Vatican Shadows

A couple of days ago, the Vatican library opened free online access to hi-res photos of what is generally believed to be one of the oldest books in the world, P75, the remains of a papyrus book of the Christian Gospels in Greek that is commonly dated to the third century. That turned out to be the story of the year on this blog, with over 900 reads, 85 retweets and 7,500 Twitter impressions.

[The next two grafs have been revised, after I realized that I had posted on the same topic in January this year, and clean forgot.] P75 got me interested in the library's other Bodmer papyrus, donated to it in 1969, the famous P72, shelved as Pap.Bodmer.VIII. The new digital site neither indexes nor mentions it on the front page of the digital manuscripts site.

The old BAV portal's link still gives you access to Pap.Bodmer.VIII, a booklet of epistles, containing all the text of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. [This link I am giving you is not a secret, but rather one forgotten by the designers of the new portal. My apologies for overstating the case, when I first put this post up and claimed I had "discovered" the link.]

The writing on the P72 papyrus is thought to date to the 3rd or 4th century, roughly of the same period as the Codex Vaticanus, probably the world's oldest intact parchment codex.

The Wikipedia entry notes that P72 was dismembered from the "Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex," a little book dug from the sands of Egypt in which other works were: Nativity of Mary, the apocryphal correspondence of Paul to the Corinthians, the Eleventh Ode of Solomon, Melito's Homily on the Passover, a fragment of a hymn, the Apology of Phileas, and Psalm 33 and 34.

We don't know if  P72, where you can see the folds in the folios, is the oldest papyrus codex in existence, but Brent Nongbri, the Australian scholar, has recently argued: "It would seem that P.Bodm. VIII had a previous life, in which it preceded another work that was later removed when P.Bodm. VIII became part of the ‘Miscellaneous’ or ‘Composite’ codex." So it could be years or decades older than other parts of the codex.

You can read his short paper on his Academia.edu page, as well as a blog post he wrote.

As for P75 (the gospels), its date of making has long been estimated to be the 3rd century, but Nongbri published a critique this year in the Journal of Biblical Literature where he argued that this date is slapdash (my word, not his) and that the correct date is more likely to be 4th century, more or less of the same period as the Codex Vaticanus. I'll have more as the story continues.

Aside from all this excitement, the BAV has this week released an additional 34 items. Here is the full list:

1. Vat.ebr.32,  - Details
2. Vat.ebr.33, - Details
3. Vat.ebr.230, - Details
4. Vat.ebr.250, - Details
5. Vat.ebr.270.pt.1, - Details
6. Vat.ebr.270.pt.2 - Details
7. Vat.ebr.271 - Details
8. Vat.ebr.283 - Details
9. Vat.ebr.286 - Details
10. Vat.ebr.289 - Details
11. Vat.ebr.296 - Details
12. Vat.lat.276 - a 12th-century Augustine in Caroline minuscule with some Beneventan script on fols 258v-260v (my thanks to AaronM on Twitter for this info: https://twitter.com/gundormr/status/756196478452924416), Details
13. Vat.lat.288 - Ambrose of Milan, Details
14. Vat.lat.295 - Ambrose, Details
15. Vat.lat.296 - a 10th-century Ambrose, Details
16. Vat.lat.373 - made for the Renaissance bishop Pietro del Monte (c. 1400–57), from fol 111 he added the prologue to his Repertorium utriusque iuris, a major legal text - Details
17. Vat.lat.650 - a 10th-century compilation with Alcuin and others, many very faint pages have also been scanned with what seems to be ultraviolet light. Details
18. Vat.lat.674 - 14th century theological and scientific: here are some shape diagrams in the margin in a geometrical piece (140v, rotated):
    
      second half empty, Details
19. Vat.lat.740 - Aquinas, Details
20. Vat.lat.773 - Details
21. Vat.lat.775 - Details
22. Vat.lat.778 - Details
23. Vat.lat.779 - Details
24. Vat.lat.786 - Details
25. Vat.lat.789 - Details
26. Vat.lat.813 - Details
27. Vat.lat.819 - Details
28. Vat.lat.834 - Giles of Rome, Quaestiones, Details
29. Vat.lat.836 - Giles of Rome, c. 1243-1316, Commentarius in librum II Sententiarum, Details
30. Vat.lat.837 - ditto, Details
31. Vat.lat.852 - Details
32. Vat.lat.866 - Details
33. Vat.lat.875 , Details,
34. Vat.lat.14747 , an 18th century fair copy cataloguing the authors in the papal collection of printed books, the seventh volume, arranged by names, S-Z. Here is the pen drawing for S:
    

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 61. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Maybe This Is the Oldest Book

Over a year ago, we debated on this blog and on Twitter what was the oldest bound book in the work. See the first post: Is this the world's oldest bound book? and the second post: Older than the Oldest.

