By Brent Nongbri

Talented scholars have spent countless hours poring over our most ancient copies of Christian writings with much profit, but the object of their study has mostly been the texts that the manuscripts carry and not the ancient books themselves. What can the study of the physical objects in their own right teach us?

I’ve tried to address this question in my recent book, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. Having a better understanding of the ancient book as a three-dimensional object with its own history can cause us to question where our knowledge of these manuscripts comes from—and how secure it actually is—while also forcing us to think more about all the people who encountered these books, both in antiquity and the modern day.

Approaching early Christian manuscripts as physical artifacts immediately raises the kinds of questions we regularly pose to non-textual artifacts. Where do they come from? What archaeological context did they have? How old are they?

The question of age is clearly important for textual critics who weigh different readings of manuscripts when they establish a critical text. But the process of determining the age of early Christian books is often less clear-cut than we imagine. The dates assigned to most of our earliest Christian manuscripts are quite insecure since they are generally based on nothing more than palaeography, the analysis of handwriting, a highly subjective and often problematic undertaking. Experts can disagree by decades or even centuries, as in the case of a tiny fragment of a papyrus copy of the Gospel According to Matthew (PSI 1.1), that has been assigned dates ranging from the third century to the seventh century CE.

SI 1.1, fragment of a papyrus leaf of the Gospel According to Matthew. (PSI Online)

The question of archaeological context is also frequently difficult. While we know that most of the earliest surviving copies of ancient Christian literature come from Egypt, we frequently don’t know from which particular site in Egypt the books originated, and only in very rare cases do we have detailed information about the archaeological context in which manuscripts are found. When we do know a little something about the archaeological context of our manuscripts, it can actually be a little surprising. In fact, in terms of raw numbers, most of our very earliest Christian manuscripts were thrown out as garbage in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. From 1896 to 1907 British papyrologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt led excavations of the city’s trash mounds and recovered an enormous collection of ancient documents and manuscripts.

Excavation of a trash mound in Oxyrhynchus, with Grenfell’s silhouette. (Egypt Exploration Society)

To date, well over 5,000 of the texts found by Grenfell and Hunt have been published, but this represents only a fraction of the reported half million fragments they recovered. Among the pieces that have been published are over 150 pieces (mostly fragmentary but occasionally substantial) of early Christian books, a mix of what we would now call “canonical” and “apocryphal” material. These pieces display a variety of formats. The vast majority of the books are codices (books with pages) rather than rolls. And these codices ranged widely in size and quality, from small roughly made codices like a tiny parchment copy of the Didache (P.Oxy. 15.1782, about 5 cm wide and 6 cm high) to rather large and luxurious codices like the lavishly copied papyrus book that contained the Martyrdom of Pamoun (P.Oxy. 70.4759, about 14 cm wide and 26 cm high).

P.Oxy. 15.1782 and 70.4759. (Egypt Exploration Society and Imaging Papyri Project, University of Oxford)

So, we can generalize a bit about Christianity at Oxyrhynchus using the manuscripts that have been published so far, but we need to be careful. It’s hard to know how accurate a picture we’re actually getting because such a small fraction of the material from the site has been published. Questions remain: How well does the published portion of the Christian manuscripts represent the full number of Christian manuscripts that were excavated? How well does what was excavated represent the whole of what survived antiquity in the trash heaps (that is to say, how much was destroyed or stolen during excavations)? How well did the material that survived to the twentieth century represent what was originally thrown out in the trash heaps in antiquity? And finally, how did that trash reflect the actual reading habits of the residents of Oxyrhynchus? Were these books from the libraries of a few individuals? Or was book ownership more widespread?

A different but equally pressing set of questions face us when we turn to our more substantially preserved early Christian manuscripts like the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri and the Bodmer Papyri.

P.Bodmer 5, a portion of the so-called Bodmer Composite Codex, which contains a mix of “canonical” and “apocryphal” Christian texts. (Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny-Geneva)

Named for the collectors who managed to snap up the majority of the finds through the antiquities market in the 1930s and 1950s respectively, these two collections contain some early Christian books in a truly excellent state of preservation, but our contextual knowledge about them is quite limited because they were not discovered by archaeologists but instead purchased from antiquities dealers.

We can still extract some knowledge from these books by paying attention to their physical characteristics. For instance, when we think about how ancient readers would have understood these texts, it helps to know which texts were between the same covers and which books may have been on the same shelf. Sometimes the combinations might not be what we expect. One of the Bodmer books, the so-called “Composite” or “Miscellaneous” codex, contains the Genesis of Mary (often called the Protevangelium of James), 3 Corinthians, the eleventh Ode of Solomon, the New Testament book of Jude, and the paschal sermon of Melito of Sardis. At a later point, a copy of 1-2 Peter seems to have been added to the codex. Another Bodmer codex contains the Gospel According to Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Romans. There is even a codex containing part of the book of Daniel in Greek along with book 6 of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.

An intact bifolium containing Thucydides (P.Bodmer 27) and the biblical book of Daniel (P.Bodmer 46). (Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny-Geneva)

And all of these books seem to have sat alongside a volume containing comedies of the Greek playwright, Menander, if we are in fact right to understand these books as a coherent ancient collection.

But therein lies the catch. Because the Bodmer codices are a product of the antiquities market, we can never be entirely sure that they all formed part of the same ancient collection. In this case, and indeed in the case of most of our best-preserved early Christian books, we are dealing with materials that were found by people who are not professional archaeologists. The information they provide may be based on misunderstandings or even complete fabrications. Finders, dealers, buyers, and sometimes even scholars all have reasons to be less than forthcoming about issues of provenance. The antiquities market essentially erects a wall between us and any secure knowledge about manuscripts not unearthed through proper archaeological excavation.

When it comes to the archaeology of the earliest Christian manuscripts, then, the chief takeaway is that reliable knowledge about discoveries of early Christian books is precious and extremely difficult to come by, and we should be critical and careful when we hear any confident claims about the earliest Christian books.

Brent Nongbri is an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University.