As many of you may be aware, I belong to the Textual Criticism Yahoo Group. I used to just argue and make idiotic statements like I was back in high school (I was better behaved in university before my relapse). Once I learned how many top ranked scholars are in this group I stopped behaving like a teenager (even though I know my immaturity will inevitably resurface again).What I like about this discussion group is that it deals with real, physical objects (fragments of gospels etc) rather than endless 'interpretations' of the texts themselves. As I posted earlier I used my membership to advance my observation that the fragment P52 cannot possibly be used to PROVE that the canonical gospel of John dates from the early second century.
I already discussed my original comment in that forum in a previous blog posting at this site. Let me just say here that in that original Yahoo Group posting I demonstrated that the same fragment could be argued to belong to an early Diatessaron or a single, long gospel that was principally used by members of churches outside of the Catholic fold (or Catholics who secretly kept 'heretical' associations).
In any event I ended up having someone claim that my explanation didn't make sense because the Diatessaron was too long to allow for it to be developed from a single quire (or the quantity of paper used). I happened to have someone come to my aid noting that most books, were developed out of a number of quires anyway so this objection was essentially silly.
Well today I actually managed to get some support for my idea that P52 might well be a single, long gospel in a post from Tom Hennel of Manchester who said that:
on your basic point (i.e. that P52 might be a Diatessaron fragment), you should bear in mind that the Dura fragment (0212) is on parchment, not papyrus. Parchment was stronger - less inclined to split - could be made longer without being unwieldy, and could be written on with much smaller letters.
So it's possible that a long parchment scroll could have held a full gospel harmony - or othewise that the text in 0212 might have been a harmony of the passion texts only.
Of course the same might be true of P52 - which certainly cannot be regarded as a witness to the circulation of the Gospel of John that we know. Nevertheless, whatever was the text of P52, someone took a lot of care constructing the codex; they did not simply use a notebook. Such care suggests the text contained was fairly substantial.
I also brought up a point that the Diatessaron fragment at Dura Europos was written on a scroll not a codex so did that suggest that the Christian communities of the near East's preference for the scroll had something to do with them being closer to Judaism his answer was:I suppose that is a possibility. There was a long-established Jesish community in Dura, and a lavishly decorated synagogue. Equally, there was also a Mithraeum, and I note that the depictions of Mithraic prophets on the walls of the Mithraeum show them holding Mithriac texts in scroll form.
As to why the Christian community were early adopters of the scroll form; Graham Stanton considers that this may have been due to a wish to have all four gospels in one book - the problem being that P52 appears to pre-date the gathering of the Gospels together.
Ernest Richards suggests that the codex may have first been adopted to circulate collections of Paul's letters (and those of Ignatius etc). He notes that Cicero (Cic. Fam. 9:26:1) recorded personal copies of his letters in his notebook: "I am jotting down a copy of this letter into my notebook"; and also that the published collections of Cicero's corrspondence took their texts from his notebook copies, not from the dispatched letters. Richards suggests that collections of Paul's letter circulated in codex form, because that was the form in which theya had been preserved. The adoption of the codex for Gospels followed from that
Now many of you may be wondering why I care so much about a little fragment like P52. The answer is that this little bit of paper is like the proverbial 'mustard seed.' It may be small but it has the power to uproot the whole inherited claims about the fourfold canon.
Here was my response to the two posts:
Thank you so much for that excellent overview. If I may offer my observation as an addendum. IF (and again I want to stress I am not claiming to have proved this) P52 was a pre-Diatessaric gospel fragment then it makes sense to have placed in a codex.
IF P52 was the canonical gospel of John as you note it doesn't make sense that it would be placed in a codex as it predates the assembly of the quaternion first mentioned by Irenaeus. When Irenaeus makes his great statement about the 'correctness' of a fourfold gospel he does not once say that anyone before him used it or assembled such a canon.
The point of my posts was to stress that the familiar John-Polycarp-Irenaeus line is not the only line of Johannine transmission in the late second century. Florinus active in Rome trumpeting a John-Polycarp-Florinus line of transmission where Florinus was a gnostic but Leucius, another gnostic makes explicit his understanding that the Johannine gospel was 'Diatessaron-like.'
