Texts and Artefacts: Collected Essays on Early Christian Manuscripts

The essays included in this volume present Larry W. Hurtado's steadfast analysis of the earliest Christian manuscripts. In these chapters Hurtado considers not only standard text-critical issues which seek to uncover an earliest possible version of a text, but also the manuscripts available to us themselves. Hurtado examines often overlooked 2nd and 3rd century artefacts, which are among the earliest manuscripts available, drawing fascinating conclusions about the features of early Christianity.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first addresses text-critical and text-historical issues about the textual transmission of the New Testament writings. The second part looks at manuscripts as physical and visual artefacts themselves. Whilst these essays are presented together as a republished collection, Hurtado has made several updates across the collection to draw them together and to reflect on the developing nature of the issues they address since they were first written.

• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Text-Critical and Text-Historical Studies
  • 1. The New Testament in the Second Century: Text, Collections and Canon
  • 2. The Early New Testament Papyri: A Survey of Their Significance
  • 3. P45 and the Textual History of the Gospel of Mark
  • 4. God or Jesus? Textual Ambiguity and Textual Variants in Acts of the Apostles
• Part 2: Manuscripts as Artefacts
  • 5. The 'Meta-Data' of Earliest Christian Manuscripts
  • 6. Manuscripts and the Sociology of Early Christian Reading
  • 7. The Origin of the Nomina Sacra: A Proposal
  • 8. The Staurogram in Early Christian Manuscripts: The Earliest Visual Reference to the Crucified Jesus
  • 9. A Fresh Analysis of P.Oxyrhynchus 1228 (P22) as Artefact
  • 10. The Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas as Artefacts: Papyrological Observations on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654 and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655
  • 11. Who Read Early Christian Apocrypha?
  • 12. P45 as Early Christian Artefact: What it Reflects about Early Christianity
• Index