Recommend-a-blog (35)

I haven’t done one of these recommendation posts in a couple of years for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is the incredible site churn that has occurred on the Web since late 2013 when Bernie, IC and I began blogging here. Linking to other people’s worthwhile work is a moving target, quite impossible to maintain. If you still believe the bromide “The internet is forever”, well … stop. It just ain’t so, unless what you have posted is terminally embarrassing. In that case, you can guarantee it will not be going anywhere soon. Somebody’s got a backup to the backup to the backup on a server somewhere, and your great, great grandchildren will probably read it and weep. Or laugh uproariously.

The good stuff? That disappears faster than a Hollywood marriage. Grrr.

Still, I’m going to take a crack at passing another new post on, if only so that readers can enjoy it for a few months before entropy does its thing.

Patrick Young maintains a website called Forgotten Christianity on Substack that is chock full of goodies. One post from June of this year is entitled “Medieval Monks Tore Apart St. Paul’s Letters to Bind Other Books. Now They’ve Resurfaced.” How important is it that a 6th-century Greek parchment codex reappeared a few months ago for the first time in about 800 years? Very important indeed, apparently.

We might instinctively feel that tearing apart such an ancient copy of Paul’s letters is an act of vandalism or disrespect but in fact, what tended to happen with old manuscripts is that their ink would fade over the years, eventually rendering them illegible and useless to the monks who preserved them. At that point, their only value was as binding material in books, which by the 12th century had replaced manuscripts as the literary preservation technique of choice. This particular manuscript is called Codex H, and at some point in its six centuries of life had been re-inked. Re-inking leaves “ghost text” visible to modern multi-spectral imaging, and a Scottish team from Glasgow recently retrieved it. You can find the full digital edition of Codex H here, including the 42 new pages pulled from the binding of another book.

The importance of these to scholars and to those of us interested in such things can hardly be overstated. Here’s Young on the subject:

“The recovered pages don’t contain new letters from Paul. They do not overturn anything in the canon. They do not produce theological surprises. What they reveal is something arguably more interesting to anyone who cares about early Christianity: how the Church actually read Paul.”

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so I won’t recycle Young’s entire post here, but let’s just say Codex H gives us new insights into how the early church navigated Paul’s epistles in an era long before chapters and verses were added by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The early believers had their own chapter divisions, which are quite different from ours. They also annotated the text heavily, as many Christians do in their Bibles today.

Most importantly, for Christians concerned that all the copying and recopying of manuscripts over the centuries since the writing of the New Testament has introduced significant error, we can sit back and take a deep breath. Young writes:

“St. Paul wrote to real communities in Corinth, Galatia, Rome, Ephesus, and elsewhere around the Roman Empire, and those letters were immediately recognized as authoritative. They were copied, annotated, organized, re-inked, torn apart, scattered across five countries, and eventually recovered by multispectral imaging in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2026.

And they still say the same thing they said in the 6th century.”

Young finishes with a sample from Codex H of 1 Corinthians 13:4-13 for which this is precisely the case. When a document survives nearly 1,500 years of transmission without a word of corruption, surely we can have similar confidence concerning the integrity of manuscript transmission during the 500 years between Paul and Codex H.

Frankly, I suspect ancient manuscript transmission will turn out to have been far more reliable that today’s hit-and-miss preservation of knowledge in digital archives.