SBL 2008:
Grossman/Haines-Eitzen Session (Monday, 24 Nov 2008, 1 pm)
SBL24-90
Qumran
Joint Session With: Qumran, Social History of
Formative Christianity and Judaism
11/24/2008
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: Meeting Room 201 - CC
Theme: Material Witness: Ancient Manuscripts and the Evidence for Scribal Practice
Kim
Haines-Eitzen, Cornell University, Presiding (5 min)
Emanuel Tov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Consistency
in the Activity of Scribes, Translators, and Revisers? (25 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania
Connecting
the Dots: Early Jewish and Early Christian Greek Evidence in Context
(25 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Florentino García Martínez, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Scribal
Practices in the Aramaic Literary Texts from Qumran (25 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Roger Bagnall, New York University, Respondent (25 min)
Discussion (30 min)
Abstract: We now have access to a number of
pre-Christian or
almost certainly non-Christian examples of Greek fragments of Jewish
texts,
mostly but not exclusively of works that came to be considered
scriptural. It
is possible to identify various scribal features in these texts, and to
compare
those features with the evidence from early Christian texts as well as
texts
that could be either Jewish or Christian in origin. Comparison with
similar
features in Greek documentary and "paraliterary" texts in general
also sheds light on the possible scribal developments and relationships
in that
transitional period that saw the rise both of Christianity and of codex
technology. It will be suggested that in "scribal practice" as in
numerous other areas, early Christians seem to have been heavily
indebted to
their Greek Jewish predecessors, within the general context of
Greco-Roman
developments.
Orientation: For several years
now, I've been trying to evaluate the old arguments that attempted
to make socio-economic judgments based on the features and formats of early
Christian written materials, and have at least convinced myself that
what has usually been interpreted as Christian innovation reflecting
relatively less professional cultural and educational status was, instead,
largely in continuity with earlier Greek Jewish practices. While this
changes the model in significant ways for the study of early
Christianity, it leaves unaddressed the question of why Greek Jews
developed and/or adopted such literary practices [see Peter Parsons' comments below]. Seeking for clues to
that set of issues led me to search more carefully for analogous
Greco-Roman practices, and indeed, to find significant parallels in
some of the surviving "paraliterary" texts such as commentary,
mythography, astrology, and law.
Roberts payed less attention to the
other scribal features such as the use of what have been termed
"reading aids" such as paragraphing, spacing and even occasional
punctuation, all of which appear in the Jewish Greek examples. Since
these features are not characteristic of most other Greek literary remnants
from this period, but do appear in many later Greek Christian
manuscripts, it
became standard to explain them in the Christian materials as evidence
of a less literary training for the Christian copyists. Roberts himself
shows awareness of the situation, although he does not attempt to
address it directly -- "From this survey of the
externals of our earliest Christian manuscripts we can conclude that
their writing is based, with some changes and with a few exceptions, on
the model of the documents, not on that of Greek classical manuscripts
nor on that of the Greco-Jewish tradition" (Manuscript,
Society and Belief 20). "But if the style is
documentary in origin, it is documentary with a difference. Several of
the early texts carry reading aids -- accents, breathings, punctuation,
marks to indicate foreign words; ... All this is quite alien to the
documents and not all that common in the literary papyri, not at least
in the abundance in which they are found in some Christian texts" (21).
But Roberts does not comment on the frequency with which these features
are also found in what he admits to be "stylish" Jewish materials, some
of which were not, of course, available to him in the 1970s. And it
goes relatively unnoticed, perhaps because the material was less
accessible thirty years ago, that other genres of Greek literature --
notably commentary and "mythography" -- exhibit similar features, as I
noted in an earlier
presentation.
What, then, is the current situation? Almost all of the Jewish Greek fragments make some use of spacing. Rochelle Altman explains this sort of feature as "breathing units" -- as much as can be spoken in one breath -- but surely more is involved in some of the texts. Tov has examined the relationship to liturgical units in the Jewish scriptural tradition, with significant, if not complete, success. Where left margins are preserved, evidence of some sort of paragraphing sometimes appears as in
Peter Parsons noted such features in the Minor
Prophets materials, and commented at some length:
"...the use of enlarged initials at line-beginning (hands A and B) and
phrase-beginning (hand A) and (set out in the margin) to mark a new
section (hand A) gives this manuscript a documentary look. ... The fact
is itself remarkable. Early Christian books show the same
characteristic; copies of the Greek classics do not. It has therefore
been tempting to argue that the texts of the Early Church stood closer
to the world of business than to that of literature, and to draw
conclusions about the social milieu in which the texts circulated or
the esteem in which they were held. Now we see the same thing in a
Jewish manuscript of pre-Christian date. This may suggest that the
Christians inherited the practice, rather than inventing it; the
problem remains, why Greek-speaking Jews should have adopted it in the
first place" (23f).
