"From Jewish Scribes to Christian Scriptoria?: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity in their Greek Literary Worlds"

by Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania Emeritus

The path from early Jewish to early Christian scribal practices is difficult to map. That there were some connections is highly probable, given the Jewish origins of the earliest followers of Jesus and the positive use of Jewish scriptures by many early Christian individuals and groups. I have argued elsewhere that early Christian scribal practices such as the use of spacing to divide sense units (or even words), the use of marginal section markers, and some related format features were probably learned or borrowed from Jewish techniques. Somewhat less easily documented, but no less probable in my mind is the transition from Jewish treatment of the tetragrammaton as a special "term" to early Christian development of "nomina sacra" conventions. Finally, I strongly suspect that even the appropriation of the codex in early Christian circles is at least partly indebted to Jewish experimentation with book formats, although possible evidence for that suspicion falls short of demonstration. The extent to which such scribal practices may have been unusual in the larger Greco-Roman world of texts and documents is my present concern, and whether we can learn anything useful from investigating that larger context.

Jewish and Christian Scribal Techniques and Greco-Roman "Literature"

The impression left by specialists in the study of the "high literature" of the Greco-Roman world is that the sorts of scribal features mentioned above were not typical -- at least not of the texts produced for the most discriminating buyers or patrons. The late Colin H. Roberts (1909-1990) was one of the most authoritative, in terms of papyrological credentials, and probably the most outspoken on such issues. In his closely argued Schweich Lectures for 1977 (published as Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, Oxford Press 1979) he repeatedly appeals to "documentary" practices to describe features of the earliest (mostly second century) Christian texts that he explores. For example he summarizes: "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" (20).\1/

Actually, Roberts seems to be caught between papyrological judgments carried over from the earlier 20th century (see his 1949 article "The Christian Book and the Greek Papyri," JTS 50: 155-168),\2/ and new insights emerging partly due to the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls and partly from criticisms of the "old" approach made especially in a 1973 article article by papyrologist Kurt Treu (1928-1991). Thus the 1977 Roberts\3/ acknowledges that there may well have been some Jewish influences on early Christian scribal techniques -- he is now even willing to change his mind and admit a 2nd century codex as probably Jewish (pp. 12 and 76, on POxy 656 of Genesis\4/; possibly also POxy 1007 of Genesis\5/). Tucked away in his note 2 on p. 15 he conjectures that "some of these early O.T. texts [which he considers to be Christian in origin] may have been copied from better written Jewish manuscripts in which such literary practices as the use of iota adscript would have been usual." Or again, "documentary practice may not have been the only influence on Christian scribes. In the manuscript of the Minor Prophets found in a cave ... in Judaea and dated between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50, an enlarged letter, preceded by a small blank space, marks the beginning of a new phrase, while verses are marked off by larger spaces. This may well have been standard Hebrew usage in texts such as this, clearly intended for liturgical reading" (18). In a footnote, he opines that "this might indicate that the method of paragraphing by the initial letter was of Jewish origin" (n.3; he could not have known the Esther papyrus POxy 4443). And again, "Scrupulous reproduction of the text" as attested by careful correction of some Christian manuscripts also "may be a legacy from Judaism" (22) -- a rather ambiguous judgment at best since it presupposes carelessness in copying on the part of the initial scribe! But despite all that, he still wants to maintain that there is a significant "contrast between the plain, quasi-documentary hand of the earliest Christian papyri and the formal elegance of Jewish manuscripts" (75 -- here he seems to be thinking only of the Rylands fragments and Fouad 266 for the Jewish evidence), although he admits that "the style of these Jewish manuscripts needs closer examination and definition than they have as yet been given" (76 n.4).

I have great respect for Colin Roberts as an expert, even a pioneer in various papyrological and codicological matters, but he certainly does not distinguished himself as a reliable guide for reconstructing the history of early Jewish and early Christian scribal practices. His knowledge of Judaism seems rather limited and somewhat myopic -- what are we to make of the claim that "to judge from their hands, the earliest Christian books were essentially books for use, not, as Jewish Rolls of the Law sometimes were, almost cult objects; that was only possible for a publicly recognized and protected cult so that the Christian equivalent is not found before the great codices of the fourth century" (15). Perhaps the "sometimes" saves him somewhat, but it is still a historically careless statement by someone who demonstrably wants to draw a definite line between Judaism and Christianity whenever possible.\6/

A more nuanced type of statement comes from Peter Parsons, a leading senior papyrologist of the present generation, in discussing the Greek Minor Prophets scroll(s) from Nahal Hever: "...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" (DJD 8 [1990] 23f).\7/

Towards Some Solutions, or at least Clearer Questions

That is the question -- or at least one of the questions raised by this attention to codicological and scrollological features of the early Jewish and early Christian materials. What does the presence of such phenomena, on both the early Jewish and the early Christian side of the artificial divide that we have inherited tell us about continuities and discontinuities, origins and adaptations, social context and scriptoria?

First off, with Colin Roberts, we should recognize that there is a clear difference in calligraphy between some of the early Jewish Greek texts and most of the early Christian. Peter Parsons puts it this way in his overall comparisons of the various Dead Sea Scroll Greek scripts: "This makes it clear that serifed hands are common enough (but not universal) in Judaean material assignable to the period i B.C.-i A.D." (25). Roberts would agree. But what is the significance of such an observation for our purposes? That kind of calligraphy was going out of style in the Greco-Roman world at large by the first century CE, so we can hardly be surprised that it is not represented in the second century Christian -- or for that matter Jewish -- texts.

Secondly, as Roberts was well aware, there are 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 are sometimse dubbed "semi-literary" or even "sub-literary." The most recent terminology I have seen, and with which I have great sympathy, is "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 literature of the same period.\8/

Can this observation tell us anything about the scribes, their training, the readers of what they produced, the world in which they operated? Were they selfconsciously functioning as scholars, who make commentaries, or "mythographers" creating descriptions and lists? At least it does not seem to have been an isolated world, scribally speaking, whether they recognized it or not. One might argue for relative isolation, if a strong case is made for the early Christian scribes acquiring their habits from Jewish forebears in a closed social context, but it seems unlikely that such isolation from the rest of the scribal world could be maintained for long in either the early Jewish or the early Christian settings in hellenistic Egypt. Was some early Jewish Greek scribal practice at least relatively isolated from what was going on around it? Roberts might have been tempted to say yes, given his relatively simplististic image of early Judaism, but even then we are left with Parson's question of "why Greek-speaking Jews should have adopted it in the first place"! We have a real paleographical paradox, in our present state of knowledge, with sophisticated serifed calligraphy on the one hand, and numerous paraliterary features on the other. I have no clear answers at this point, mostly questions. But it does seem to me impossible to revert to a picture of early Jewish and early Christian scribal practices that fails to recognize these basic continuities -- which make me all the more alert to the possibility of further continuities (e.g. with regard to nomina sacra and codices) that need to be explored more carefully in the wider context of Greco-Roman paraliterary endeavors.