Some authoritative experts said the crown should not go to the Codex Vaticanus, a parchment bible which is still bound, but to the 102 battered and now separated pages of Pap.Hanna (the sole Hanna Papyrus), also known as P75, which is a little 3rd-century booklet containing most of the Gospels of Luke and John.

On July 18, all the extant pages of this booklet were placed online by the digitization program at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome.

It's a battered little papyrus book from Egypt, originally sewn together in a codex and now kept between sheets of glass. This is among the most famous of the so-called Bodmer Papyri discovered in Egypt in 1952 and is an important source of the gospels within 200 years of their composition. It also contains an early Christian "brand logo", the Tau-Rho symbol or staurogram.

In all, 50 new items were placed online in this summer batch. Here is my full unofficial list:

1. Cappon.229
2. Cappon.297 
3. Pap.Hanna (the bibliography page for this item still uses the former shelfmark, Pap.Bodmer.XIV-XV).
4. Vat.ebr.25
5. Vat.ebr.26
6. Vat.ebr.27
7. Vat.ebr.28
8. Vat.ebr.30
9. Vat.ebr.31
10. Vat.ebr.214
11. Vat.ebr.215
12. Vat.ebr.220
13. Vat.ebr.221
14. Vat.ebr.222
15. Vat.ebr.223
16. Vat.ebr.225
17. Vat.ebr.229
18. Vat.ebr.232
19. Vat.ebr.234
20. Vat.ebr.235
21. Vat.ebr.236
22. Vat.ebr.239
23. Vat.ebr.241
24. Vat.ebr.242
25. Vat.ebr.244
26. Vat.ebr.247
27. Vat.ebr.249
28. Vat.ebr.252
29. Vat.ebr.257
30. Vat.ebr.260
31. Vat.ebr.261
32. Vat.ebr.262
33. Vat.ebr.265
34. Vat.ebr.266
35. Vat.ebr.267
36. Vat.ebr.268
37. Vat.ebr.273
38. Vat.ebr.275
39. Vat.ebr.277
40. Vat.ebr.279
41. Vat.ebr.284
42. Vat.ebr.285
43. Vat.ebr.290
44. Vat.ebr.292
45. Vat.ebr.293
46. Vat.ebr.295
47. Vat.ebr.298
48. Vat.ebr.299
49. Vat.ebr.303
50. Vat.lat.9973

This is Piggin's Unofficial List (PUL) number 60. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Top TextArch Story of 2016

The general news media only pick up on text-archaeology stories once a year at most. The big story of 2012 was the emergence of a piece of papyrus containing what was supposedly a gnostic gospel with a saying by Jesus referring to "my wife." It looks like the huger story of 2016 will be the emergence of damning doubts about the provenance of that snippet.

Late on June 15, The Atlantic published an investigative story by Ariel Sabar linking the papyrus to Walter Fritz, a German man now living in Florida who has studied egyptology. Take the time to read this story, as it is likely to go down in history as one of the great pieces of text-archaeology journalism.

Christian Askeland writes in a comment on the usually authoritative Evangelical Text Criticism blog that Sabar was not in fact the first to identify Fritz as principal in the matter or flag his knowledge of Coptic, but adds in praise, "Sabar’s work is clearly original. The large majority of his presentation is material uniquely discovered by him."

A Google New search indicates French and Dutch media have reported this now, but the retail German news media have yet to pick up on this amazing back story, which has yet another back story behind it: the employment of Mr Fritz as director of the Stasi Museum in Berlin when he was 27 years old in 1991-92. The German freelance journalist involved, Petra Krischok, does not mention the story on her website.

