Full Description
The essays included in this volume present Larry W. Hurtado's steadfast analysis of the earliest Christian manuscripts. In these chapters, Hurtado considers not only standard text-critical issues which seek to uncover an earliest possible version of a text, but also the very manuscripts that are available to us. As one of the pre-eminent scholars of the field, Hurtado examines often overlooked 2nd and 3rd century artefacts, which are among the earliest manuscripts available, drawing fascinating conclusions about the features of early Christianity.
Divided into two halves, the first part of the volume addresses text-critical and text-historical issues about the textual transmission of various New Testament writings. The second part looks at manuscripts as physical and visual artefacts themselves, exploring the metadata and sociology of their context and the nature of their first readers, for the light cast upon early Christianity. Whilst these essays are presented together here as a republished collection, Hurtado has made several updates across the collection to draw them together and to reflect on the developing nature of the issues that they address since they were first written.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Text-Critical and Text-Historical Studies
1. The New Testament in the Second Century: Text, Collections and Canon
2. The Early New Testament Papyri: A Survey of Their Significance
3. New Testament Scholarship and the Dating of New Testament Papyri
4. God or Jesus? Textual Ambiguity and Textual Variants in Acts of the Apostles
Part 2: Manuscripts as Artefacts
5. The 'Meta-Data' of Earliest Christian Manuscripts
6. Manuscripts and the Sociology of Early Christian Reading
7. The Origin of the Nomina Sacra: A Proposal
8. The Staurogram in Early Christian Manuscripts: The Earliest Visual Reference to the Crucified Jesus
9. A Fresh Analysis of P.Oxyrhynchus 1228 (P22) as Artefact
10. The Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas as Artefacts: Papyrological Observations on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654 and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655
11. Who Read Early Christian Apocrypha?
12. P45 as Early Christian Artefact: What it Reflects about Early Christianity
Index
