the Roman and late antique eras, there is a small set of “books” made of lead. Some of these made their first appearance in the last couple decades (the so-called Jordanian lead codices) and were clearly demonstrated to be modern forgeries.

But there were earlier artifacts that have sometimes been called lead codices. One of them is on display in Rome at the Epigraphic Museum of the Museo Nazionale at the Baths of Diocletian. The label at the museum describes this object in the following way:

“‘Basilidian’ book: The small lead book was for magical and religious use and is formed of seven pages with a cover on whose faces are a male and a female portrait. On the pages, incised on both sides, objects, animals and human figures, are depicted, followed by a line and five rows of Greek characters with the value of magic symbols, charakteres. The term ‘Basilidian’ refers to Basilides, the founder of a philosophical school at Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. Unknown provenance, 4th-5th century AD”

The “unknown provenance” should of course give us pause. And it turns out there is a strange story to tell. But first, a brief description of the object (a quite thorough description of the sheets can be found in a 2012 catalog entry by Gabriella Bevilacqua1).

The cover, which is hinged, is displayed apart from the folia. It has the profile of a male head on the front cover and that of a female head on the back cover.:

The covers of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

The seven individual folia are displayed against a mirror, so that both sides of each leaf can be seen:

The sheets of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

Each sheet displays images at the top of the sheet with mostly gibberish text occupying the lower portion:

A sheet of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

Drawings of all the sheets were published in a short pamphlet by Jacques Matter in 1852.2 Another set of drawings, including a detailed rendering of the cover and the hinge apparatus appeared in the1878 catalog of Ettore de Ruggiero.3 The images are reproduced below (after the front and back covers, each vertical pair with a Roman numeral shows the front and back of a sheet):

Plates with drawings of the lead codex from Ettore de Ruggiero, Catalogo del Museo Kircheriano (Rome, 1878)

Strings of letters that don’t form words are common in ancient magical contexts, but the text on these leaves is strange for a couple reasons. It not only combines letters seemingly from multiple different alphabets, it also combines different forms of letters from within alphabets. For instance, it uses both a “capital” omega, Ω, and something like a script omega, (see the W in what looks like ⲓⲁⲱ on sheet V). Similarly, the writing shows both a branched sigma, Σ, and what appears to be a lunate sigma, C. There also appear to be some Arabic numerals tossed in (for instance, the numeral 8 seems to appear on several pages).

It seems that the covers were each hinged to a vertical pipe with a rod to which the seven sheets were originally affixed with tabs wrapped around the rod (a couple of the plates seem to show small stubs where the tabs snapped off the hinge mechanism).

And now the provenance story: This item (currently inventory number 65036) comes from the Museo Kircheriano, the sprawling collection of antiquities most closely associated with Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), but the earliest documentation of this exact item seems to be the 1837 catalog of Giuseppe Brunati. There, Brunati notes that a similar item was in the Kircheriano in the eighteenth century, but that the present lead book was a different object. As he wrote, “The suspicion arises that somebody, having taken away the genuinely ancient booklet, has fraudulently substituted another.”4

This earlier lead book was documented in the catalog of Filippo Buonanni in 1709.5 Interestingly, he described the artifact both as a “book” (liber) and as a “box” or “case” (theca) that “contained seven lead plates” (septem laminae…plumbeae includunture). These sheets are said to have images and nonsense text drawn from different alphabets, but the accompanying illustration confirms that these are distinct from the lead artifact currently on display in the Epigraphic Museum:

Plate showing an earlier (now lost) lead codex from the Museo Kircheriano in Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709)

The cover at first glance looks similar to what we have seen, but the hinge mechanism and its attachment to the cover are both different. And again, the layout of the sheets is similar (images in the upper portion, nonsense text in the lower portion), but none of the seven current sheets match the images or text of this drawing. Note also that the sheet in the upper lefthand corner of the plate clearly looks as if it is sitting in a box with sides extending from the bottom, the top, and the side opposite the hinge.

Buonnani claimed that this book had come from “an ancient sarcophagus” that also contained the ashes of the deceased, but he offered no further details (Fuit hic plumbeus liber repertus in antiquo Sarcophago, in quo cineres demortui fuerant inclusi). The current location of this artifact is unknown (or at least unknown to me).

