Oxyrhynchus! It’s not something you use to wash your clothes!
It’s a place in Egypt where, a century ago, a huge load of ancient manuscripts were found. (This tends to happen in Egypt, where the desert climate better preserves documents written on papyrus, which has a nasty tendency to rot in wetter climes.)
A BUNCH OF STUFF WAS DISCOVERED AT OXYRHYNCHUS,
including some fragments of what later turned out to be the Gospel of Thomas (we got the full text from the Nag Hammadi find later on) and the Gospel of the Hebrews–both being apocryphal gospels that are not inspired and do not belong in the New Testament.
This much is common knowledge among folks with a passing familiarity with biblical archaeology.
But what many have been less familiar with is the fact that many of the Oxyrhynchus texts remained unread because they were simply illegible. In fact, 800 boxes of the things remained unread at Oxford.
A new technique using infra-red has enabled scholars to finally read the documents, and the results thus far have been stunning.
EXCERPTS:
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".
The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.
The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery
Now, as this story starts to break further into public consciousness, you’re going to hear a lot about the possibility of new gospels being discovered, and the secular media will do its part to try to suggest that any that are found are as early as possible, so as to make them rivals for the canonical gospels.
Take all this with a big spoonful of salt.
While it is theoretically possible that documents from the first century could be found, it is more likely that additional works from later than that would be found. These might be simply copies of Gnostic works we found at Nag Hammadi and be no big deal (despite media hype) or they might be new documents. In any event, it would take a good bit of time to figure out what their dates are, and the first dates proposed would likely turn out to be wrong.
It is possible that documents could be discovered that would contain accurate historical traditions of Jesus or the apostles, but the discovery of anything actually by them is unlikely (which is not to say that we mightn’t find things falsely attributed to them).
If we did discover, say, a new letter of Paul that looked authentic, it would set off a huge debate in the Christian community over what to do with it, but the odds of it being added to the New Testament (certainly in our lifetimes) would be remote.
What it might do, though, is prompt a lot of folks to realize how dependent on Tradition we are for the canon of Scripture–that it was Tradition that guided the early Church in identifying as authentic the manuscripts that we now have in the Bible. Any new document appearing to be authentic would lack a tradition of use in the churches and thus would not readily be added to the Scriptures of any group of Christians–except those already favorable to Gnostic texts out of an attraction to heterodoxy and novelty.
More later on what would happen if we found such a document. In the meantime,
Interesting post, as usual, Jimmy, but this line: “…the odds of it being added to the New Testament (certainly in our lifetimes) would be remote.” doesn’t help me. Nothing big ever gets started and finished in one lifetime in Rome. What I want to know, is what I’ve always wondered: COULD other texts be added to the canon of Scripture (not whether it will happen in my lifetime). The list of sacraments is closed. IS the list of inspired books closed, or not?
Pardon any apparent casuistry, but in a very nitty gritty sense the canon is not closed. Insofar as we are not certain exactly which *copies* of the canonical works to use (copyist errors, textual variations, lexical ambiguity, etc.), we must admit a certain fuzziness around the edges of any dogmatic decree of canonicity.
It seems to me the Church sensibly avoids this “problem” by relying on a realist metaphysic to establish the canon, as a collection of instantiationas of the inspired autographs themselves. What would be needed to absolutely hermetically seal the canon is a more precise (but basically unworkable) trope metaphysic, whereby THIS or THAT unique instance of said canonical work is THE canonical MS. Realism says X instantiates or actualizes the idea of “red.” Nominalism says “red” actually just means the (socially/ statistically) accepted set of all things said to be red. Trope theory, by contrast, tries to speak between them both by saying there is such a thing as “redness” but that it is “THIS red thing’s redness.” Thus, there is a supersensible reality which red objects really do instantiate (“redness”) but which is itself based on BEING instantiated by *particular* red things. Redness, then would be what all red things truly instantiate, and not merely what we consider the set of all things to add up to. And yet, each thing’s unique instantiation of redness in turn depends on the reality of redness as such. X’s particular redness cannot be red without redness, but redness is not red without “accepting” X’s particular redness “as its own.”
By extension, there are numerous (?) copies of St. Paul’s letter to Titus, but the epistle itself only ocmes to us by way of the concrete MSS. we have. Are we lacking the “real” epistle if we only have later and minutely varied copies? No, because each copy of Titus is what it is precisely by virtue of really and truly instantiating the “ur-epistle” itself.
These are abstruse considerations, I know, so I leave it to my canon-law and dogmatic betters to explain whether the canon, as a set of instantiated but non-tropically defined works, is unalterable. I suspect so. Now we just need to get down to finding those golden tropes!
It seems you have to pay money to read the article.
Maybe they’ve found Hortensius! I’ve always wondered what how Cicero work on philosophy compared to others.
Amen, Jordan, to read the work that set Augustine ablaze philosophically!
Amen, Jordan, to read the work that set Augustine ablaze philosophically!
Amen, Jordan, to read the work that set Augustine ablaze philosophically!
Ah, the troublesome Spotted Double Post strikes again!
Gadzooks! A Streaked Triple Post — in these parts!?
Double posts make little baby Jesus cry.
:_(
Triple posts make him unleash his wrath!
🙂
Jimmy: You have a subscription to the independent?
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
I’m hoping for some of Aristotle’s prose, the style of which his contemporaries praised. All we have of him now are lecture notes.
I am looking forward to what comes out. Most of the ‘religious’ stuff will probably end up to be trash, a lot of the pagan literature will be amazing to look at anew.
The Independent story has been out several days at this point. It must have hit the week mark right after Jimmy saw it. If you search for Oxyrhynchus, though, you’ll find less complete stories about this.
Also, check out http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/
Sorry about the bad link, folks! Apparently they shift things to pay-only archives after a few days.
(Billy, no I don’t have a subscription to the Independent. And wouldn’t if you paid me!)
Add a blog to your list:
http://www.veniaminov.blogspot.com/
Thanks.