To what extent does size matter? In a spate of recent publications, and coming from the entirely different angle of the history of the relation between writing formats (especilly size of columns, styles of writing) and intended functions (authoritative texts for copying, booksellers copies, private copies, etc.), Rochelle Altman suggests that the Rylands Deuteronomy scroll "was an official text of the Jewish population of Alexandria" -- "the serifs of this font design follow the Aramaic practice of heavy serifs as opposed to the thin serifs used by Rome." She goes on to make the problematic claim that "all of our early examples of Greek fonts with serifs are from Ptolemaic Egypt, not from Seleucid Syria or mainland Greece. Official serifed Greek scripts only begin to replace the Classical Greek sans-serif fonts following the Roman conquest of Egypt." If that claim proved accurate, the serifed fonts of the Qumran caves 4 and 7 Greek could suggest strong Egyptian connections for that material, at least. Otherwise, the criteria for making the sorts of distinctions on which Altman insists with reference to sizes and styles are extremely difficult to assess in these very fragmented materials, although that does not mean that the task is not worth attempting. But not in any detail today.
Here are the pieces that align most closely with her judgments about top level (authoritative in some sense) texts:
As for "accents, breathings, punctuation, marks to indicate foreign words," as mentioned by Roberts, there is little evidence of such in these Jewish fragments [[dieresis in Job and Esther, midpoint in Fouad-b]], nor is there evidence of overlined abbreviations ("nomina sacra" and numbers), another feature that became frequent in Christian materials. On the other hand, the special divine name (tetragrammaton) appears in several forms -- archaic Hebrew, square Hebrew, Greek abbreviated transliteration (IAW), and probably also in Greek translation (KURIOS). What the relationship may have been between the Jewish treatments of the tetragrammaton and the practice of abbreviation in the Christian materials is unclear, although I suspect they can hardly be unrelated.
Another aspect of this larger
problem of formats and presentational devices is the role of the codex
in Jewish and Christian circles. There is probable evidence for Jewish
Greek use of the codex from around the turn of the second/third century
in
POxy656 of Gen 14-27. Even Roberts, who for a time resisted such a
conclusion, reconsidered in view of the challenges raised by Kurt
Treu and decided that POxy 656 was indeed from a Jewish "papyrus
codex of Genesis assigned to the second century" (Manuscript,
Society and Belief 76). He also considers
"most puzzling" the ambiguous fragment
POxy1007,
"part of a leaf of a parchment codex of Genesis dated to the third
century" in which the tetragrammaton is abbreviated in paleo-Hebrew,
followed by an abbreviated overlined form of QEOS. He suggests that
"either we have an instance of a Jewish scribe being influenced by
Christian practice or we must assume that a Christian in copying a
Jewish manuscript preserved the Hebrew form of the Name, as a few later
manuscripts, e.g. the Marchalianus [MS "Q" of the Prophets,
6th c], do" (77). He never seems to consider that perhaps we have a
Jewish scribe for whom the use of such contractions was part of an
ongoing scribal tradition, and perhaps also the use of the codex (about
which Roberts does not comment in this connection).
In short, with reference to many of
these formatting and presentational features, it makes more sense to
imagine continuity from Greek Judaism to Greek Christianity than to
pursue conjectures about why Christian scribes and copyists invented or
developed
different practices of their own. It also makes sense to explore
similarities and differences in
various types of Greek literature from the same period to determine the
extent to which such practices in the Jewish and Christian materials in
question
should be viewed as unusual, not simply in relationship to manuscripts
of Homer,
Thucydides, and the like ("high literature"), but in the context of
what is being called "paraliterary" types of writing such as
commentaries, "mythographic" narratives, memoirs, astrological texts,
and even legal treatises.
Indeed, it is also among such genres that the codex format first
appears with
significant strength in the development of non Christian Greek texts.
This is
reasonable since the notebook codex would most likely have been the
initial recipient for such types of material in that educational and
literary culture.