Appendix: Selected Examples

1. Calligraphic sophistication with paraliterary features and possibly "Jewish" interests (Solomon's judicial wisdom) --

3. Paraliterary style and features with apparently Christian content (see also Egerton 2 Gospel) --

4. Other texts, including commentaries, with various paraliterary features --

//end//

Miscellaneous Notes from Colin Roberts, especially

\2/ Already in 1949, discussing early Christian use of the papyrus codex format, Roberts writes that "in the final stage the format used for Christian literature [i.e. the codex] was used for the O.T. as well. This was a step of great importance; the roll of the Law was sacrosanct to the Jew and we know with what reverence the sacred rolls were regarded in the synagogues of the dispersion. Such a treatment of the Jewish scriptures implies that by the middle of the second century Christian communities were emancipated from Jewish influences and Christian writings were regarded as providing the norm for the whole corpus of sacred literature to a degree not hitherto suspected. These developments could not have taken place had the parchment codex not been used by the Christians of Rome in the first century" (161). Further, "It has been remarked that the early Christians were literate rather than literary; in the world of freedmen, slaves, small business men, of whom the earliest communities in Italy may have been largely composed, classical literature would hardly have been known and the obvious form for memoranda or any writings not aspiring to the dignity of literature would have been the parchment note-book [i.e. codex]. (For those who were Jews there would have been no competition [from the codex as a format] at this very early stage with the sacred rolls of the Law.)" (162). Then: "All of the earliest group of Christian texts ... are written in hands which in varying degrees are blends of the pure literary and the documentary hand, such as would be used by men who were aware that they were not copying a business document or letter (work to which they would be accustomed) but were not trained calligraphers. Such a hand, clear and practical ... is not what one would expect to find used for literary texts and yet has a quality that distinguishes it from the ordinary business hand. As such it reflects well the circle for which it was written, since Christians were not writing literature and the canons of Greek literature, whether in writing or format, do not apply; further, because of its affinities with the documentary hand, it is easier to date than that of most literary texts" (167-168). Finally, he refers to Harnack's contention that the Christian scriptures were more or less public, and affirms that "their private study was not merely permitted to but incumbent on the laity. Of this attitude, itself a legacy from Judaism, confirmation ... can be found in the number, the distribution, the great variety in type of book of the papyri" (168).

\3/ Roberts largely maintains these positions in his famous Schweich Lectures of 1977, published in 1979 as Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt. In his first appendix, responding to the objections by Kurt Treu (1973) to the arbitrariness of criteria used to distinguish Christian from Jewish copies of Greek Jewish scriptures ("OT"). Roberts alludes to "the contrast between the plain, quasi-documentary hand of the earliest Christian papyri and the formal elegance of Jewish manuscripts" (75 -- he seems to be thinking only of the Rylands fragments and Fouad 266 for the Jewish evidence at this point). Later, he suggests that "there seems to have been a distinctive style of writing [i.e. "the character of the script"] used for Jewish copies of the scriptures in Greek from the second century B.C. onwards and still used, with modifications of course, down to the third century A.D.; [footnote: the style of these Jewish manuscripts needs closer examination and definition than they have as yet been given, especially in the use of serifs (for these see GMAW, p.25)] ... But not all Greek manuscripts known to be Jewish are written in this style, witness the roll of the Minor Prophets ..., and parallels to it can be found among the secular literary papyri" (76). Parsons adds, in his comparisons of the various Dead Sea Scroll Greek scripts: "This makes it clear that serifed hands are common enough (but not universal) in Judaean material assignable to the period i B.C.-i A.D." (25). DJD 8 (1990) 23f.

\4/ At this point, Roberts attempts to update his list of probably Jewish scriptural fragments dated after the rise of Christianity and surprisingly changes his mind about POxy 656, "a papyrus codex of Genesis assigned to the second century" (76) in which he finds no abbreviations of nomina sacra, but blank spaces where the tetragrammaton was expected, filled in by a later hand with uncontracted KURIOS. He does not attempt to explain how this early codex could be Jewish -- an unexpected position given his earlier arguments about presumed Jewish resistance to anything but the roll format for copies of the Law!

\5/ He also considers "most puzzling" the ambiguous fragment POxy 1007 "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 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, do" (77). He never considers that perhaps we have a Jewish scribe for whom the use of such contractions was part of an ongoing scribal tradition. Nor does he comment on the codex problem here as well.

\6/ I have great respect for Colin Roberts as a pioneer in papyrological and codicological matters, but he is certainly not a reliable guide for reconstructing the history of early Jewish and early Christian scribal practices. His knowledge of Judaism in 1949 appears to be entirely secondary and rapidly becoming out of date as the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls became available. By 1977, he has the benefit of Kurt Treu's criticisms and cautions, and he tries to take them into account. But the Schweich Lectures abundantly attest that Roberts still wants there to be much clearer lines between Judaism and Christianity than the evidence supports. His concessions to the new evidence often are fascinating: As we noted in his appendix, he is now willing to admit a 2nd century codex as probably Jewish (12, and n.5); tucked away in his note 2 on p. 15 he conjectures that "some of these early O.T. texts [which he considers to be Christian in origin] may have been copied from better written Jewish manuscripts in which such literary practices as the use of iota adscript would have been usual." Still, "to judge from their hands, the earliest Christian books were essentially books for use, not, as Jewish Rolls of the Law sometimes were, almost cult objects; that was only possible for a publicly recognized and protected cult so that the Christian equivalent is not found before the great codices of the fourth century" (15). His general conclusion about the early Christian manuscripts from the 2nd century is that they are largely "reformed documentary," "quasi-literary," and he points to such evidence as "that of leaving spaces between words or more often groups of words ... in contrast with the strict literary principle of scriptio continua with breaks only at the end of sections," or to writing "the first word of the text [with]... and enlarged initial letter, [and also] ... the beginning of a new clause or section" (16). Still, he somewhat belatedly adds "documentary practice may not have been the only influence on Christian scribes. In the manuscript of the Minor Prophets found in a cave near Engedi [sic] in Judaea and dated between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50, and enlarged letter, preceded by a small blank space, marks the beginning of a new phrase, while verses are marked off by larger spaces. This may well have been standard Hebrew usage in texts such as this, clearly intended for liturgical reading" (18). In a footnote, he opines that "this might indicate that the method of paragraphing by the initial letter was of Jewish origin" (n.3). He is also well aware that similar enlargement and/or extension of letters into the margin (ekthesis) "in secular literary texts ... is confined in the Roman period to commentaries and lists" (18). "Scrupulous reproduction of the text" as attested by careful correction of manuscripts "may be a legacy from Judaism" (22) -- a rather ambiguous judgment at best about the care in copying on the part of the initial scribe!

