To the scribes ∵ This book began as an internal checklist of Euthalian features, eventually growi... more To the scribes ∵ This book began as an internal checklist of Euthalian features, eventually growing into a more organised catalogue. We began to gather this information because, despite the excellent work of previous generations of scholars, there was no central tool for working with manuscripts that preserved the Euthalian tradition and because there is currently a confluence of research projects being carried out at the University of Glasgow on the New Testament's paratextuality that would greatly benefit from this tool.
An innovative study of the manuscript history of the New Testament, encompassing its paratexts--titles, cross-references, prefaces, marginalia, and more. How did the Bible come to be? In Words Are Not Enough, Garrick V. Allen argues that our exploration of New Testament origins must take account of more than just the text on the page. Where did the titles, verses, and chapters come from? Why do these extras, the paratexts, matter?
Allen traces the manuscript history of Scripture from our earliest extant texts through the Middle Ages to illuminate the origins of the printed Bibles we have today. Allen's research encompasses formatting, titles, prefaces, subscriptions, cross-references, marginalia, and illustrations. Along the way, he explains how anonymous scribes and scholars contributed to our framing--and thereby our understanding--of the New Testament.
But Allen does not narrate this history to try to unearth a pristine authorial text. Instead, he argues that this process of change is itself sacred. On the handwritten page, Scripture and tradition meet. Students, scholars, and any curious reader will learn how the messy, human transmission of the sacred text can enrich our biblical interpretation.
In the introductory volume to the first edition of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, a project ... more In the introductory volume to the first edition of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, a project funded by Beatty himself, Sir Frederic G. Kenyon concludes with a lengthy note of gratitude to his patron: Biblical students will not be slow to congratulate Mr. Chester Beatty on his extraordinary good fortune in acquiring this unique group of manuscripts, and to thank him for making them so fully available for their study. As editor, I can only express my gratitude to him for placing material of such fascinating interest in my hands just at the moment when I was free to undertake it, and my regret for the imperfections of execution which more competent scholars will no doubt discover.1 Although this statement is a stereotypical acknowledgement of funding and humility, it reflects a larger perspective that the guild owes collectors a debt of gratitude. This view that Beatty and the other large-scale collectors of that generation are ultimately responsible for the discovery, acquisition, and publication of the papyri remains largely intact in the popular imagination. Beatty is, after all, the one who purchased the material with his own funds, transported them to Europe, had Hugo Ibscher mount them in glass, brought them to London to be studied by Kenyon, paid for their publication, and eventually brought them to Dublin (along with the rest of his astounding collection) after the Second World War, finally leaving them upon trust for the use and enjoyment of the public to be housed in a museum that bears his name to this day. This is surely no insignificant series of events and, insofar as Beatty could have discharged his fortune in any way he saw fit, we might indeed be thankful that he spent his money on items that are so relevant to our field. The portrait of Beatty as a lone actor and generous benefactor to Biblical Studies and Papyrology, not to mention the other disciplines and the broader public that
explores the various ways that ancient Jewish and Christian writers engaged with and interpreted ... more explores the various ways that ancient Jewish and Christian writers engaged with and interpreted the Hebrew Bible in antiquity, focusing on physical mechanics of rewriting and reuse, modes of allusion and quotation, texts and text forms, text collecting, and the development of interpretative traditions. Contributions examine the use of the Hebrew Bible and its early versions in a variety of ancient corpora, including the Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic works, analysing the vast array of textual permutations that define ancient engagement with Jewish scripture. This volume argues that the processes of reading and cognition, influenced by the physical and intellectual contexts of interpretation, are central aspects of ancient biblical interpretation that are underappreciated in current scholarship.
The Acknowledgements page with an account of the origin, development, and completion of the colla... more The Acknowledgements page with an account of the origin, development, and completion of the collaborative translation of Schmid's "Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Apokalypse-Textes: Die Alten Staemme."
Die O enbarung des Johannes. Strömungen in der britischen Forschung zur Apokalypse.] 2015. Ca. 28... more Die O enbarung des Johannes. Strömungen in der britischen Forschung zur Apokalypse.] 2015. Ca. 280 Seiten. WUNT II erscheint im November ISBN 978-3-16-153869-8 fadengeheftete Broschur ca. 80,00 € ISBN 978-3-16-153870-4 eBook PDF 80,00 € Verö entlicht auf Englisch. Dieser Band präsentiert die Spannweite der Schwerpunkte in der aktuellen britischen Forschung zur Johanneso enbarung und untersucht Fragen nach Genre, Aufbau, Komposition, Wiederverwendung der Schriften, Exegese, thematischen Problemen und der Rezeptionsgeschichte. Er enthält Beiträge von renommierten Wissenschaftlern sowie Nachwuchswissenschaftlerin und macht deren Erkenntnisse einer breiteren Leserschaft zugänglich. Inhaltlich leistet er einen Beitrag zu verschiedenen Diskussionen, nicht nur in Bezug auf die Apokalypse sondern auch auf allgemeinere Diskurse in Neuem Testament und frühem Christentum.