After Buonnani published this object in 1709, Bernard de Montfaucon in 1719 published another similar artifact that he said he had purchased during his trip to Rome in 1699.6 This piece is described as having six lead sheets between two lead covers, though only four of the lead sheets were said to have text. The illustration provided by Montfaucon again shows the similarities in terms of layout, imagery, and writing but also the differences in the details when compared to the lead codex in the museum.

Bernard de Monfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, vol. 2.2 (Paris, 1719)

It was Montfaucon who gave this small genre its commonly used name (“Basilidian books”), because of the iconography, which includes an Abraxas figure (a human torso and arms with a bird head and two serpents in place of legs), which he associated with the “gnostic” teacher Basilides. Montfaucon said that he gave this lead book to Cardinal de Bouillon (1643-1715). I am not aware of its current location.

We thus seem to have evidence for two lead codices in Rome in the very late 17th and early 18th centuries (both now lost), and for a third that shows up in the early 19th century. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other such objects that have been published. Iconography for hinged book-like objects in pre-Roman contexts is attested, and ivory diptychs with different forms of hinges are well known from Roman late antiquity.7 But these lead codices seem very dubious to me, especially the one now on display in the Epigraphic Museum–the thickness of the lead, the look of the script, and most of all its sudden appearance in a museum in place of an entirely different artifact! When Brunati first mentioned this “new” lead book in 1837, his evaluation did not inspire much confidence: “Utinam vero authenticus sit.” I suspect his hesitations were justified. Barring the discovery of a similar kind of artifact in a secure archaeological context, it is probably best to regard this object as a production of 17th or 18th century.8

