Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology

Description

Scholars of early Christian and Jewish literature have for many years focused on interpreting texts in their hypothetical original forms and contexts, while largely overlooking important aspects of the surviving manuscript evidence and the culture that produced it. This volume of essays seeks to remedy this situation by focusing on the material aspects of the manuscripts themselves and the fluidity of textual transmission in a manuscript culture. With an emphasis on method and looking at texts as they have been used and transmitted in manuscripts, this book discusses how we may deal with textual evidence that can often be described as mere snapshots of fluid textual traditions that have been intentionally adapted to fit ever-shifting contexts. The emphasis of the book is on the contexts and interests of users and producers of texts as they appear in our surviving manuscripts, rather than on original authors and their intentions, and the essays provide both important correctives to former textual interpretations, as well as new insights into the societies and individuals that copied and read the texts in the manuscripts that have actually been preserved to us. Preface Table of Contents List of Contributors Images Abbreviations Studying Snapshots: On Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology An Illusion of Textual Stability: Textual Fluidity, New Philology, and the Nag Hammadi Codices Reading Variants in James and the Apocalypse of James: A Perspective from New Philology The Making of a Secret Book of John: Nag Hammadi Codex III in Light of New Philology Two Witnesses, One Valentinian Gospel? The Gospel of Truth in Nag Hammadi Codices I and XII Monastic Paideia and Textual Fluidity in the Classroom Textual Fluidity in Early Monasticism: Sayings, Sermons and Stories Four Texts from Nag Hammadi amid the Textual and Generic Fluidity of the “Letter” in the Literature of Late Antique Egypt Know Thy Enemy: The Materialization of Orthodoxy in Syriac Manuscripts “You Have Found What You Seek”: The Form and Function of a Sixth-Century Divinatory Bible in Syriac Between “Text Witness” and “Text on the Page”: Trajectories in the History of Editing the Epistle of Baruch The End of the Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek Codices, and Syriac Manuscripts Translating the Hekhalot Literature: Insights from New Philology Indices