This article explores the complex life and significance of Codex H (GA 015), a copy of Paul's let... more This article explores the complex life and significance of Codex H (GA 015), a copy of Paul's letters in Greek preserving the earliest evidence for the Euthalian apparatus. Codex H was disassembled in the Megisti Lavra monastery on Mount Athos sometime between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and used as binding material and flyleaves in multiple other medieval manuscripts produced and restored there. Codex H's surviving folios are now held in Paris, Torino, Kyiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Megisti Lavra. Its story highlights the ethical complexities inherent in scholarship on the New Testament's manuscripts, especially as it relates to digital tools and emerging forms of restorative textual scholarship. In order to begin to reconstruct Codex H before it was disassembled, we first work to understand its post-production life, tracing the paths its pages took in reverse chronological order, from their current holding institutions to Mount Athos. We argue that the story of Codex H is important because it helps us to understand the ways late ancient copies traversed time and space to their current forms as we encounter them today, offering new ways to think about the most primary sources of New Testament scholarship.
This article explores the complex theoretical and practical issues involved in editing paratextua... more This article explores the complex theoretical and practical issues involved in editing paratextual features in Greek New Testament manuscripts and the many possible critical research questions to which this type of collaborative work contributes. Reflecting on the ongoing work of the ‘Titles of the New Testament’ (TiNT) project based at the University of Glasgow, we outline the challenges involved in working digitally with a large and heterogenous manuscript corpus and discuss some of the editorial steps we have taken to enable the construction of a titular search tool and our own research questions on this corpus. We ultimately conclude that our digital editorial practices stand in a long line of annotating activity that can be traced back as far as the scribes and craftspeople who produced the manuscripts we continue to explore in this project
Studies Bulletin is the biannual on-line and print-on-demand journal of the European research net... more Studies Bulletin is the biannual on-line and print-on-demand journal of the European research network Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies. Born in 2009 as a European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme, the network has been affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/) since 2016. Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin welcomes articles, project descriptions, conference reports, book reviews and notes on all topics connected with the written cultures of the Mediterranean Near and Middle East and related traditions or offering a comparative perspective. Contributions should be sent to Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies,
In the introductory volume to the first edition of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, a project ... more In the introductory volume to the first edition of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, a project funded by Beatty himself, Sir Frederic G. Kenyon concludes with a lengthy note of gratitude to his patron: Biblical students will not be slow to congratulate Mr. Chester Beatty on his extraordinary good fortune in acquiring this unique group of manuscripts, and to thank him for making them so fully available for their study. As editor, I can only express my gratitude to him for placing material of such fascinating interest in my hands just at the moment when I was free to undertake it, and my regret for the imperfections of execution which more competent scholars will no doubt discover.1 Although this statement is a stereotypical acknowledgement of funding and humility, it reflects a larger perspective that the guild owes collectors a debt of gratitude. This view that Beatty and the other large-scale collectors of that generation are ultimately responsible for the discovery, acquisition, and publication of the papyri remains largely intact in the popular imagination. Beatty is, after all, the one who purchased the material with his own funds, transported them to Europe, had Hugo Ibscher mount them in glass, brought them to London to be studied by Kenyon, paid for their publication, and eventually brought them to Dublin (along with the rest of his astounding collection) after the Second World War, finally leaving them upon trust for the use and enjoyment of the public to be housed in a museum that bears his name to this day. This is surely no insignificant series of events and, insofar as Beatty could have discharged his fortune in any way he saw fit, we might indeed be thankful that he spent his money on items that are so relevant to our field. The portrait of Beatty as a lone actor and generous benefactor to Biblical Studies and Papyrology, not to mention the other disciplines and the broader public that