\1/ "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" (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)

\7/ See also P.Parsons, DJD 8 (1990) 23f, on the Minor Prophets scroll (item 13 above): "...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). Parsons adds, in his comparisons of the various Dead Sea Scroll Greek scripts: "This makes it clear that serifed hands are common enough (but not universal) in Judaean material assignable to the period i B.C.-i A.D." (25).

---

Summary Report to my Colleagues on the SBL Program [ca 12no2004]:

My initial plan has gone awry, and I find myself constipated with new information and possibilities. Perhaps I'll be able to sort some of it out before our session, but in the meantime, here is where things currently stand:

My previous efforts, which I've tried to summarize below, convince me that there are direct continuities between pre-Christian Jewish Greek scribal traditions and early Christian practices, both on logical grounds and in terms of the extant evidence. Originally, I planned to explore in more depth the early Christian side of this relationship, and to present it in selected images and visual comparisons that built on the previous work.

But since I've always felt uncomfortable about the generalizations based on earlier editions (and impressions) of the papyrological sources, I wanted to detour briefly to determine just how similar or different the features I was emphasizing (now called "lectional signs" by one of the online projects) were in relation to the general "literary" and "documentary" papyrological sources of the same period. I already knew that some of these features (e.g. word division by spacing) could be found in some "documentary" letters and reports, but was not sure whether earlier editors had paid close enough attention to such matters in "literary" sources.

Well, the ease of internet access to relevant (and irrelevant) images has trapped me, and I've discovered that the "Jewish" features that I'd thought most relevant and characteristic are also fairly typical of a class of materials that is being dubbed "Paraliterary" (I like the term) by a Louvain online project (see below) -- especially items in the range of things classified as "commentaries" of various sorts. This does not ruin the continuity hypothesis, but it does open interesting new doors that I've only begun to try to open. What kinds of people wrote and/or copied these "paraliterary" materials? What was their training, their social and educational status? Is the impression that the clearly Jewish manuscripts with these features are written in more "professional" lettering than most of the non-Jewish examples significant? If these features had long since become part of a Jewish and Christian "scribal tradition," does their continued presence in other contexts have any direct relevance for the continuities/discontinuities issue or the social status issue? And so on.

The presentation that I've been working on, with a quick rehash of my previous efforts and with appropriate links to the online materials is found below, followed by various related notes and lists that I've amassed for further exploration. I can probably give a very brief report containing this confession and showing some selected illustrative images rather than using the full 25 minutes (!), since others may need more time. All this is for your eyes only, until, of course, google.com and its compeditors discover it!

Bob

==

* SBL 2004 paper: Textual Transmission and Early Jewish-Christian Relations

[S22-110 (p.174)-- Monday Nov. 22, 4-6:30, CC-207]

[Papyrology & Early Christian Backgrounds is co-sponsoring, with the New
Testament Textual Criticism and Early Jewish Christian Relations Sections]
– "Eisenbaum, Pamela" <PEisenbaum@Iliff.edu> (March 04)

Eldon Jay Epp, Case Western Reserve University (Emeritus): Jews and Judaism in Oxyrhynchus: Socioreligious Context for the New Testament Papyri <eepp@erols.com>

Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania: From Jewish Scribes to Christian Scriptoria: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity

L. W. Hurtado, University of Edinburgh: The Meta-data of Earliest Christian Manuscripts <l.hurtado@ed.ac.uk>

Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Christ against the Jews: Anti-Jewish Alterations of the Texts of Scripture <behrman@email.unc.edu>

T. Rajak, University of Reading, Respondent <t.rajak@reading.ac.uk>

"From Jewish Scribes to Christian Scriptoria?: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity in their Greek Literary Worlds" [first attempt, oc-no2004]

Overview

Attempting to map the route(s) between Jewish and Christian scribal practices encounters many obstacles. That there were some connections is highly probable, given the Jewish origins of Christianity and the adopting of Jewish scriptures by many early Christian individuals and groups. Whether there were any unusual aspects to this process and what traces it may have left is the focus of this presentation. With respect to scribal conventions, how much did early Christian copyists and/or authors take over from the Jewish heritage, and can we learn anything useful from such findings?

Background: the "certifiably Jewish" Greek materials

An examination of the dozen or so surviving fragments of pre- and non- Christian Jewish scriptures in Greek provides an obvious starting point. These are all written in scroll format (use of codices is not attested for literature in the pre-Christian period) representing various degrees of literary training and/or care. Egypt and Palestine are the locations where these fragments have been discovered, and where they probably also originated. These fragments are dated paleographically from the second century BCE onward, on both papyrus and leather, and the question of "Jewish" or "Christian" becomes muddled as we reach the second half of the first century CE and later.

Various descriptive observations are possible concerning the scribal features of these "certifiably Jewish" fragments. Several are written in careful decorative Greek hands that, from a modern aesthetic perspective, rival what has been preserved from their contemporary Greek literary world in general. Whether this means that they were transcribed by well trained Jewish scribes in a clearly Jewish context is impossible to say, since it cannot be excluded that some or all of them may have come from the professional book copying trade of the time without any specific concern for the "Jewishness" of their producers. Some of the "Jewish" hands also are less aesthetically striking.

Regarding format issues of a larger (layout of text) and smaller ("lectional signs") sort, several of these fragments of Jewish Greek scriptures employ special markings to indicate section divisions: "paragraph" signs (Fouad 266b), interlinear marginal strokes at the left margin (4QLevA, Esther), extension of (often enlarged) letters into the left margin (ekthesis) at the start of a section or word in the otherwise all caps (uncial or majuscule) writing ( MPrsA, Esther). Within the text blocks, spacing appears in all these manuscripts (except those too fragmentary to judge) to separate sections (sentences) and even words (MPrsB), although explicit punctuation is rare. Special marks for breathings, accents, stress, etc., are also rare in the surviving fragments (dieresis in Job, mid point in Fouad 266b).

Characteristic of these early fragments is their treatment of the special "four lettered" divine name, the "tetragrammaton." An unambiguous and certifiably pre-Christian example of the tetragrammaton being represented by the Greek term "Lord" (kurios), as was regularly the case in later Christian texts, has not yet been found (but see 4Q126), although there is good reason to think that such a substitution was in use in Greek Jewish circles (e.g. Philo, Paul, Josephus). Nor do abbreviations of other kinds occur, not even of numbers in cipher form ("12" for "twelve") -- although the surviving fragments seldom record numbers in any form -- the absence of which would be consistent with what is typical of other Greek literary manuscripts from the same period.

Early Christian copying of manuscripts

All that is background, which I have explored in various forms in the past several years. My intention for this presentation was to explore more thoroughly the presence, or absence, of such features in extant early Christian (or indeterminantly "Jewish" or "Christian") manuscripts in hopes of shedding light on the extent to which early Christian scribes may have been trained in (or imitated) Jewish approaches. Presumably Jews such as Paul who embraced some form of what came to be called "Christianity" and who also maintained a positive appreciation for Jewish scriptures retained possession of their copies of Jewish scriptures (in whatever form, including excerpts) and encouraged other sympathizers to obtain copies as well. To what extent can we trace such developments in the preserved evidence?

