J.K. Elliott

The Use of Dictation in Ancient Book-Production

It is a striking fact that of all the numerous handbooks of palaeography, barely a handful pauses to consider in a practical manner the technique of ancient book-production. The Antike Buchwesen , published in 1882, is an enormous, if uncritical, collection of materials; and both Theodor Birt himself in his later publications, and other writers too numerous to mention, have constantly referred to this book as containing an exposition of the dictation theory. But under the dictation theory, all the scribes working under one dictator would have produced the same amount of work in the same time, and they must therefore have been paid on a time-work, not a piece-work basis. While identical visual errors and identical phonetic errors may be made by different scribes, the mistakes due to lack of liaison between scribe and dictator are more likely to be different in each case. Keywords: ancient book-production; dictation theory; phonetic errors; Theodor Birt

The Anointing of Jesus

THERE are four accounts of the anointing of Jesus, one in each of the gospels (Mk 143-9, Mt 268-13, Lk 736 -60, Jn 123 -8). As has been pointed out many times in many commentaries, there are significant differences between these four accounts. A major area of disagreement is the period in Jesus’s ministry, in which the anointing is said to occur : Mt and Mk place the incident two days before the Passover, Jn has it six days before the Passover and Lk places it much earlier in Jesus’ life. There is also disagreement between the gospels whether Jesus’ head is anointed or his feet : Mt and Mk say the former, Lk and Jn the latter. In Jn the episode is presumed to take place in the house of Mary and Martha ; in Lk it occurs in the house of Simon the Pharisee ; in Mt and Mk in the house of Simon the Leper. The account in Lk, especially, is markedly different from the other three insofar as it has been expanded by the parable of the two debtors, and as the emphasis of the story is on the

Two Notes on Papyrus

Many writers on the use of manuscripts in the ancient world have emphasised the difficulty experienced by the reader of a papyrus roll when he came to the end of the roll and was faced by the necessity to re-roll it for the benefit of the next reader; and it has often been claimed that this re-rolling was a troublesome and lengthy process. The author also experimented with a roll the end of which was glued to a stick with a wooden knob at each end, to represent the umbilicus and cornua known from allusions in Latin literature. This chapter concludes that re-rolling a papyrus roll presented no great difficulty to a reader, especially in an age when there was no demand for labour-saving devices. And the necessity for re-rolling is unlikely to have been an important factor in the long drawn-out battle between the roll and the codex. Keywords: ancient world; Latin literature; papyrus

Manuscripts, the Codex and the Canon

The article analyses the contents of the most significant MSS of the New Testament and identifies the major differences between them regarding their contents and the sequences of the books they contain. It is argued that one of the reasons why the New Testament canon became relatively firmly fixed from an early date was that Christians used the codex. For the Old Testament the contents were far more fluid. The article draws attention to the differences not only between the Hebrew and Alexandrian canons but also between the often fluctuating contents of the Hebrew, Syriac, Latin and Greek MSS of the Old Testament. It is shown how the main MSS, especially within the Greek tradition, have affected modern printed editions of the Septuagint. A description of how the varying traditions in Latin and Greek have influenced modern versions is also included.

The Apocryphal Acts

was an underlying religious reality to the world of which Beauty is the evidence. William Temple was asked to assess the ’Testament’ for orthodoxy there was a feeling that a poem which Bridges wished to dedicate to the King should not provoke religious controversy. Temple gave it almost full marks: yet the poem is full of attacks on the various churches, justified we may think, repudiates the doctrine of eternal punishment as a barbarous anachronism, and describes the Fall as

Which is the Best Synopsis

using language that is meaningless to most people. As I sit and listen to Christian speakers near the clocktower in Leicester and watch the passersby, I notice that it is not only Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and people of other faith who are bewildered by the language of blood and sacrifice; indeed, their culture is more likely to make some sort of sense of it than the average white nominal Christians!). But Christians must resist the notion that the only aim of such witnessing is to convert others to Christianity. In our contemporary world of unparalleled change, some aggiornamellto (updating) of our theology and missiology is required, such as Roman Catholics began to do in the Vatican II reforms, rescuing from the Christian heritage more positive assessments of the faith of others than have often

The Apocryphal Acts and the Ancient Novel: Literary Parallels to Early Non-Canonical Christian Writings1:

We expect professional librarians to be tidyminded people, determined that each and every book that crosses their desk be correctly catalogued and classified and then properly shelved. Where on the shelves would we expect them to put the early Christian narratives known collectively as the Apocryphal Acts? Because of some similarities between these early Acts, which typically tell of the lives of their eponymous heroes, their deeds or ‘acts’, and then their deaths, they are sometimes linked to contemporary novels from the 1st–3rd centuries ce. Perhaps they should therefore be shelved alongside pagan novels of the period. But because of the nature of the narrative in the apocryphal stories in general and in the apocryphal Acts in particular, some critics have broadened a search to find parallels in other literature by looking not only at novels but at earlier epics, typically in poetry like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Those and early Christian writings like the canonical Acts are referred to below. We may also ask: Ought our apocryphal Acts be more properly shelved as ‘Religious Literature’ or as ‘History’ or even as ‘Biography’? And what about ancient plays, written for theatrical and public performance? Should one look for parallels there too? We are looking mainly at the five principal apocryphal Acts, those of Andrew, of Paul, of Peter, of John and of Thomas. (I list them neutrally in alphabetical order as I do in my Apocryphal New Testament,2 partly because I am unsure of their relative interdependence and consequently of their likeliest sequence of composition.) Although the canonical Acts features Peter and then Paul, the big five apocryphal Acts deal with one apostle apiece, typically described as the founding father of a particular church. Alongside these are secondary acts.3 We see

A Short Textual Commentary on the Book of Revelation and the “New” Nestle

AbstractThis is an analysis of a representative selection of text-critical variants in the Book of Revelation. In particular the variants include those that concern the author’s language and style and those involving grammatical features. The attempted solutions offered are based on the principles of thoroughgoing eclectic criticism.

The Origin of the Christian Codex

In The Birth of the Codex , published in 1983, his co-author, the late C. H. Roberts, and the author put forward, two alternative hypotheses to explain the extraordinary predilection of the early Christians for the codex form of book as opposed to the roll. When Colin Roberts published his magisterial monograph The Codex in 1954 there were 22 known papyrus fragments of the Gospels, ranging in date from the 2nd century to the 6th or 7th. Since then 20 more Gospel fragments have come to light, and again everyone is from a codex. Of course other Gospels still circulated freely, and continued to be read and quoted. But inevitably the selection of the Four and their physical unity in the Codex gave them, right from the start, an authority and prestige which no competitor could hope to rival. The Four-Gospel Canon and the Four-Gospel Codex are thus inseparable. Keywords: Colin Roberts; Four-Gospel Canon; Four-Gospel Codex; papyrus fragments

The Last Chapter in the History of the Codex Sinaiticus

In 1975 an extraordinary discovery was made in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. In a recess in the wall of the Monastery, the very existence of which was unknown to the present-day community, a vast quantity of manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts was discovered, full details of which are now being published. In May 1844 the Biblical scholar Constantine Tischendorf visited the Monastery, where he remained for eight days. Among these fragments Tischendorf found 129 leaves in Greek which he identified as coming from a manuscript of the Old Testament and which, to judge from the appearance of the script, could not be later than the fourth century, and thus the earliest Biblical manuscript he had ever seen. Among the great mass of fragments found in 1975 were twelve complete leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus, together with some fragments. Keywords: Biblical manuscript; Codex Sinaiticus; Constantine Tischendorf; Mount Sinai; Old Testament