What's also very striking to me as a journalist is how hugely difficult under restrictive German laws it would have been to expose this story if it had happened in Germany: the Fritz trail through company incorporations, land ownership and so on would have been unsearchable. All of this public registry data is treated as confidential under Germany's ridiculous Datenschutz laws. The new EU "right to be forgotten" law makes it even harder to track what someone did in 1991.

As a law grad I would also be interested to hear discussion of whether any of the alleged actions during the production of this papyrus to Professor Karen King of Harvard could possibly constitute a crime.

And as an observer of life, I am struck by the psychological issues here. Sabar suggests that King, so academically gifted, is perhaps a poor judge of real life. Watch Sabar on the video which is entitled "To Catch a Forger" (did The Atlantic's lawyer really okay that?) and you'll see that he is very much the writer, a bit shy. Read the quotes from Fritz and you are struck by the great emotional intelligence of such a person, able to yield slivers of truth in a patient bid to convince someone of falsity. The next step I guess is for one of the great tiger interviewers of the business to get Fritz into a TV studio.

Bodmer Papyrus

A cache of 22 papyri, all apparently discovered and assembled in Egypt in 1952, was smuggled later to Switzerland to be sold for the highest possible price. This celebrated remnant of a library of the ancient world is named after Martin Bodmer, the wealthy scion of a Swiss silk manufacturing family, who purchased the papyri en bloc for his book collection at Cologny near Geneva.

Written in Greek, most are little codices, a few are rolls. Most of the ancient world's books have vanished, but the dry air of Egypt preserved just a few like these. The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana now holds several Bodmer Papyri of importance to Christianity.
One is an item known to scholarship as 72, a 3rd- or 4th-century manuscript. Part of it, containing sections of epistles Peter 1 and 2, was donated to Pope Paul VI in 1969. [My thanks to Brent Nongbri of Sydney (his page on Academia.edu) for explaining this to me.] Its BAV shelfmark is Papiri Bodmer VIII. The leaves have been unbound and each is kept in a glass frame. Its age naturally makes it a matter of interest in the debate on my blog last year about the world's oldest book.

P72 is celebrated enough to have its own Wikipedia entry with links that you can follow up. It came online on January 25, the first of the Bodmer Papyi to appear and one of the latest 136 Digita Vaticana releases. The images are dissimilar from the other scans and may simply come from the BAV's photographic collection. Previously, only some black-and-white microfilm images of this papyrus were accessible online via CSNTM.

My strictly unofficial list of the 136 releases is below (the BAV makes no running announcements), and I will add more annotations to this list as I have time. The links below lead to a BAV catalog page. You then have to click on book logo at the top left to see the actual digitization.

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.36,
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.46,
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.15,
4. Barb.lat.4072,
5. Barb.lat.4073, Dante
6. Barb.lat.4079,
7. Barb.lat.4087,
8. Barb.lat.4098,
9. Barb.lat.4116,
10. Barb.lat.4117,
11. Barb.lat.4119,
12. Barb.lat.7943, charters, I see a date 1624 on one
13. Barb.or.143,
14. Barb.or.157,
15. Borgh.226, Novels of Justinian
16. Cappon.298,
17. Chig.L.VIII.293, Dante?, annotations to verse
18. Ott.lat.3316,
19. Pal.gr.140,
20. Pal.lat.23,
21. Pal.lat.47,
22. Pal.lat.965,
23. Pal.lat.972,
24. Pal.lat.974,
25. Pal.lat.975,
26. Pal.lat.976,
27. Pal.lat.978,
28. Pal.lat.980,
29. Pal.lat.1207,
30. Pal.lat.1276,
31. Pal.lat.1351,
32. Pal.lat.1362.pt.A,
33. Pal.lat.1362.pt.B,
34. Pal.lat.1365,
35. Pal.lat.1400,
36. Pal.lat.1418,
37. Pal.lat.1424,
38. Pal.lat.1447,
39. Pal.lat.1459,
40. Pal.lat.1463,
41. Pal.lat.1464,
42. Pal.lat.1465,
43. Pal.lat.1472,
44. Pal.lat.1475,
45. Pal.lat.1479,
46. Pal.lat.1483,
47. Pal.lat.1486,
48. Pal.lat.1488,
49. Pal.lat.1489,
50. Pap.Bodmer.VIII, see above
51. Ross.463, just a few fragments of a lost 14th-century codex of Dante's Divine Comedy
52. Urb.lat.13,
53. Urb.lat.31,
54. Urb.lat.52,
55. Urb.lat.59,
56. Urb.lat.99,
57. Urb.lat.119,
58. Urb.lat.120,
59. Urb.lat.242,
60. Urb.lat.272,
61. Urb.lat.306,
62. Urb.lat.312,
63. Urb.lat.315,
64. Urb.lat.324,
65. Urb.lat.325,
66. Urb.lat.326,
67. Urb.lat.338,
68. Urb.lat.340,
69. Urb.lat.342,
70. Urb.lat.344,
71. Urb.lat.350, Aeneid by Virgil, see Rome Reborn catalog where Anthony Grafton opines (I am not sure why) that "this is perhaps the most lavishly illustrated of all copies of Virgil in existence." Here's a detail:
    