Special treatment of the tetragrammaton is probably the most obvious traceable phenomenon in this regard. From his textually selfconscious Christian perch, Jerome tells us about the "PIPI" manuscripts as late as the start of the 5th century, and we even have a Christian Hexaplaric palimpsest fragment from the Cairo Geniza to illustrate his claim. Other examples of less clear pedigree from the Christian period have also been preserved, showing that this pre-Christian practice so well attested in the Greek Jewish fragments -- not to mention related phenomena in the Semitic Dead Sea Scrolls -- had a significant afterlife in the emerging world of Christian scriptoria. The pronunciation as IO or IAO also left its mark in the Onomastica literature as well as in "magic" type of objects. Whether, as I suspect, the development of Christian "nomina sacra" is a related phenomenon, I leave aside for the present.

My plan for this presentation was to explore possible continuities between the "certifiably Jewish" use of certain "lectional signs" (paragraph markers, section dividers, enlarged initial letters, letters extending into the left margin ["ekthesis"], various types of spacing, diacritics, line fillers, and the like) and their presence in early Christian manuscripts. I am reacting, in part, to older claims that Christian scribal practices often need to be understood as at best "sub-literary," emerging rather ad hoc among relatively untrained and impecunious copyists who sort of made things up as they went along. This, I suspect, is not a useful description of the situation, and probably few contemporary students of ancient literature would endorse that approach. What would a close examination of the evidence indicate? Can we shed some light on how early Christian copyists and producers of literature were trained and operated within the larger framework of ancient "scrollology" and "codicology" through such a study?

Important studies of early Jewish and Christian materials, in relation to the Dead Sea Scroll evidence, have been published by Emanuel Tov, with the most recent appearing just this week from Brill -- Scribal Habits and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (STDJ 54; Leiden/Boston: E. J. Brill, 2004) xix + 398 pp. and 21 illustrations; see especially "Appendix 5: Scribal Features of Early Witnesses to Greek Scripture." Of the 15 (or 16 if both hands of the Gk MPr scroll are counted) extant "certifiably Jewish" Greek biblical and parabiblical manuscripts, two are too fragmentary to be useful for present purposes (7QLXXEx, 7QLXXEpJer; I'm not including the other controversial and highly fragmentary 7Q materials at this point, which would increase the total), while all the others show uses of space breaks! Many manuscripts of Greek Jewish scriptures from the early Christian period exhibit similar features (Yale Genesis, Baden Exodus, Beatty Num-Dt, Beatty Jer, POxy 656 Gen, POxy 4442 Exod). I have only just begun to gather the evidence from other early papyri that might be expected to preserve such "characteristic Jewish features," if indeed such features were transmitted as I suspect -- e.g. Philo, "apocrypha and pseudepigrapha," Josephus, and even Paul and other early Christian materials.

Lectional Signs in the larger Greco-Roman world

As I've noted, older scholarly handbooks had suggested that the "lectional signs" in question were unusual in extant Greek literature and thus called for a less "literary" sort of explanation. Since every year our access to ancient writing conventions expands significantly with the publication of additional papyri and related materials, it seemed wise to detour briefly (I thought) to determine how accurate the older judgments might be regarding "literary" use of such devices. Fortunately, thanks to various forward-looking projects in the study of the ancient materials, a wealth of images have become and are becoming available on internet sites to facilitate such a task. The researcher is increasingly less dependant on what earlier editors have chosen to describe or, less frequently, to exhibit in facsimile. Much can now be viewed in minimally digested form, such as the Oxyrhynchus papyri from volume 15 (POxy 1782) onward (selectively in the earlier volumes), or with detailed descriptive information as in such endeavors as the Advanced Papyrological Information System or the LEUVEN DATABASE OF ANCIENT BOOKS or the "Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri" and the "LISTS AND CATALOGUES IN GREEK PARALITERARY PAPYRI" also being produced at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Also very useful for "literary" texts are the online Mertens-Pack 3 listings.

Sometimes things don't work out as expected. Rather than confirming that the early Jewish and early Christian scribal practices were relatively unusual in relation to the broader Greco-Roman world and thus strengthened the arguments for characteristic continuity in this aspect, study of the wider context suggests that the early Jewish and early Christian scribes may have been following well-worn procedures used in the production of commentarial and related material from pre-Christian times onward! This was a surprise, not necessarily unpleasant, but I have only begun to reflect on what it might mean for understanding what was going on in the scribal traditions of early Judaism and early Christianity.

Fortunately, there is a growing interest, and thus some bibliography on the subject, among students of Greco-Roman antiquity. This is not surprising when one notices that in the approximately 1100 online items from Oxyrhynchus (including both "literary" and "documentary" materials) that are dated prior to 200 CE, about 5% (54 items) are classified as some form of "commentary" by their various editors. Although perhaps 20 % of these are too small or too mutilated to provide useful evidence, the vast majority of the rest contain one or more of the lectional signs that seem to be typical of the early Jewish materials. Indeed, I found only one item that was extensively preserved but had none of the lectional signs. Similarly, in the Leuven Corpus of Paraliterary Papyri which presently contains 228 "mythographic" items dated prior to about the year 200 of which 53 are classified as "commentary," nearly half are described as employing coronis (5) or paragraphos (23) markers, and many make use of blank spacing (19) and/or ekthesis (13) as well as "abbreviation" (11). A similar pattern exists through the larger CPP collection as well (228 items, coronis 15, paragraphos 77, blank spacing 72, ekthesis 30 -- and numeric abbreviations 32, with other abbreviations as well at 36).

What does this suggest for the topic at hand? It does not change the fact that early Jewish and early Christian manuscripts share certain features, but it does dilute any argument that such features were unusual in manuscripts from that period. In certain types of writings, most noticably "commentary," one might even expect to find most of these features. We might well ask what types of writing were not affected by these lectional signs, in order to proceed to more responsible conclusions. Does the contemporary classification "Paraliterary" help to characterize these approaches, and if so, what does it tell us? I have no answers yet, but will close with a few relevant images for comparison and contemplation:

POxy1173+1356+2158++ Philo (3rd ce, papyrus codex) [vh696]
[neat semi-cursive hand, use of spacing]

POxy 23.2369 Sophocles, Inachus [tragedy] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel
marginal markings, section spacing, diacritics, abbreviated marginal number [average]

POxy 24.2387 Alcman, Parthenia [poetry, commentary] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel
marginal markings, interlinear marks, diacritics and punct, spacing at end of lines, commentary abbrevs and some word/sentence spacing? [neat]

POxy 53.3695 Anacreon [Lyric poetry] roll, 1st CE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
interlinear marginal strokes, ornate coronis, diacritics (added later?) [average]