  1. Gabriella Bevilacqua, “IX, 41. Libro ‘Basilidiano’,” in Rosanna Friggeri et al. (eds.), Terme di Diocleziano: La collezione epigrafica (Milan, 2012), pp. 596-599. ↩︎
  2. Jacques Matter, Une excursion gnostique en Italie (Paris, 1852), plates 3-9. ↩︎
  3. Ettore de Ruggiero, Catalogo del Museo Kircheriano (Rome, 1878), pp. 1.63-64): “199: Libello basllldlano di piombo (al. c. 10, lar. c. 9). La copertura del libro ha sul diritto, in rilievo, un busto di donna velata, sul rovescio quello d’un uomo barbato. Dentro erano, per mezzo di cerniera, riunite sette sottili tavolette di piombo della medesima grandezza, che ora sono sciolte, ciascuna delle quali contiene, ai due lati, incise due figure simboliche nella parte sùperiore, e una leggenda nel rimanente. Una strana mescolanza di lettere greche, italiche e latine non ne rende possibile alcuna decifrazione; il carattere gnostico dell’ insieme è però indubitato. Il Bonanni menziona (mus. Kirch. p. 180), pubblicandone un saggio (tav. LX), un analogo monumento, che pare sia stato ai suoi tempi trovato in Roma, ed era conservato nel Museo. Esso però era affatto diverso dal nostro, come pure dall’altro acquistato in Roma dal Montfaucon nel 1699 e donato da lui al cardinale de Bauillon (palaeoar. graeca p. 181; cf. antiq. expliq. 2, 2, pl. 177). È ignoto come e quando sia scomparso il primo del Museo, sostituendovisi quest’altro. Il Brunati, (p. 122) per altro, già notò nel 1838 questa sostituzione, manifestando qualche dubbio sulla sua autenticità, e concludendo che tutti e tre i sudetti libelli possano pervenire da una medesima origine.” These images were reprinted in H. Leclercq’s entry for “Basilidiens” in the Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris, 1910), vol. 2, part 1, cols. 514-525. ↩︎
  4. Brunati, Musei Kircheriani inscriptiones ethnicae et christianae (Milan, 1837), pp. 122-124: “Tantum suspicio oritur, quod quidam, abrepto sincero veteri libello, alium fraudolenter substituerit.” ↩︎
  5. Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709), p. 180: “LIBER PLUMBEUS, Thecam plumbeam expressimus in Tabula LX. in formam libri compactam, in qua septem laminae etiam plumbeae includuntur, in quarum singulis plures characteres incisi fuerunt verriculo, & quidem non unius idiomatis, sed variorum linguarum; sunt enim aliqui ex graeco Alphabetico selecti, alqui verò ex haebraico, multi ex antiqo Etruscorum, varii ex latino. Horum Characterum combinationes verba intelligibilia efformat, quae nec Graecus, nec haebraici, neque latini sermonis licet peritissimus intelligere nunquam potuit. Singulis etiam laminis adjecta sunt aliqua symbola at ex nullo eorum deduci potest, quid Artifex mente conceperit, quod indicaret. Quamobrem in genere Talismanorum enumerandum esse judico, in quibus Antiquorum superstitio id exprimebat, quod erronea mente conceperat, putabatque optimum esse remedium, vel ad amla avertenda, vel ad daemones fugandos, aut tutissimam viam ad bonorum. Fuit hic plumbeus liber repertus in antiquo Sarcophago, in quo cineres demortui fuerant inclusi. Constat autem ex pluribus monumentis, ab Aethnicis praecipuè Aegyptiis non rarò in sepulchris aliqua deposita fuisse, quae ad placandos Manes, vel ad Daemones fugandos utilia esse opinabantur. Ex Cornelio Tacito Annal. lib. 2. habemus, cum refert Mortem Germanici veneno intersecti, ‘Carmina, & devotiones, & nomen Germanici, plumbeis tabulis insculptum, semiusti eineres ac able obliti, aliaque maleficia, & animas Numinibus infernis sacrari.’ Ubi notat Ludovicus Dorleans in suis novis cogitationibus, Antiquos plumbeis laminis usos esse, ne facilè illa nomina delerentur.” ↩︎
  6. Montfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, vol. 2.2 (Paris, 1719), plate 177 and page 378: “Il me reste à parler d’un petit livre tout de plomb, que j’achetai à Rome en 1699, & dont je fis present à M. le Cardinal de Bouillon: il eft de la même grandeur qu’il est ci-après représenté dans la planche; non seulement les deux plaques qui font la couverture , mais aussi tous les feuillets au nombre de six, la baguete inserée dans les anneaux qui tiennent aux feuillets, la charnière & ses clous; enfin tout sans exception est de plomb. Les douze pages que sont les deux côtez de chaque feuillet, ont autant de figures des Gnostiques: audessous de ces figures, il y a des inscriptions, partie Hetrusques & partie Greques , mais aux quatre premières pages seulement; toutes ces inscriptions sont également inintelligibles.” ↩︎
  7. On hinged Hittite tablets, see Michele Cammarosano, “Writing on Wood in Hittite Anatolia,” in Marilina Betrò et al. (eds), The Ancient World Revisited: Material Dimensions of Written Artefacts (De Gruyter, 2024), 165-205. For an example of a hinged late antique diptych, see the Boethius Diptych. ↩︎
  8. The first catalog of the Kircher collection appeared in 1678: Georgius de Sepibus, Romani collegii Societatus Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum (Amsterdam, 1678). It has a section on books in foreign languages, but that includes nothing that matches well with the lead books. In the index of objects, the only leaden item is a chunk of pure lead (p. 41). Perhaps this is an indication that the lead codex described by Buonanni in 1709 entered the collection after 1678. ↩︎

Posted in Bernard de Montfaucon, Fakes and Forgeries, Lead codices | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Decoration of the Fore-edges of Coptic Codices

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

There is a fun article in The New York Times about the growing trend among publishers of producing deluxe editions of romance and fantasy books. The article mentions different kinds of cover enhancements but focuses on decoration of the fore-edge. There are short videos and photos of the production of the deluxe edition of Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, which is due out in January 2025. The deluxe edition will have dragons painted on the fore-edge:

Producing the decorated fore-edges of Onyx Storm; image source: The New York Times

This kind of decoration goes quite far back in the history of the book. The earliest example that I know of is a set of parchment Coptic codices said to have been found in a jar in the Egyptian city of Saqqara in the winter of 1924-1925. A colophon allows us to identify the original home of the books as the Monastery of Apa Jeremiah in Saqqara. They are usually dated to the 6th or 7th century and contain quite interesting combinations of texts:

  • The letters of Paul and the Gospel According to John
  • The Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel According to John
  • A portion of the Psalms (1-5) and the first chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew

