By Roger S. Bagnall
For the earlier hundred years, a lot has been written concerning the early versions of Christian texts chanced on within the zone that was Roman Egypt. students have mentioned those papyrus manuscripts--containing the Bible and different Christian works--as facts of Christianity's presence in that ancient zone in the course of the first 3 centuries advert. In Early Christian Books in Egypt, uncommon papyrologist Roger Bagnall exhibits good deal of this dialogue and scholarship has been misdirected, biased, and at odds with the realities of the traditional international. offering an in depth photo of the social, fiscal, and highbrow weather within which those manuscripts have been written and circulated, he finds that the variety of Christian books from this era is probably going fewer than formerly believed.
Bagnall explains why papyrus manuscripts have mostly been dated too early, how the function of Christians within the heritage of the codex has been misrepresented, and the way where of books in historic society has been misunderstood. the writer bargains a pragmatic reappraisal of the variety of Christians in Egypt in the course of early Christianity, and gives a radical photograph of the economics of booklet construction through the interval that allows you to ascertain the variety of Christian papyri more likely to have existed. assisting a extra conservative method of relationship surviving papyri, Bagnall examines the dramatic outcomes of those findings for the historic knowing of the Christian church in Egypt.
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We do not, of course, have accurate figures about the percentage of the population that was Christian in the second and third centuries, nor will we ever have them. The census did not, as I already remarked, record such information, and in fact no one ever knew what the figures were. But models of what these numbers might have been have been offered by Keith Hopkins and Rodney Stark (Hopkins 1998; Stark 1996: esp. 3-27); as for our purposes these do not differ significantly and they use similar methodologies, I shall use here Stark's calculation that the rate of growth of the Christian population ought to have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 percent per year (or 40 percent per decade).
Indeed, he sees the inconsistent usage here as a reflection of dogmatic controversies in Alexandria in the early third century. Overinterpretation, I think one might say. We may now turn to something altogether more substantive and positive, where we shall be dealing in the main with good, even excellent, scholarship and real, rather than phony, problems. But the issues raised by this material are nonetheless full of troubling and difficult aspects concerning the earliest stratum of Christian books.
Into this state of the discussion enters P. Oxy. LXIX 4706, "twentyseven fragments of a roll, blank on the back," as its editor, Gonis, says. Of these fragments, only seventeen have been placed so far. Gonis describes the hand as "informal with cursive tendencies, of the kind that C. H. Roberts described as 'reformed documentary' ... " The identified fragments contain portions of books Ill and IV of the Visions and almost all the books of the Precepts (Mandata), from which only books I and Ill are lacking.