[paragraphos, abbrev strokes too]

P.Oxy.XXIV 2389 Commentary (on Alcman) roll ed. E. Lobel [paragr, mg strokes]
Second half of first century [neat simple uncial]

POxy 44.3208 "Latin Letter" [doc], turn of era, ed. V. Brown
clear word spacing, punctuation marks [somewhat careless]

Reign of Augustus

POxy 53.3711 Commentary (on Lyric Poetry) roll [X type "chrisms" paragr, minor spacing?]
Second century

Sorbonne 826 cahier d'e'colier grec d'Egypte ; P. Bour. 1 ; Pack2 2643, 3/4 CE

upright chrism

==

Some Bibliography

William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus ( Studies in Book and Print Culture; University of Toronto Press 2003). x / 440 pp / 18 illustrations, 63 tables ISBN 0802037348 Cloth $85.00 = 55.00
http://classics.uc.edu/johnson <william.johnson@UC.EDU>
The text is in large part technical, and directed in the first instance to papyrologists and students of Buchwesen. But I'll mention that I convinced UT to include a largish number of fairly lavish plates, including 3 color foldouts and 4 double page spreads, in the hope of providing a relatively affordable tool for showing e.g. undergraduates the look and feel of a literary roll (as only a foldout can properly do!); thus a reasonable recommendation for purchase even at a teaching institution.

Glenn W. Most (ed.), Commentaries - Kommentare. Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte, Band 4. Go"ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999. Pp. xvi, 468. ISBN 3-525-25903-4. DM 142. [Reviewed by James J. O'Donnell] In organizing by object rather than subject of commentary, it misses some horizontal links. Ineke Sluiter's 'Commentaries and the Didactic Tradition' ranges most widely and suggestively, but few of the other papers succeed in isolating commentary-making as a practice in itself. Second, there is little attention to the material form of the thing called 'commentary', and this is unfortunate. The term is used, in my experience, for a range of things including but not limited to: transcription (with or without editing) of oral presentation of exposition of a text read aloud to a broad public (many Christian sermons take this form, but many books passed down as commentaries began as such sermons with greater [Ambrose] and lesser [Augustine, some of the time] degrees of revision afterwards); marginal notes and interlineations in an authoritative text (with important transformation that occurs when the marginalia of an authoritative commentator are extracted and made the center of a book and the text reduced to lemmata -- Pelagius on Paul went through an important shift of this sort); compilations of marginalia (e.g., the Glossa Ordinaria or the Talmud); and deliberate writing of a "commentary" as a vehicle for the exposition of the commentator's own views (from Hellenistic readers of Plato and Aristotle down to Aquinas down to the present -- with the particular further distinction in our own time between the ambitious learned commentary, the humble commentary-for-students, and [very commonly practiced by classicists] the ambitious learned commentary headed by a recusatio purporting that the subjoined work is only a humble commentary-for-students [these last not infrequently published with handsome two-toned covers]). To continue to lump those practices together as often as this volume does is to leave a task of distinction for a future conference.

Silke Trojahn, Die auf Papyri erhaltenen Kommentare zur Alten Komo"die. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Philologie. BzA 175. Mu"nchen/Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2002. Pp. 264. ISBN 3-598-77724-8. EUR 78.00. [Review by Mieczyslaw Mejor] Altogether, the book discusses in detail 22 papyri (including two fragments of a comedy of unknown authorship) with fragments of commentaries to Aristophanes' comedies and three papyri with commentaries to Eupolis' comedies: Aristophanes: P. Oxy. VI 856; P. Bodl. Gr. Class. F 72; P. Oxy. XI 1402; P. Berol. 13929 and P. Berol. 21105; P. Bingen 18; P. Oxy. XI 1371; P. Rein. 3, 20 = P. Vindob. 29423; P. Strass. 621; P. Oxy. LXVI 4509; P. Rein. 1, 34 d; P. Duk. 643; PSI 720; P. Oxy. LXVI 4514; P. Louvre (= Pack 140); P. Oxy. XIII 1617; P. Oxy. LXVI 4520; P. Oxy. LXVI 4521; P. Oxy. XXXV 2737; P. Michig. 3690; P. Flor. 112; P. Amh. 2, 13; Eupolis: P. Oxy. XXXV 2741; P. Oxy. XXXVII 2813; P. Oxy. XXXV 2740. The author decided to leave out the fragments that, according to her, do not shed new light on the subject. However, in a supplement to the second part of the book (cap. 2.2.6), they have been enumerated and discussed briefly: They include the following: P. Oxy. ined. Inv. 101/175 (The author is preparing their edition in Oxyrhynchus Papyri), P. Oxy. XXXV 2742, P. Oxy. XXXVII 2806, P. Ryl. 483, P. Grenf. 2, 12, P. Rein. 3, 23 (= P. Vind. 29413), PSI 846, P. Oxy. XXXVII 2810, P. Oxy. XXXV 2738, P. Oxy. XVII 2086r, P. Oxy. XXXVII 2811v, P. Antin. 2, 60r, P. Oxy. XIII 1611, P. Oxy. LXVI 4508). According to the adopted classification, commentaries preserved on papyrus are classified by their format into scholia (i.e. notes written near a column of text on a roll or in the margins of a codex) and hypomnemata (i.e. commentaries written separately from the main text, either with or without the inclusion of lemmata to key them to the appropriate lines of the commented text) -- It is worth mentioning that the author refers here to the authority of E.G. Turner, declaring that Turner himself introduced this terminological differentiation (cf. p. 10, n. 2: "Fuer diese terminologische Trennung plaedierte bereits TURNER ..."), and forgetting that he used the results of studies of Edgar Lobel (see: P.Oxy. XX 2260; P.Oxy. XXI 2307, p. 95; P.Oxy. XXV 2429, p. 35, see: Turner Greek Papyri, pp. 114-115).

Le Commentaire entre tradition et innovation. Actes du Colloque international de l'Institut des Traditions Textuelles (Paris Villejuif, 22-25 sept. 1999). Publ. sous dir. M.-O. Goulet-Caze', avec coll. e'dit. de T. Dorandi, R. Goulet [et al.], Paris 2000,

Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter, hrsg. von W. Geerlings, Chr. Schulze, Leiden/Ko"ln 2002 (Clavis commentariorum antiquitatis et medii aevi),The classical commentary. Histories, practices, theory. Ed. by R. K. Gibson, Chr. Shuttleworth Kraus, Leiden/Ko"ln 2002. [Review by Mieczyslaw Mejor]