Nils Dahl was an omnivorous scholar, tackling questions related to the composition, redaction, th... more Nils Dahl was an omnivorous scholar, tackling questions related to the composition, redaction, theology, transmission, and history of the New Testament. One area that captured his attention (and the attention of his students and colleagues) was the Euthalian apparatus, a series of complicated and ubiquitous lists, cross-reference systems, biographical texts, and text divisions. Dahl saw the critical value of these traditions for understanding the early transmission of the Pauline corpus, hypothesizing that the material once comprised an official ancient edition connected to the library of Caesarea. This article takes a step back by first examining the flexibility of the Euthalian material in the manuscripts that preserve it, arguing that it is more valuable to understand these features in the context of transmission and reading as opposed to viewing the tradition as evidence for an ancient edition. It is a great honour for me to be here today to give a lecture in the name of a scholar whose work I greatly admire for its breadth, technical skill, and ability to navigate multiple research contexts. The more I read the work of Nils Dahl and learn about his life, the more I identify with him, not only as an expatriate who has worked most of my career away from my home country, but also as someone whose interest in the New Testament is not exclusively exegetical or theological, although of course Dahl's interests extended to these areas too. 1 Among Dahl's many skills, I am most impressed by his ability to explore the New Testament in the context of early Jewish literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls (especially in a period when most of the scrolls were not yet published) and in light of ancient literary conventions, all the while considering its
This article examines two aspects of the ubiquitous, but oft-overlooked, set of paratexts known a... more This article examines two aspects of the ubiquitous, but oft-overlooked, set of paratexts known as the Euthalian Apparatus. The Euthalian apparatus supplements Acts, the Pauline Epistles, and the Catholic Epistles in a variety of manuscripts, framing these works with prefaces, cross references, lists of various kinds, and biographic texts relating to Paul. To begin to understand this variable system as a work of late-ancient textual scholarship, transmitted in hundreds of medieval manuscripts, I examine the two quotation lists provided for Acts, focusing on their various presentations in the manuscripts, using GA 1162 as an example. Examining these lists enables us to better understand the reception of Acts’ use of Jewish scripture, Acts’ reception in late-ancient scholastic contexts, the transmission of quotations, and the complexity involved in defining the boundaries ofcanonical ideologies.
In this article I catalogue and analyse every form of the titleinscriptions, subscriptions and ke... more In this article I catalogue and analyse every form of the titleinscriptions, subscriptions and kephalaiathat appears in the New Testament papyri, bringing together this material for the first time. The titles provide new evidence for examining questions related to traditions of entitling in antiquity more broadly and offer a space to consider the dynamic relationships between medium, materiality, book-forms, paratextuality and interpretation, both in antiquity and in our own scholarly culture that stands between print and digital forms. The material also highlights interesting divergences in labelling strategies between the titles of works in the various New Testament subcorpora and suggests that the kat' andra formula is not the only way to entitle a Gospel.
Recent changes to the technology used to produce critical editions and the mass digitization of G... more Recent changes to the technology used to produce critical editions and the mass digitization of Greek New Testament manuscripts are beginning to fundamentally alter the place of later manuscripts in critical practice, reinvigorating research into minuscules and particular subtraditions of manuscripts that have often stood outside the interest of most New Testament scholars. This situation necessitates a reexamination of often-overlooked manuscripts, going beyond traditional text-critical concerns to better understand the ways that manuscripts function as arbiters of knowledge for the texts they carry, especially when their paratextuality and design differ from modern Bibles and critical editions. Changes in editorial technology have created a situation where editions can also be informed by the conceptual networks of literary interrelationships and interpretive pathways reflected in the layout and design of manuscripts. Moreover, the expanded availability of digital manuscript images creates new avenues for interdisciplinary exploration of the significance of paratextual systems. This article begins to explore these issues by analyzing the unpublished GA 2604 (Dublin, CBL W 139), a deluxe twelfth-century gospel codex. Manuscripts of all forms and from all periods provide reception-historical information about their producers, users, and contexts. 1 This critical point has been 1
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Books by Garrick Allen
An innovative study of the manuscript history of the New Testament, encompassing its paratexts--titles, cross-references, prefaces, marginalia, and more.
How did the Bible come to be? In Words Are Not Enough, Garrick V. Allen argues that our exploration of New Testament origins must take account of more than just the text on the page. Where did the titles, verses, and chapters come from? Why do these extras, the paratexts, matter?
Allen traces the manuscript history of Scripture from our earliest extant texts through the Middle Ages to illuminate the origins of the printed Bibles we have today. Allen's research encompasses formatting, titles, prefaces, subscriptions, cross-references, marginalia, and illustrations. Along the way, he explains how anonymous scribes and scholars contributed to our framing--and thereby our understanding--of the New Testament.
But Allen does not narrate this history to try to unearth a pristine authorial text. Instead, he argues that this process of change is itself sacred. On the handwritten page, Scripture and tradition meet. Students, scholars, and any curious reader will learn how the messy, human transmission of the sacred text can enrich our biblical interpretation.
Papers by Garrick Allen