    
72. Urb.lat.357,
73. Urb.lat.362,
74. Urb.lat.363,
75. Urb.lat.364,
76. Urb.lat.369,
77. Urb.lat.377,
78. Urb.lat.379,
79. Urb.lat.380,
80. Urb.lat.382,
81. Urb.lat.386,
82. Urb.lat.390,
83. Urb.lat.391,
84. Urb.lat.392,
85. Urb.lat.393,
86. Urb.lat.394,
87. Urb.lat.395,
88. Urb.lat.398,
89. Urb.lat.399,
90. Urb.lat.403,
91. Urb.lat.404, papal bulls
92. Urb.lat.408,
93. Urb.lat.409,
94. Urb.lat.414,
95. Urb.lat.415, De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni of Q. Curtius Rufus (Life of Alexandra the Great) with this bad-tempered child faun at fol. 1r
    
96. Urb.lat.419,
97. Urb.lat.422,
98. Urb.lat.424,
99. Urb.lat.431,
100. Urb.lat.436,
101. Urb.lat.437,
102. Urb.lat.440,
103. Urb.lat.441,
104. Urb.lat.455,
105. Urb.lat.456,
106. Urb.lat.459, Liber insularum archipelagi by Cristoforo Buondelmonti, a book of maps and account of the author's adventurous exploration of the islands of the Aegean in 1415 or so. The illustrations suggest the nostalgic and obsessive love for the classical past, notes Anthony Grafton's Rome Reborn catalog. See the St Louis catalog too. Here is Mytilene on Lesbos (fol. XXXr), 600 years before the current refugee wave was arriving on the island:
     
107. Urb.lat.464, Florentine History by Leonardo Bruni, best-selling 15th-century author. See the St Louis catalog and Grafton's Rome Reborn catalog.
108. Urb.lat.469,
109. Urb.lat.471,
110. Urb.lat.475,
111. Urb.lat.480,
112. Urb.lat.481, homilies of Ephraem the Syrian, Latin translation, and here he is:
     
113. Urb.lat.482,
114. Urb.lat.484,
115. Urb.lat.486,
116. Urb.lat.520,
117. Urb.lat.682, Dante
118. Vat.ar.2016,
119. Vat.gr.2556,
120. Vat.lat.28,
121. Vat.lat.41,
122. Vat.lat.48,
123. Vat.lat.84, The Psalter of Nonantola (10th to 11th century), Beuron number 368
124. Vat.lat.120, Gospels, with illumination by an artist of the Fécamp Bible
125. Vat.lat.144,
126. Vat.lat.242,
127. Vat.lat.270,
128. Vat.lat.389,
129. Vat.lat.409,
130. Vat.lat.459, Augustine, Confessions, 11th-12th century
131. Vat.lat.471,
132. Vat.lat.521, Humbert on Augustine, incipit "Viris religiosis non modicum ... "
133. Vat.lat.4780, Dante
134. Vat.lat.5465, an 8th or 9th-century Latin Gospel Book in uncial with fine Eusebian canon tables. The codicologist Michael Gorman (whose key article on the topic I have featured previously on this blog here and here) says it is one of a set of the southern Tuscan type, stating: "It seems to me that the abbey at Monte Amiata is a very probable origin for some of these manuscripts. We know of few likely alternatives." I have blogged on Monte Amiata here as well in case you are curious about the place itself. On canon tables, note Martin Wallraff's plans for an edition.
135. Vat.lat.5691, Cardinal Cesare Baronio, 1538-1607, Annales ecclesiastici, vol. VIII
136. Vat.lat.5758, Sermons of Augustine in one of the oldest manuscripts, made at Bobbio, Italy in the 6th or 7th century, see the catalog entry at St Louis. Lowe, CLA 1 36, TM 66131. It is marked on the front (p. 1) as coming from the book chest of Abbot Bobolenus. This pre-Carolingian homiliary is one of the sources of W. M. Lindsay's Notae Latinae covering abbreviations in the early minuscule period such as "ff kk" for "beloved brothers. Martin Hellmann is studying these. The codex also has some small but interesting initials, like this A on p. 95:
     