It seems to me that as long as we are forced into thinking that only Irenaeus knew Polycarp and the Johannine tradition we will never make sense of why the Johannine gospel associated with P52 would have to assembled as a 'fairly substantial' text as you note.
The point is that I implore each of you to look at Polycarp's gospel citations in his short letter. Then just match up the two longest quotes against the Diatessaron. I think a fairly significant discovery will follow.
Arie, I don't want to put words into Ulrich Schmid's mouth but I find it difficult to read his Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische Einordnung der marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1995) without accepting the idea that Marcion's gospel was also related to the Diatessaron in some way.
For those who can't read German let me say that Schmid has re-examined all the evidence much more carefully and systematically than had been done so far. His finding is that Marcion’s text differed from other mss. in a way that would affect the meaning in only a few places, though these few differences are important.
All the rest of what was listed by Zahn and Harnack and others is simply agreement between Marcion’s text and the papyri or the Western Text or readings attested in the Syriac transmission. Tertullian and Epiphanius and others saw the disagreement with their text, without realising that the disagreement was not specific to Marcion.
Besides this, a large part of what was cited in previous work as specific to Marcion is no more than Tertullian’s re-wording of indirect quotations to fit his sentence structure, or Epiphanius not always quoting clearly.
Schmid thinks in terms of Marcion having made changes, but what he says can be re-phrased in terms of what was original, that is, Marcion’s, being changed. When he speaks of Marcion’s deletions, we can take that to mean that additions were put in by others.
The full list of all the differences between Marcion and the majority of Catholic mss. where at the same time Marcion is not supported by the papyri or the Western Text and so on, is very very short.
If you get the book look just above the middle of p. 310, starting with the words „Sein Beitrag beschränkt sich auf die Streichung präzise eingrenzbarer Textabschnitte....“ Notice that all these differences are what Schmid calls omissions by Marcion and I would call additions in the Roman & Catholic Recension. Most are additions of long phrases or whole sentences or verses with additional highly loaded content, but the last one listed by Schmid only concerns references to “the flesh of Christ”, much shorter but still loaded with implications.
All the same, the list of places where Marcion differs from the majority of Catholic mss. and is in agreement with the papyri, the Western Text and so on, is long: it comes to thirty pages in Schmid’s listing. Very few of these differences affect the meaning, but some make a big difference.
These differences affecting the meaning are explained by Schmid as being due to Marcion’s use of mss. of a recension that was anti-Jewish and had been revised in accordance with the Western Text and some related recension before Marcion saw it. This can be turned round to mean that the Western Text and this similar unknown recension represent a more original text than the form in the majority of Catholic mss.
The point is that Marcion witnesses a pre-Irenaean use of a single gospel canon. It has been argued by a number of people that there are a great number of 'Marcionitism' in Polycarp's text. I don't see it as inconcievable that a Johannine NT canon with only one single, long Diatessaronic 'gospel of John' might well have been passed on from Polycarp to his associates including Theophilus of Antioch (who is acknowledge to have preferred a single, long gospel 'harmony').
Yes, its speculation. Yes, its imaginative. But how else are we going to explain the curious features of P52 that you just mentioned Tom, without speculation and imagination? The familiar recycling of Irenaeus statement of 'what should be' established as canonical in the late second century (i.e. the fourfold canon) cannot help explain why the Johannine gospe of P52 would need a sturdy codex which housed a text as you note which "was fairly substantial.'
The point I want to make here is that my reinterpretation of P52 sets in motion the revaluation of early Christianity. I have it all written down in a book I wrote called Against Polycarp which I never published but which David Trobisch wrote the introduction (I will have to update it with these ideas about P52 which aren't present there yet).
Once we can prove that EVERYONE BEFORE IRENAEUS used a single long gospel and that these texts really weren't really as different as everyone thought (they were all proto-Diatessaronic single, long gospels with new additions added to the Marcionite original) it will be clearly demonstrated that Polycarp and Marcion weren't as far a part as previously thought (indeed that Polycarp represented nothing short of a second century heresy from Marcionitism).
Indeed Polycarp will be demonstrated to have been a forger and an innovator. Irenaeus his successor in counterfeiting and Marcion and the Marcionites will ultimately be vindicated.
I tell you this new sun is rising up over the horizon. I can see the light from this new day approaching sooner than most people think ...
