Professor Larry Hurtado has written a helpful guide to the manuscript tradition in early Christianity. The book is called The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. He gives an outline of our earliest manuscripts in chapter one. Then he discusses the rise of the Codex and its desirability among Christians. He asks why the Codex became an early Christian convention. He suggests that one of the main reasons was its portability, that modest-sized codices may have been attractive and serviceable for itinerant Christian teachers and evangelists, perhaps even as early as the first century. But that this factor becomes less of an issue in the second and third centuries when Hurtado argues that books were being prepared for Christians in residence (p. 67). He includes chapters on the Nomina Sacra and the Staurogram, subjects which he has explored in earlier publications and presentations. His final chapter describes other scribal features such as Codex size, use of columns, margins, lines per page, reader's aids, and corrections.
His work is highly interpretative, since one of the main goals of the work appears to me to understand why the Christian scribes used the Codex, why they used the abbreviations they did, what the size of the manuscript means, and so forth. His conclusions suggest that these can tell us something significant about their faith and its performance, that the specific nature of the manuscript is an artifact of early Christian usage and religious life (p. 189).
3 comments:
Does Hurtado suggest that having individual manuscript sheets made life much easier for an editor? In fact a team of editors could have been employed on a document. They could have arrived at a concensus, commenting on each other's inconsistencies. Individual sheets could then have been easily corrected and the book re-collated. That is how I envisage the extant NT was edited and expanded according to Flavian instructions. We have no record of the original prophetic documents written during the reign of Claudius and Nero. These would have been destroyed by the Flavians.
Geoff
The extant NT was edited and expanded according to Flavian instructions?
Looks like there's a conspiracy theorist in our midst.
The documents of the NT were state sponsored publications. And the essential tool of the massive production process was the codex. But the kernal information of the original prophetic documents (which were probably on scrolls) is evident in the extant text.
Refugee prophets (Galileans in Acts) first proclaimed the Spirit to Jews in Rome around 37 CE. Jesus had not been invented then.
Geoff
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