The posted total of items is 3,684 after one item, Vat.gr.126 was removed from the schedule for reasons unknown on Jan 28. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 37.]

Gorman, Michael. “Manuscript Books at Monte Amiata in the Eleventh Century.” Scriptorium 56 (2002): 225–93: 268–71.

Older than the Oldest

After my post Is this the World's Oldest Bound Book? appeared, Cillian O'Hogan, who is the curator of classical and Byzantine studies at the British Library, kindly tweeted some comments making out a case that papyrus books older than the Codex Vaticanus do exist, and met the objection from Roger Pearse, who is an eminent citizen-science blogger, that only a bundle with more than one quire to it counts as a "book". He then wrote:

@roger_pearse @JBPiggin P66 is certainly multi-quire, but it may be only contemporary with CS and CV. Also P4+64+67 if all one codex (200)
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) February 24, 2015

All those Ps refer to papyrus finds, along with numbers given to them by Christian scholars seeking the earliest texts of the New Testament. Some of these things are not online at all, but acceptable images of the 75 leaves of P66 are at EarlyBible.com. This is the one that is probably contemporary with the Codex Vaticanus.

As for the item Cillian O'Hogan dates to 200 CE, the biggest bit (P67) is in the fourth-century Barcelona Papyrus, which I discussed some years ago on my website. Sadly, that papyrus has never been viewable online. However there is an image of P4 at EarlyBible.com and P64, the three small fragments making up MS Gr. 17 at the Magdalen College Library, Oxford, are accessible online as the following tweet points out:

@CillianOHogan @roger_pearse @JBPiggin Late to the conversation, sorry! But P64 is online at http://t.co/JImx5z7c6r
— Magdalen Lib & Arch (@MagdLibAndArch) March 9, 2015

In addition, I pointed out myself that the 102 battered pages at the BAV in Rome of Hanna Papyrus 1, also known as P75, are supposed to date from approximately the same period. It has not been digitized yet, but there are a couple of leaves visible at VatLib. For low-res images, see P75 at CSNTM.

Finally, it was pointed out that there is a very old leaf of a secular work, Homer's Odyssey, dated to the period 200-400 CE. Click on the link below to see it:

@roger_pearse @JBPiggin Also, parchment, but 3rd-4th century, this fine Odyssey from @thejohnrylands http://t.co/BprqU1lkwC
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) February 24, 2015

In addition, Cillian O'Hogan pointed to a very fine Medieval Fragments blog post by Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel), a medieval book historian at Leiden University, in December 2013 with a different tack on the topic, What is the Oldest Book in the World?

So where do we stand? A case could be made that one or all of these four items are books older than the Codex Vaticanus, but would they, in their incomplete and damaged state, be accepted by the average teenager as "books" in the common garden sense of that word? They have no covers and have been torn apart.

The Codex Vaticanus may not be in its original binding, and indeed it has had leaves inserted in it to replace its lost pages, but it exists as a bound codex that people (see the first post) have continued to open and shut (and handle without using tweezers) right up to the present day. I would compare this to the difference between a shipwreck and a ship. Every wreck was a ship, but is a ship no longer, unless it can be refloated and patched up and made to sail again. No one would dream of messing with the papyrii or "repairing" the indignities done to them by illegal diggers and dealers in Egypt, so I think that we would have to consider them, for now at least, to be the remains of former books.