These books all had wooden covers, leather covered spines, and decorated fore-edges:

Saqqara Coptic Codices, views of the spines (top) and fore-edges with decorations (bottom)

These three books are now in the Chester Beatty collection in Dublin (Cpt 813, Cpt 814, and Cpt 815) and were bought from the Cairo dealer Maurice Nahman (other books from the same find are in the University of Michigan’s collections). The codices were considerably fancier than they look in these photos. The leather on the covers had intricate decorations, and the books were found together with the remains of elaborate leather wrapping bands and carved bone clasps. The article in which these photos appeared was written by Charles T. Lamacraft,1 who also produced some lovely models of the codices based on his study of the surviving fragments:

Model of Chester Beatty Cpt 815 showing cover and leather wrapping band; image source: Chester Beatty Online Collections
Model of Chester Beatty Cpt 815 enclosed in leather wrapping band; image source: Chester Beatty Online Collections

These would have been very nice little books. It’s encouraging to see the modern publishing industry recapturing some of the traditions of early codex production.

  1. C.T. Lamacraft, “Early Book-bindings from a Coptic Monastery,” The Library 20 (1939) 214-233. ↩︎
Posted in Book binding, Book covers, Chester Beatty Papyri, Codicology, Maurice Nahman, Saqqara Codices | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A New Article on Carl Schmidt and the Antiquities Trade

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

The coptologist Carl Schmidt (1868-1938) was very active in the antiquities trade. His name is associated with the purchase of many well known manuscripts, including one I’ve discussed here.

Carl Schmidt
image source: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen

An important new article on Schmidt has appeared in a journal that may not be on the radar of papyrologists:

  • Jakob Wigand, “Unearthed, Smuggled and Decontextualized: Carl Schmidt and the Provenance of Hamburg’s Papyrus Bilinguis 1,” Philological Encounters 9 (2024) 1-37

Using archival evidence from the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Wigand unpacks the exact nature of Schmidt’s involvement in the purchasing and export of papyri. Wigand’s main example is the documentation for the purchase of the Hamburg bilingual codex (TM 61979), which was obtained by Schmidt in the late 1920s.

Bifolium of the Hamburg Bilingual Papyrus, digitally stitched from images at the Universität Hamburg

Wigand’s thorough investigation uncovers both a previously unknown story of the alleged archaeological context of the codex and details about the logistics of Schmidt’s removal of the codex from Egypt. The most important finding is a letter from Schmidt that clearly shows he intentionally avoided the inspection required by Egypt’s Law No. 14 of 1912 on Antiquities, which prohibited the export of antiquities without the authorization of the Antiquities Service. Wigand also demonstrates that this was not an isolated case for Schmidt.

Articles like this are very useful because they add important texture to the way we approach the antiquities trade before the 1970s. Many conversations about the illicit trade in antiquities are oriented around the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Sometimes these discussions can leave the impression that any material that can be shown to have left its country of origin before 1970 is “clean” and that worrying about pre-1970 smuggling amounts to unfairly judging our predecessors by our own modern standards. But national laws concerning antiquities existed well before 1970. So, to point out that this material was smuggled is not to anachronistically condemn our forebearers, but instead to acknowledge that some of our academic ancestors engaged in activity that was criminal even in their own day.

Yet, archival studies of the histories of manuscript collections can also complicate another assumption–that all papyri that appeared on the antiquities market in the early part of the twentieth century were illicitly smuggled out of Egypt. For instance, Lorne Zelyck’s detective work at the British Library uncovered the envelope in which the fragments of the Egerton Gospel were shipped to London. The envelope from Maurice Nahman still carries the intact red seals of the Egyptian Museum, indicating that the papyri in this shipment were inspected and approved for export by Egyptian authorities.1

No doubt more such evidence, both explicit evidence of smuggling and explicit evidence of legal export, could be uncovered with further study. We need (much) more of this kind of archival research.