Perhaps, to avoid the possibility of misunderstandings due to poorly defined terminology, given such diversity of the forms of text commentaries, one should rather talk of "commenting literature" instead of "commentaries", which encompasses all the forms of explications and commentary: scholia, hypomnemata, hypotheseis, Christian ennarrationes (commentarius currens), sermons, accessus ad auctores and proper commentaries, i.e. works of determined structure, with a characteristic prologue, an introduction to the methodology of studying-commenting and the subject-matter of the commented text (isagoge).
The article by Wolfgang Luppe, "Scholia, hypomnemata, und hypotheseis zu griechischen Dramen auf Papyri", brings forth a number of interesting remarks on different forms of ancient commentaries on Attic comedy and tragedy. In most cases our knowledge of the form of the commentaries is distorted by many centuries of manuscript tradition, but thanks to the papyri we are able to get a glimpse of the technique and contents of the original commentaries. Luppe confirms that the scholia (like the hypomnemata) we find in the papyri, as a rule, are not the notes by the readers but explanations taken from other commentaries. This is why the scholia of the Antiquity are something else then the ones from the Middle Ages, and their authors should not be equated with the medieval "scholiastae". The hypotheseis, i.e. short summaries of plays, presenting the main characters and mythological stories, were a specific form of commentary. Thus, they are not what the modern reader would call didascalia. These notes are present in the medieval manuscript tradition (Euripides), and on papyri. They come from the same source, which -- according to Luppe -- was the work of Diakaiarchus, a disciple of Aristotle. S. Trojahn's book on papyri commentaries on Old Attic Comedy is in full harmony with Luppe's article.

[Review by Daniel Sto"kl Ben Ezra] Wolfgang Luppe, "scholia, hupomne^mata und hupotheseis zu griechischen Dramen auf Papyri" (55-68, illustrations pp. 69-77) is a nicely illustrated overview of the material remains of the three main kinds of commentaries, Scholia (54-57), Hypomnemata (57-64) and Hypotheseis (64-68), focusing on Greek plays: Scholia: Ven. Marc. 474; POxy 2806, PDuke Inv 643; Hypomnemata: POxy 2812; POxy 2813; POxy 2741; Hypotheseis: POxy 4020; POxy 2455; POxy 2456.

Marina Del Fabbro, Il commentario nella tradizione papiracea, "Studia Papyrologica" 18 (1979), pp. 69-132.

the thesis of G. Zuntz that papyri and medieval corpora of scholia were based on the same sources, the Alexandrian commentaries

Heinrich von Staden on the Hellenistic commentaries to Hippokrates in Geerlings, Wilhelm and Christian Schulze (edd.), Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter, Bd. 2. Neue Beitra"ge zu seiner Eforschung. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Pp. 272; illustr. 40. ISBN 90-04-13562-6.

Tiziano Dorandi, Le commentaire dans la tradition papyrologique: quelques cas controverse's, [in:] Le commentaire entre tradition ... , op. cit., pp. 15-27.

Wolfgang Luppe, "Scholia, hypomnemata und hypotheseis zu griechischen Dramen auf Papyri," published in Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter, op. cit., pp. 55-77.

==

Testing hypotheses

check Africanus KESTOI frg (POxy 412 = vh674 = LitLond 174; CHR GkLitHands pl 23a), and other early literary examples on the edges of Christianity and Judaism.

photographicservices@cbl.ie wrote to them re ChBeat 7, 7 May (response received)

http://www.papyrologie.paris4.sorbonne.fr/menu1/collections/pgrec/mp3.htm

http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/services/cedopal/ (Liege)

beaubien@umich.edu

==

PAPYRI: POxy Listing by "Dates" to about 200 CE:

POxy 53.3716 Euripides, Orestes [tragedy] roll, ca 100 BCE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
marginal number abbreviation "K" (perhaps added later?) with horizontal stroke(s)
[careless] Second-first century BCE
POxy 65.4451 "Commentary on Iliad I" roll, 1st BCE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
word/sentence spacing with enlarged first letters inline [sloppy]

First century BCE

P.Oxy.XLIX 3462 account [lots of spacing]
First century BCE

P.Oxy.XLIX 3482
8 October 73 BCE

P.Oxy.LV 3777 cession of land
1-31 August 57 BCE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3461
25 August 46 BCE
P.Oxy.LIII 3714 Euripides (both sides?)
First century BCE or CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3433 Menander [irregular rt mg]
Late first century BCE/first century CE
POxy 42.3000 Eratosthenes, Hermes [Epic poetry] roll, turn of the era, ed. P. J. Parsons --s
parts of two cols from end of the work? coronis? abbreviations? [sloppy]

First century BCE - first century CE
POxy 44.3208 "Latin Letter" [doc], turn of era, ed. V. Brown
clear word spacing, punctuation marks [somewhat careless]

Reign of Augustus
POxy 68.4660 Hesiod, Days [poetry] roll, turn of era, ed. D. Obbink
probable marginal mark (simple paragraphos)

First century BCE/first century CE
POxy 61.4099 "Mythological Compendium" roll, turn of the era, ed. R. L. Fowler --
no left margin; uses spacing between some words and at end of lines [careless uncial]

First century BCE-First century CE
P.Oxy.LXVII 3324 Meleager [irregular rt mg]
First century BCE/first century CE
P.Oxy.LXVII 4546 Euripides [badly damaged]
First century BCE/first century CE
P.Oxy.LX 4013 Euripides [very small frg]
First century BCE/first century CE
P.Oxy.XLI 2979 letter [minimal spacing]
September/October 3 BCE

POxy 23.2369 Sophocles, Inachus [tragedy] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel
marginal markings, section spacing, diacritics, abbreviated marginal number [average]

First BCE/ first CE
POxy 24.2387 Alcman, Parthenia [poetry, commentary] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel
marginal markings, interlinear marks, diacritics and punct, spacing at end of lines, commentary abbrevs and some word/sentence spacing? [neat]

Late first BCE/ early first CE
P.Oxy.XXII 2309 Homer [end of line abbrev?]
First century BCE/ first century
POxy 19.2214 Callimachus, Aitia [poetry] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel

seems to have some diacritics and some comments (top margin, etc.) [average]
First century BCE/ first century CE
P.Oxy.XXXI 2545 Aristophanes [end of line punct?]
Late first century BCE / early first century CE
POxy 25.2432 "Simonides ?" [poetry] roll, turn of era, ed. E. Lobel

(no left mg) diacritics, end of line spaces and punctuation [attractive]

