Reading Early New Testament Manuscripts

Abstract

In his recent publication on the production and transmission of early Christian gospels,1 Scott D. Charlesworth works out criteria to distinguish early Christian manuscripts that have been produced/copied in controlled settings for “public” use from those that have been copied in uncontrolled settings for “private” usage. Charlesworth defines the category “public manuscripts” as “intentionally produced to be read aloud by lectors in Christian meetings.”2 As the main indicators for identifying public manuscripts, he points to “sense breaks,” “punctuation,” and “lectional signs,” which would “greatly assist the task of the lector (ἀναγνώστης)” of “rightly dividing the continuous lines of letters in ancient texts (scriptio continua)”3 during ancient Christian worship.4 The term “sense break” refers to the paragraphos, a horizontal stroke found in the margins of ancient manuscripts. According to W. A. Johnson, on whom Charlesworth relies here, in papyri with literary texts, the paragraphos “was added primarily to assist with reading aloud—the typical way in which these literary texts would have been used.”5 Under the term “lectional signs”, Charlesworth includes markings on the level of letters and words, i. e. diacritics such as the trema, breathings and accents, as well as the apostrophe. In contrast, he suggests that the absence of these “reader’s aids” in early manuscripts of New Testament texts indicates a private setting “where MSS were read by individuals or where ‘private’ readings for family or friends were conducted, there was more leisurely interaction with the text and the need for reader’s aids was less pressing.”6 There is a fundamental methodological problem with Charlesworth’s approach: the fragmentary state of most of the papyri he examines does not allow for any definite conclusion about the absence of (in his terminology) “reader’s aids,” especially diacritics. Even more problematic, in my view, is that he assumes the presence of an official early Christian worship with a communal reading or even a liturgy of the word. However, the question of the broader social context of early Christian worship is not