  1. Lorne R. Zelyck, The Egerton Gospel (Egerton Papyrus 2 + Papyrus Köln VI 255): Introduction, Critical Edition, and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 20, note 22. ↩︎
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Carl Schmidt, Hamburg Bilingual Papyrus, Maurice Nahman | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Work on Codex Vaticanus (Vat. gr. 1209)

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

2024 has been a good year for the study of Codex Vaticanus. Peter Head at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog just posted a notice of an important new study of the inks in the codex:

  • Nehemia Gordon, Patrick Andrist, Oliver Hahn, Pavlos D. Vasileiadis, Nelson Calvillo, and Ira Rabin, “Did the Original Scribes Write the Distigmai in Codex Vaticanus B of the Bible (Vat. gr. 1209)?” Vatican Library Review 3 (2024) 125-156

The article is available open access here.

It seems that the marginal distigmai (double dots), which have occasionally been described as fourth-century indicators of textual variation, are written in inks that were made from a very pure form of vitriol, which points to a much later date (sixteenth century). Thus, the distigmai were neither part of the original production of the codex nor the work of an early user of the codex.

Earlier this year, the Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung series published a fascinating study on the early critical academic reception of Codex Vaticanus, detailing how it came to have such a prominent place in the textual criticism of the New Testament:

  • An-Ting Yi, From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024)

The book is available open access here.

These 2024 studies follow on the heels of two other important studies of Codex Vaticanus, a doctoral thesis at Cambridge and a recent volume of Studi e testi:

  • Jesse Grenz, The Scribes and Correctors of Codex Vaticanus: A Study on the Codicology, Paleography, and Text of B(03) (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2021)
  • Pietro Versace, I marginalia del Codex Vaticanus (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2018)

And all of this is in addition to the nicely illustrated resources related to the codex on the Vatican Library’s excellent palaeography site.

It’s exciting to see how much we still have to learn from this fascinating manuscript.

Some of the original ink in Codex Vaticanus (p. 1479); image source: Digital Vatican Library
Posted in Codex Vaticanus, Codicology, Ink | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Additional Items from the Schøyen Collection on Sale

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

Thanks to Alexander Schick for the tip: Earlier this year, Christie’s offered on auction several pieces from the collection of Martin Schøyen. Among the pieces sold was the so-called Crosby-Schøyen codex. Still no word on who bought the book or where it now resides. Now it looks like other pieces are for sale through an online rare book dealer:

Included are parchment folia from Coptic Psalters. All three have the same slightly odd statement of provenance:

“In the collection of Maurice Nahman (1868-1948), French collector-dealer, and Head Cashier at the Crédit Foncier d’Egypte in Cairo, who used this position to establish himself as the foremost antiquity dealer of Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s. A sale of part of his collection was held by Christie’s, London, on 2 March 1937. After his death his son kept the business going until 1953, and then the remaining stock was offered at Hotel Drouot, Paris, on 26-27 February and 5 June 1953, with the remainder apparently passing to Erik von Scherling.”

It’s not clear from this statement whether these particular pieces are being claimed as part of the 1937 sale, the 1953 sales, or as a part of Nahman’s collection that “apparently passed” to Erik von Scherling. Or whether they are just being assigned in general terms to “the collection of Maurice Nahman.” A somewhat frustratingly vague statement.

Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Crosby-Schøyen Codex, Erik von Scherling, Martin Schøyen, Maurice Nahman, Schøyen Collection | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A New Article on Religion and Historiography (and Science)

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

Since the publication of Before Religion in 2013, I have not really returned to the topic of conceptual problems in the study of religion. My attention shifted to early Christian manuscripts and, more recently, the development of the codex. But questions about the concept of religion still interest me, and back in 2022, I was invited by colleagues at Lund University to a dialogue with Kevin Schilbrack. For those who don’t know, Schilbrack is a prolific philosopher of religion who has written some classic articles in the field. See–for starters–the following:

The idea for the meeting in Lund was for me to respond to Schilbrack’s criticisms of Before Religion. But it also served as an opportunity for the two of us to meet for the first time, which was very enjoyable. Even if we come to quite different conclusions, it was an honor and a pleasure to mix it up with Kevin.