As Roberts was well aware, there were many
different kinds of "documentary" hands and formats, so lumping them
together somehow in general statements is of little help. At one point
Roberts is more precise, at least with reference to the use of ekthesis
--
"in secular literary texts [ekthesis] ... is confined in the Roman
period to commentaries and lists" (18). "Secular literary texts" such
as "commentaries and lists"? These are not the "calligraphic" texts to
which Roberts normally refers when speaking of the "literature" of the
period. Yet his comment is on target. Most of the "unusual" or even
"documentary" scribal practices that we have been discussing are well
attested in those texts that have sometimse been dubbed
"semi-literary" or even "sub-literary," now termed "paraliterary."
Early calligraphic serifed style aside, most of the early Jewish texts
and many of the early Christian ones exhibit "paraliterary" features ("lectional
signs") such as appear in commentarial
and similarly less "classic" literature of the same period.
Time does not permit here any wide
ranging survey of these materials, which are increasingly available
with detailed descriptions on the Leuven "Catalogue of Paraliterary
Papyri" supplemented by the "Lists
and Catalogues in Greek Paraliterary Papyri"
from the same site. But since the interest of this section is "social
history" of such scribal phenomena, perhaps some general observations
are in order. The older generalization from which Christian social
history was created out of supposed "documentary" and
otherwise "non literary" features (Christian copyists were viewed as less trained in things "literary," more in touch with commercial contexts) requires significant reevaluation. The social and educational and economic situations of the persons who were responsible for producing the relevant "paraliterary" texts need to be explored and viewed in relation to the producers of the Jewish and Christian texts in question. Recent attention to "school texts and practices" in the Greco-Roman worlds may prove helpful.
But in general, this is not easy territory, especially in the context of DSS studies. Some features of the Greek DSS texts could be explained as imitation of semitic practices (as Roberts already suspected) -- e.g. sectioning by use of spacing, word division, variety in presentation of divine names (especially, but not only, the tetragrammaton), marginal markings. On the other hand, most of the same features are present in the non-DSS Greek Jewish fragments, which complicates things accordingly. And, of course, the relationship of the people who wrote the DSS Greek materials to either the semitic DSS scribes or the non DSS Greek Jewish producers is a major unknown. Even the relationship of the cave 4 Greek producers to the exclusively Greek cave 7 scribes is unclear. Are the Greek Jewish materials sufficiently homogeneous to suggest a common educational background and/or training? Of course, other features of the manuscripts also need to be taken into consideration, such as the relationship between size/style and probable function, as Rochelle Altman argues. Note, for example, her judgment that some of the DSS materials are products of the book selling trade -- "because we also find products of bookshops among the Greco-Roman papyri and the DSS, we can state with a high degree of probabilty, that bookshops existed in Judea and Greco-Roman Egypt.".
With regard to Christian scribal
practices, while there are developments beyond what the Greek Jewish
materials demonstrate (e.g. elaboration of punctuation schemes,
expansion of nomina sacra uses, widescale adoption of the codex), it
seems no longer possible to speak simply of Christian innovation in
scribal practices, or to create specifically Christian "social history"
from the observed phenomena. Continuities from Jewish practices to
Christian are what we should expect, in light of early Christian
history in general. So, as Peter Parsons observed, regarding
ekthesis and enlarged letters to mark sections, "the
problem remains, why Greek-speaking Jews should have adopted" such
practices "in the first place" (24). Given the calligraphic care
exhibited by many of the same Jewish MSS, the old explanation (with
regard to Christians) of social and educational "inferiority" seems
unsatisfactory.
As Emanuel Tov has detailed, many
of the semitic Qumran materials show more or less consistent scribal
practices, presumably learned and passed along in some sort of
educational or professional continuity. Here the comparanda are more
scarce and more
chronologically constrained than with the Greek materials, although if
on other grounds one accepts the view that such semitic materials at
Qumran emanated from an Essene or similarly cohesive Jewish group,
perhaps an aspect of "social history" can be postulated. And if the Greek
Qumran materials come from the same Jewish milieu, a bilingual aspect
can be added. But such a conclusion would be highly conjectural, and
difficult to support on the basis of the existing evidence. On the
other hand, the hypothesis that there was significant continuity in
scribal practices between the Jewish worlds and early Christianity
seems to me at least more productive than earlier theories of
discontinuity and/or competition in such matters.
Finally,
questions need to be explored as to the "social history" of the
relevant paraliterary materials in the Greco-Roman scribal world at
large. To what extent can the producers and users of these materials be
identified, and what can that tell us about the adoption of similar
practices by Greek Jews and Christians? At present I have no
convincing, or even highly suggestive answers, but at least the playing
field seems more level now, and the materials available for comparison more plentiful and accessible, than has been the situation in the past.
/end/