First century BCE / first century CE
P.Oxy.XXXIII 2662 Plato [no mgs]
First century BCE/ first century CE
POxy 20.2277 "Official Correspondence" one side, 13 CE, ed. E. P. Wegener

some word/sentence division, especially by use of large letters [sloppy]
POxy 55.3779 "Registration of Sheep and Goats" one side, 20/21 CE, ed. J. R. Rea
some word/sentence division, especially by use of large letters (? hard to read)
P.Oxy.XXVI 2439 Pindar
First half of the first century
P.Oxy.XXIII 2360 Stesichorus
Early first century
POxy 42.3020 "Letter of Augustus and Proceedings of Embassy" two cols of roll, early 1st CE, ed. P. J. Parsons
some interesting features, fairly subtle (ekthesis? small spaces?)[undisciplined]
P.Oxy.XIX 2222 chronology
Early first century
POxy 38.2825 Menander, Phasma [comedy] roll, early 1st CE, ed. E. G. Turner
some divisions by spacing, interlinear marginal strokes [attractive]
POxy 25.2435 "Acta Alexandrinorum ?" [prose] roll, early 1st CE, ed. E. G. Turner

various divisions (large and small) by spacing, enlarged letters [sloppy]
P.Oxy.XLIX 3483 contract
Early first century
P.Oxy.XXXVI 2772
CE 11, 28 April (?), see Anag. 3 (1983), 22-23
P.Oxy.LV 3806
21 May 15 CE
P.Oxy.LXVII 4582
14-27 September 16 CE
P.Oxy.LV 3778
28 January 21 CE
POxy 17.2148 "Letter to Heraclides" [doc] sheet, 27 CE, ed. A. S. Hunt
clear tendencies to word division by spacing [sloppy]
POxy 55.3807 "Business Letter" [doc] sheet, 26-28 CE, ed. J. R. Rea

tend to word division by spacing, much abbreviation
POxy 24.2412 "Account of Money Payments" [doc, in cols] roll, 28/29 CE, ed. J. W. B. Barns

clear and consistent word division by spacing [mixed hands]
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2842
CE 29? CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3484
27-33 CE

P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2850
26 Jan., CE 29
P.Oxy.LVIII 3915
7-8 September 30 CE

P.Oxy.XIX 2234
CE 31

P.Oxy.XXII 2353
4th September CE 32
P.Oxy.LXVII 4588
26 September 33 CE
P.Oxy.XLVII 3351
20 February 34 CE

P.Oxy.XLVI 3267
c. 37-41 CE

P.Oxy.XLIX 3485
23 August 38 CE
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2834
19 July 42 CE
P.Oxy.LXVII 4583
15 September 45 CE

P.Oxy.LV 3780
40-42 CE
P.Oxy.XXXIV 2720
CE 41/54
P.Oxy.XLIX 3486
41-42? CE
P.Oxy.XXXIII 2669
CE 41/54
P.Oxy.XLII 3033
c. 45 - 47 CE
P.Oxy.L 3522 Job (OG) [[see above]]
First century
P.Oxy.LXVII 4624 business letter [word spacing, marginal interlinear marks?]
First century
P.Oxy.XV 1795 Epigrams [sectioning by ekthesis, blank ends]
First century
P.Oxy.XXX 2508 Archilochus ? [diacritics?]
First century
P.Oxy.XXXII 2632 Lyric Poetry
First century
P.Oxy.XIX 2221 Commentary on Nicander [ekthesis, section spacing]
First century
P.Oxy.XXIII 2375 Callimachus
First century
P.Oxy.XIX 2220 Euphorion [ekthesis? diacritics, corrections/comments in mg]
First century
P.Oxy.LX 4015 Euripides
First century
P.Oxy.XXIV 2391 Commentary (on Alcman?) ed. E. Lobel [spacing; informal uncial]
First century [very fragmentary]
P.Oxy.XLII 3021 Acta Alexandrinorum
First century
P.Oxy.LVII 3896 Thucydides
First century
P.Oxy.XXIV 2397 Commentary on Iliad roll [nothing unusual][same scribe as 2389?]
Second half of first century
POxy 45.3230 Hesiod, Erga and Aspis [Epic poetry] roll, 2nd CE, ed. M. L. West --
spacing? (nothing obvious)(excerpts) [attractive]

First century
P.Oxy.LX 4025 Menander, Misoumenos?
First century
P.Oxy.XV 1789 Alcaeus [interlinear marginal strokes, diacritics]
First century
P.Oxy.LXIV 4440 list [word division]
First century
P.Oxy.XXI 2295 Alcaeus [paragraphos & mg strokes, diacritics, corrections, comments?]
First century
P.Oxy.XV 1791 Pindar
First Century
P.Oxy.XXXII 2618 Stesichorus? [paragraphos?]
First century
P.Oxy.LX 4048 Aeschines [section divider?]
First century
POxy 65.4453 "Commentary on the Odyssey" roll, 1st CE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
interlinear marginal stroke, possibly some spacing?

First century
P.Oxy.LIX 3966 Menander
First century
P.Oxy.L 3540 Comedy
First century
P.Oxy.XXI 2303 Alcaeus [mg strokes, diacritics, comments?]
First century ?
P.Oxy.XXI 2298 Alcaeus [diacritics (no left mg)]
First century ?
P.Oxy.XXVIII 2502 Hesiod? (scrap)
First century
P.Oxy.XLIX 3468 petition [ekthesis, spacing (neat writing)]
First century
P.Oxy.XLII 3014 decree [some spacing (sloppy hand)]
First century
P.Oxy.XV 1801 Theon? Glossary [sectioning by ekthesis & horiz strokes, use of spacing]
First Century
P.Oxy.LIII 3700 Mime Poetry [sectioned by spacing (no left mg)]
First century
P.Oxy.XLII 3062 letter [word division]
First century
P.Oxy.XLII 3052 itinerary [abbrev number]
First century
P.Oxy.XLVI 3273 official correspondence [some word spacing]
First century
POxy 53.3701 "Materia Medica" roll, 1st CE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
two columns, not "literary"; interlinear marginal strokes and sectioning by spacing
[ligatured, careless; Technical writing? interlinear marginal strokes]
First century
P.Oxy.LXVIII 4655 Hesiod [diacritics added]
First century
P.Oxy.XXII 2339 proceedings & Acta? [word division spacing (long lines)(both sides)]
First century
POxy 53.3695 Anacreon [Lyric poetry] roll, 1st CE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
interlinear marginal strokes, ornate coronis, diacritics (added later?) [average]

[paragraphos, abbrev strokes too]
P.Oxy.XXXVI 2786
First century
P.Oxy.LVI 3844
First century
P.Oxy.XXXIX 2880
First Century
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2835
Middle of first century
P.Oxy.XLII 3070
First century
P.Oxy.LVII 3883
First century
POxy 56.3823 On Alexander [prose] roll, 1st CE, ed. A. Kerkhecker --
interlinear marginal stroke, some internal spacing (line 9) [average]

First century
P.Oxy.XXVIII 2496
First century
P.Oxy.XXXIII 2654
First century
P.Oxy.XLII 3004
First century
P.Oxy.XXXVII 2812
First century
POxy 62.4324 Demosthenes [rhetoric] roll, 1st CE, ed. J. E. G. Whitehorne
possible minor word spacing, possible coronis [attractive unprofessional]

First century
P.Oxy.XLIX 3469
First century
P.Oxy.XLV 3210 Commentary on Alcman? (Addendum to XXIV 2389?) ed. M. W. Haslam
First century [very fragmentary; neat hand]
P.Oxy.XLII 3061
First century
P.Oxy.XXXVII 2808
Middle of first century
P.Oxy.XXI 2299
Middle of first century ?
P.Oxy.XXXVII 2811 Commentary (on Iambic Poetry or Comedy) roll [spacing]
First half of second century
POxy 66.4502 "Epigram (Nicarchus II)" roll, 1st CE ?, ed. P. J. Parsons
section spacing with titles, some tendency to word spacing (irregular hand)