After the meeting, we agreed to convert the talks we gave into articles to be submitted to Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift. These pieces have now been published and are available open access. My contribution is called “Imagining Science: Ancient Religion, Modern Science, and How We Talk About History.” Here is the abstract:

Disagreement about the trans-cultural applicability of the concept of religion has been a feature of the academic study of religion for decades. In a series of recent essays, Kevin Schilbrack has powerfully reframed these discussions as a debate between realist and antirealist philosophical orientations. Aligning himself with Critical Realism, Schilbrack argues that religion is a transcultural and transhistorical reality and that those who deny this are antirealists. As my own work is among his targets, this article engages Schilbrack’s critique. The first part of the article challenges some of Schilbrack’s readings of Before Religion. The second part queries Schilbrack’s use of examples from the physical sciences as analogies for the relationship between concepts and the real things they are said to designate. The third part models an alternative use of examples from the natural sciences to think about historiography, concluding that the realist/antirealist dichotomy is not a useful tool. The physics of the last 150 years has shown that our most fundamental ideas about the universe – what we think the “real” character of the world might be – can change radically in short intervals of time. Historians should take heed and approach their own engagement with the traces of the past with due humility.

I very much enjoyed digging into some topics in the history of science, especially the paths not taken, like phlogiston theory and vortex atoms. I think we have a lot to learn about method from these failed theories.

Schilbrack’s response is written up as “The Concept of ‘Religion’ as a Heuristic Device.”

I felt this was a very stimulating exchange, and I’m grateful to colleagues at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies (CTR) at Lund University for organizing this meeting.

Posted in Concept of Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Roberta Mazza’s Stolen Fragments

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve just finished reading Roberta Mazza’s excellent new book, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Stanford: Redwood Press, 2024).

This is a well organized and highly readable book. It tells a story–equal parts entertaining and disturbing–about a cluster of related topics: the collection of manuscripts and artifacts gathered by Hobby Lobby and the Museum of the Bible, Professor Dirk Obbink’s publication of an unprovenanced papyrus of Sappho, the sale and publication of dozens of so-called Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries, and the theft of over a hundred Oxyrhynchus Papyri from the collections of the Egypt Exploration Society held at the University of Oxford.

For those who may not have followed these stories, Roberta Mazza has been one of the main critical voices within the field of papyrology calling for increased vigilance about issues of provenance, and she has been relentless in focusing the discipline’s attention on the damaging role of the illicit antiquities market. Her blog, Faces & Voices, was a driving force in uncovering many of the scandals discussed in this book. Yet, there was a stretch of time between 2015 and 2021 when she was a trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society, which meant, as she explains, “I had to refrain from public comments (which was a true pain for me).” So it’s now quite eye-opening to have her account of what was going on behind the scenes during that time.

There has been some solid journalism on these topics over the years: The first broad overview was by Candida Moss and Joel Baden in their book, Bible Nation (2017). Then as the story developed, there were two very important long-form investigative articles: Charlotte Higgins’ piece in The Guardian (January 2020) and Ariel Sabar’s article in The Atlantic (June 2020). Mazza’s Stolen Fragments builds on all these earlier works, fills in gaps, and presents the most thorough and up-to-date treatment of the whole messy affair, with an epilogue that brings readers up to the spring of 2024.

In the course of narrating the intertwined stories of Hobby Lobby, the Sappho papyrus, the fake Dead Sea Scrolls, and the stolen Oxyrhynchus papyri, Mazza makes a larger case that scholars who work with manuscripts have too often been complicit in the illegal trade in antiquities by publishing unprovenanced artifacts. So, while it is interesting to see Mazza trace out the network of dealers, collectors, and yes, scholars, whose names appear repeatedly in connection with the trade of forgeries and/or stolen items (Lee Biondi, James Charlesworth, Bruce Ferrini, Craig Lampe, Dirk Obbink, Andrew Stimer, and others), Mazza’s aim goes beyond these infamous big names to the larger academic field of papyrology and the questionable practices it continues to tolerate.

There is a palpable urgency in Mazza’s writing, and for good reason. Mazza documents the ongoing problem of looting in Egypt, and her narrative highlights the connections between looting, the trade in unprovenanced artifacts, and academics who work on unprovenanced pieces. Stolen Fragments will become a a key reference point in these discussions.

The book is written in a way that will be accessible to a wide readership (I’ll be assigning it to students), but she also includes details that will also be useful to specialists (the notes at the end of the book lead to many interesting pathways). I’ve followed all these stories pretty closely over the years, and there were surprises even for me. I won’t give them all away, but here are two that jumped out at me.

“P.Sapph. Obbink” in a wooden presentation box by Salopian

Throughout this episode, there has been a question about the location of the larger “P.Sapph. Obbink” fragment. It made an appearance in a television program with Prof. Obbink in 2015 and then disappeared from public view completely, as far I knew. In a 2020 article, Michael Sampson revealed that Christie’s had attempted to arrange a private treaty sale of the papyrus in 2015, but no further news about the papyrus was forthcoming. Mazza now reports that the papyrus was still at Christie’s in London when it was “seized by police in 2022” (p. 205). Readers will be relieved to learn that “Christie’s kept the papyrus’s expensive wooden box.”

Mazza also reports (p. 179) that all the pieces stolen from the Egypt Exploration Society have been recovered. This is very good news, but it’s surprising to me. The last EES announcement I recall on this topic came in 2021 (though it’s possible I missed later announcements). Anyway, in 2021, the editorial team in Oxford had identified about 120 missing pieces, of which 40 had been located in the collections of the Museum of the Bible and Andrew Stimer. One wonders if it was the ongoing police investigation into Prof. Obbink (now in its fifth year) that turned up some or all of these missing pieces.

There are, of course, still unanswered questions, as Mazza notes. At least some of these questions could be answered with fuller cooperation from other parties. From the side of Hobby Lobby and the Museum of the Bible: Now that they have repatriated most of their papyrus and parchment manuscripts, it would ideal if they made public all of their acquisition records relating to papyri, mummy masks, and other related artifacts, so that scholars can get a better sense of the shape of the antiquities trade in the US in those years when the collection was being built up (ca. 2009-2015). I would be curious, for instance, to learn more about the full extent of Prof. Obbink’s sales of antiquities to Hobby Lobby.

There is much more that could be said about this rich and exciting book. Fortunately, there will be a panel on it at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November in San Diego, with a great lineup of reviewers: Michael Holmes, Melissa Sellew, Sofia Torallas Tovar, and Liv Ingeborg Lied, with a response by Roberta Mazza.

Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Bruce Ferrini, Dead Sea Scrolls, Dirk Obbink, Fakes and Forgeries, Green Collection, Lee Biondi, P.Sapph. Obbink, Scott Carroll | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Tiny Inscriptions: The Capitoline Tabula Iliaca

Posted on September 26, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about miniaturization in the ancient Roman world, especially as it applies to books. For instance, according to Pliny the Elder, “Cicero records that a parchment copy of Homer’s poem The Iliad was enclosed in a nutshell” (Natural History 7.85).

While nothing quite like that survives from the Roman era, it’s still worth noting that Pliny was interested enough in the idea to repeat the story. There are, however, some surprising instances of Roman artifacts with writing so small that it is challenging to read with the naked eye. Some of the so-called Tabulae Iliacae fall into this category. These thin slabs are inscribed with text and images related to the Iliad and other mythological or historical themes. The writing in the inscriptions is sometimes incredibly small. There are a number of fascinating things about these artifacts, but at the moment I’m most interested in the tiny writing.

There is a very nice example in the Capitoline Museums. It has been away on traveling exhibitions recently, but when I visited a couple weeks ago, it was back in its case. The plaque illustrates the Iliad and events at Troy after the end of the Iliad. The small size and the reflection of the glass case make photographs a bit tricky, but these pictures give a sense of the piece.

The Capitoline Tabula Iliaca
Capitoline Museums, inv. MC0316; image source: Brent Nongbri 2024

There is greater detail in a drawing made in the late nineteenth century:

Line drawing of the Capitoline Tabula Iliaca in Theodor Schreiber and W.C.F. Anderson, Atlas of Classical Antiquities (Macmillan, 1895); image source: Heidelberg Historic Literature

The calcite plaque is quite thin and the reliefs (necessarily!) quite shallow. The thickness of the plaque is usually given as 1.5 cm:


The Capitoline Tabula Iliaca, profile view
Capitoline Museums, inv. MC0316; image source: Brent Nongbri 2024

This particular example is said to have been found in the seventeenth century to the southeast of Rome along the Via Appia just past the area where the Ciampino Airport is today. It is thought to have been produced in Rome in the first century CE. The most remarkable thing to me is the prose summary of the Iliad that occupies the pilaster on the right. Because the plaque is in a case, it was not possible to get an image with a scale, but the dimensions of the surviving portion of the tablet are usually given as 29 or 28 cm wide and 25 cm high.