First century?
P.Oxy.LXVI 4501
First century?
P.Oxy.XXXII 2617
First century
P.Oxy.LXVII 4566
First century
P.Oxy.XXXII 2622
First century
POxy 45.3218 "New Comedy" roll, 1st CE, ed. S. Stephens --
part of one column, no side margins; overlined gamma in line 4 [careless]

First century
POxy 60.4024 Menander, Leukadia? [comedy] roll, 1st CE, ed. P. J. Parsons --
interlinear marginal strokes

First century
POxy 45.3232 Hesiod, Aspis [Epic Poetry] roll, 1st CE, ed. M. L. West --
on left margin of a single column with non-literary hand, spacing?,
possible exthesis (top line) [ligatured]

First century
P.Oxy.XLVI 3271
47-54 CE

P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2836
10-11 July CE 50
P.Oxy.XXXI 2582
31 January CE 51 (BL IX, p.196)
P.Oxy.XLVII 3332
24 June (?) 53 CE
P.Oxy.XLIV 3196
After 12 January 58 CE

P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2837
25 July-28 Aug., CE 50
P.Oxy.XXXI 2555
After 13 October 54 CE (see D. Baccani, Horoscopi greci, p.82)
P.Oxy.XLIX 3464
c. 54-60 CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3463
Between 10 January and 29 August 58 CE
P.Oxy.LVIII 3916
16 February -28 August 60 CE

P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2851
24 July, CE 60
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2838
4 Feb., CE 62
P.Oxy.XLI 2970
13 October CE 62
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2873
25 Oct., CE 62
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2839
2 Sept., CE 64
P.Oxy.XLIX 3487
1 October 65
P.Oxy.XLI 2971
11 March CE 66

P.Oxy.XLVI 3272
61-62 CE
P.Oxy.XLV 3250
c.63 CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3465
63-64 CE
P.Oxy.XLVII 3352
26 February-26 March 68 CE
P.Oxy.XXII 2349
CE 70
P.Oxy.XLIX 3488
70 CE
P.Oxy.LXVI 4526
December 69/January 70(?) CE

P.Oxy.XLIX 3508
16 April 70 CE
P.Oxy.XLIV 3163
16 July 71 CE
P.Oxy.XLI 2972
30 August CE 72 (?)
P.Oxy.XLIV 3164
4 September 73 CE
P.Oxy.LXV 4478
15 December 74 CE
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2840
3 Aug., CE 75
P.Oxy.LXVII 3356
28 January 76 CE
P.Oxy.XXXIV 2725
CE 71
P.Oxy.XLIX 3489
72 CE
P.Oxy.XXIV 2389 Commentary (on Alcman) roll ed. E. Lobel [paragr, mg strokes]
Second half of first century [neat simple uncial]
P.Oxy.XXXV 2740 (Addendum, pp.102-107)Commentary (on Comedy) [paragr, mg strokes]
End of first century
P.Oxy.XXII 2337
Late first century
P.Oxy.XXVI 2450
First or early second century
P.Oxy.XXVI 2451 Commentary (on Pindar) roll [paragr, mg strokes, minor spacing, cursive]
First or early second century
P.Oxy.XXXVII 2818
End of first century
P.Oxy.XXIX 2506 Commentary (on Lyric Poetry) roll [polished hand, minor spacing]
First/ second century
P.Oxy.XXXI 2535 Commentary (on Elegiac Epigrams)roll [badly damaged]
Late first century
P.Oxy.XVIII 2190
Late first century
P.Oxy.XLVII 3357
Late first century
P.Oxy.LX 4036
Late first century
P.Oxy.LXV 4468
Late first century
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2845
Second half of first century
P.Oxy.XV 1806
Late first century
P.Oxy.LIV 3724
Later first century
P.Oxy.XLIX 3503
Late first century
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2846
Second half of first century
P.Oxy.XLIV 3154
First century
P.Oxy.XV 1793
Late first century
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2844
Second half of first century
P.Oxy.L 3554
Second half of first century
P.Oxy.XLV 3217
Late first century
P.Oxy.XXXI 2534
End of first century

P.Oxy.XXXVI 2756
CE 78/9
P.Oxy.XLI 2987
c. CE 78/9
P.Oxy.XLIX 3510
79-80 CE
P.Oxy.XXXVI 2757
Post CE 79
P.Oxy.XLV 3264
80-1 CE

P.Oxy.XXXVI 2773
15 November, CE 82
P.Oxy.LXVI 4532
27 January 85
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2841
21 July, CE 85
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2843
24-28 Aug., CE 86
P.Oxy.XLII 3051
1 May 89 CE
P.Oxy.XLV 3240
c. 88-9 CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3466
81-96 CE
P.Oxy.XXXVIII 2856
CE 91/2
P.Oxy.XLVII 3334
ca. 89-94 CE
P.Oxy.XLI 2957
February CE 91
P.Oxy.XVIII 2185
CE 92

P.Oxy.XLVII 3333
1 February 92 CE

P.Oxy.LXII 4334
94/5 CE
P.Oxy.XLII 3022
10 October - 9 December 98 CE
P.Oxy.XLIX 3467
2 September 98 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3907
11 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3902
11 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3908
14 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3904
14 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3903
14 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3909
14 November 99 CE
P.Oxy.XLI 2959
21-27 November CE 99 (cf. M. A. So"llner, ZPE 94, 1992, 118)
P.Oxy.XLI 2958
2 December CE 99

P.Oxy.XLVII 3335
99-100 CE
P.Oxy.LVII 3905
99 CE
POxy 60.4039 Aeschines, In Ctesiphontem [rhetoric] roll, ca 100 CE, ed. Eleonora Bassi --
interlinear marginal strokes

Late first or early second century
POxy 47.3325 Moschus [poetry], roll, ca 100 CE, ed. M. E. Weinstein
possibly some diacritical marks (or added later) [average]

First/second century

POxy 47.3318 [not online 05no2004]
tag, against grain, theta number

First or second century CE

P.Oxy.XLV 3234
First - second century
P.Oxy.XXXIII 2660 (and 2660a)
(2660)First/second century;(2660a)third century
P.Oxy.LXV 4443
Late first or early second century
P.Oxy.LXI 4103
First-second century
P.Oxy.XIII 1619
Late first/ early second century
P.Oxy.LXII 4314
First/second century
P.Oxy.XXXII 2640
First to second centuries
POxy 57.3880 Thucydides roll, ca 100 CE, ed. M. W. Haslam --
use of spacing between some words (sentence breaks?), enlarged next letters in line
[hurried but nice] First-second century