If that’s the case, then when we digitally add a scale, we can get a better idea of just how small the lettering is.


The Capitoline Tabula Iliaca with a scale added digitally
Capitoline Museums, inv. MC0316; image source: Brent Nongbri 2024

If we set a scale next to the inscription on the pilaster, we can see that there are about 6 lines for each centimeter. Most letters are about 1 millimeter high.


The Capitoline Tabula Iliaca, detail of pilaster with scale added digitally
Capitoline Museums, inv. MC0316; image source: Brent Nongbri 2024

It’s quite amazing that legible writing, cut into stone, could be produced at this size (this is roughly the size of the writing we find in the miniature parchment Manichean codex in Cologne).

The text in the pilaster picks up in Book 7 (there was almost certainly another pilaster on the left side of the plaque that contained a summary of the earlier books). The summary is pretty dry. Here are the first few lines from the picture above (for the whole Greek text, see the edition of IG XIV 1284 at PHI):

οἱ δ’ Ἀχαιοὶ τῖχός τε καὶ
τάφρον ποιοῦνται πε-
ρὶ τὰς ναῦς. ἀμφοτέρ-
ων δ’ αὐτῶν ἐξοπλισ-
θέντων καὶ μάχην ἐν τῷ
πεδίῳ συναψάντων οἱ
Τρῶες εἰς τὸ τῖχος τοὺς
Ἀχαιοὺς καταδιώκουσιν
καὶ τὴν νύκτ’ ἐκείνην ἐπὶ
ταῖς ναυσὶν ποιοῦνται τὴν
ἔπαυλιν. …

So, who would use an object like this and in what kind of setting? The tabulae have sometimes been understood as educational aids (Nicholas Horsfall has argued that this and other similar plaques served as a means of “elementary adult education” for the nouveau riche: “Above all, the Tabulae belong chez Trimalchio.”)1 But given the difficulty of actually reading the writing, an educational purpose seems unlikely. Use as a conversation piece seems a bit more plausible.

Two recent books have provided good treatments of the larger group of artifacts to which the Capitoline example belongs:

The archived museum record for the Capitoline Tabula Iliaca is here. This very useful online catalog seems to have disappeared from the web and been replaced by a page where one can purchase a (backwards) photograph of the plaque. Unfortunate.

  1. Nicholas Horsfall, “Stesichorus at Bovillae?” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979) 26-48. ↩︎
Posted in Capitoline Museum, Cologne Mani Codex, Inscriptions | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two Good Books on the Shroud of Turin

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

When I was writing God’s Library, I did a good bit of reading on the Shroud of Turin. I used it as an example for which radiocarbon dating was ideally suited, namely a situation in which the date of an object is disputed by a matter of centuries. In the case of the Shroud, samples analyzed at three different labs agreed in determining that the Shroud was a product of the thirteenth or fourteenth century and not the first century.1

But I had to wade through quite a few publications of widely varying quality to find reliable information about the Shroud. Toward the end of my research I was lucky to be directed to Andrea Nicolotti’s Sindone: Storia e leggende di una reliquia controversa (Turin, 2015). This book is the most comprehensive overview of the historical sources and scientific work on the Shroud of Turin, and it has since been translated into English as The Shroud of Turin: The History and Legends of the World’s Most Famous Relic (Baylor University Press, 2020). I highly recommend it as a starting point for people interested in the Shroud.

A more recent book that takes a deeper dive into what we might call the early reception history of the Shroud is Andrew R. Casper, An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Penn State University Press, 2021).

Casper’s book focuses on the way in which people understood the Shroud in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (chiefly as “as an artful relic crafted by God…a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry”).

These two books provide rich and helpful discussions of the Shroud.

  1. See P.E. Damon, D.J. Donahue, B.H. Gore et al., “Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin,” Nature 337 (1989) 611–615 and H.E. Gove, “Dating the Turin Shroud—An Assessment,” Radiocarbon 32 (1990) 87–92. ↩︎
Posted in Radiocarbon analysis | 5 Comments