Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit (Part 1)

My friend and I headed to Ft. Worth, Texas, where an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls was being held. That's right. The Dead Sea Scrolls! The oldest pieces of the Bible we have! I could barely contain my excitement.

The first part of the exhibit was a treat. I thought it was just going to be the Dead Sea Scrolls there. I was in for a surprise. They had artifacts galore, such as coins, oil lamps, and goblets. Most interesting to me were some stone ossuaries with Hebrew and Greek inscriptions. I could make out quite a few of the letters, which was amazing, considering that I got a D+ in Hebrew.

One of the ossuaries stood out from the rest. It had, at one time, contained the bones of Alexander, the son of Simon of Cyrene. Simon of Cyrene was the one who carried Jesus' cross and in Mark 15:21, the gospel mentions that his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, were with him. It is not confirmed that the ossuary contained the bones of that particular Alexander son of Simon of Cyrene, but the odds of multiple Cyrenians being in Jerusalem are pretty low in the first place, with Alexander son of Simon being even lower. At any rater, it was great to see a possible artifact from a known character in the Bible. Click here for a picture (not sure if the picture is available for distribution so I didn't put it in here).

Immediately following the artifacts were a couple of rooms containing information about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then we entered a room containing facsimilies of the most famous Dead Sea Scrolls (the Isaiah scroll). At first, I wasn't sure what to think. Fascimilies are simply an image of the original scroll printed on thick paper and cut to resemble the shape of the original. For these particular facsimilies, the company that was hired to produce them took special care in getting the rips and tears just right, and even sewing the sheets together using thread made from authentic materials from the land.

However, they were just facsimilies. They were impressive to look at, but they weren't the originals. As time went on, I began to think that the originals were not on display here, and that the whole exhibit culminated in the facsimilies of the main scrolls.

We neared the end of that room and saw that it ended in a flight of stairs that let out into a lobby. My heart sank. This was it.

[to be continued...]

P52

Having been inspired by my research on the New Testament scribes, I decided I would try to reproduce the P52 fragment.

The first thing to get right was the shape.

As you can see, the fragment has a very unique shape. In fact, it's so recognized among the New Testament scholarly community that people have made memorabilia out of it, including ties. 

Since I didn't have any fancy equipment, I had to do it the hard way. I literally put a piece of paper up against my monitor and traced the outline of the image the best I could. Next, I transferred the tracing to the papyrus itself using a pencil, and then, using a straightedge razor, I cut the papyrus to the shape. Finally, I wrote the text on the papyrus (both sides) and aged it. It wasn't a perfect replica, but it did look good. I ended up giving it to a friend before I could manage to take a picture of it. One of these days I will manage to get a picture and upload it here.

The day after I gave my friend the P52 fragment, he and I went somewhere epic. Stay tuned to find out where!

Separated by 20 centuries

A few months ago, a professor at my old school shared a link to a free book (not free anymore though, unfortunately) called The Scribes. It is a historical fiction novel about textual criticism. I was skeptical that anything involving textual criticism could be exciting enough to write a piece of fiction about it, but I started reading and immediately was engaged.

It’s a story of two 3^rd-century scribes in Rome who notice discrepancies between the codex they are copying and a codex from Alexandria. They embark on an epic quest through the ancient Mediterranean world to solve the mystery of the differences in the two texts. They have many adventures and encounter a number of characters that would be familiar to students of the Early Church Age.

The writing is a little rough in some spots, but the story pushes you forward. He does not “Americanize” the characters (a flaw all too common in historical fiction), he treats each view of Christianity in the time period with appropriate respect, and drenches the reader with buckets of information of the era. It’s an immersive experience.

What hooked me was the beginning. The main character, Justin, begins to prepare a codex for writing. He takes sheets of papyrus and folds them together, creating “quires”. He then writes the gospel of Mark with a reed pen and ink, later binding all the quires together to form a codex.

I thought to myself, “Awesome! I have papyrus, a bamboo pen, and ink! Close enough!” I had known that the New Testament was written on papyrus, but I didn’t know that it was almost exclusively written on papyrus for the first few centuries after Christ, and I certainly wasn’t aware that a reed pen was used. I started researching and found many photos of the different papyrus fragments that have been discovered. It was exhilarating, because while these were not the originals, they were removed from the originals by a space of a hundred or two hundred years (or, if the rumors are true about the oldest papyrus found, a few decades!).

Another thing that got me excited was researching the oldest confirmed papyrus, the P52 fragment. The Wikipedia article describes this document as not having been written by a “practised scribe”. That is, the letters are not uniform, there is a bit of sloppiness, and the text is quite large in comparison to other texts. I thought, “This is great! An amateur scribe like me wrote the entire book of John!” I felt a kinship with that scribe. We both have a love for the scriptures that can’t be contained, even if we haven’t gone through years of training as a scribe.

What followed was an incredible journey that I will go over in the space of the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Trying something new

I started this blog as a way to keep me focused on my papyrus projects. As it turns out, I have been working on papyrus projects more or less steadily this whole time, such that I am just now updating this blog! I’ve completed a few projects and I am excited to share them with you over the next few weeks.

About a year ago, I did a project for a friend whose birthday was coming up. I had this idea to create a Koine Greek manuscript and to antique it so that it would appear to have just been discovered in an archaeological dig somewhere. Little did I know the path down which this would lead me.

I chose 1 Timothy 4:12 as the highlighted passage for this work, the verse that says: “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.”

I then did some research on the way that Koine Greek was written in the early days. At this point I knew almost nothing about it, except that they used mostly capital letters. I happened across a site that featured a few pictures of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest (mostly) complete manuscript in Greek. I copied the letters from the codex and matched them up with the Greek letters that I had learned in college. I wasn’t prepared for how different they were!

At one time I had thought that the ancient scribes wrote in all capital letters, which would correspond to the ones I knew:

                

            And I thought it would contain none of the lowercase letters:

              

            The ancient Koine Greek script actually contained a mixture of the two:

              

The credit for the Koine font above goes to Allan Loder. Click here if you would like to download the font.

For this project, I was using a script more similar to the script used in the Codex Sinaiticus. Looking back, it was a mistake to use this script on papyrus, since the Codex Sinaiticus was written on parchment, hundreds of years after the period I am interested in, when papyrus was predominant.

At any rate, away I went. I wrote the text in two columns (which was rare on papyrus, come to find out) and it turned out pretty well. I then tore into it with my hands and used a knife to cut some of the edges. I worked it into a nice fragment shape:

Then I took a piece of sandpaper and applied it to the text itself, in some cases obliterating a letter or two. I then bought a nice frame that made the fragment appear as if it were floating in midair. I gave it to my friend and he liked it.

I ended up with a pretty nice piece, but with several historical inaccuracies. These were:

• I used the Codex Sinaiticus script on papyrus
• I wrote the text itself in two columns, a practice that was fairly rare in the early days. If they did it, they also would have written it in a much more beautiful script than I had the talent for at that time.
• I did not look up any variant readings to try and determine what the original text would have been.
• I did not use any nomina sacra (I didn’t even know what those were at the time)

There are three others that are forgivable since my resources are limited here in the US:

1. The first would be the type of ink. The type of ink the ancients would have used is not in very high supply here in the US. It would have been iron gall ink, most likely, and while it is possible to make it, I’m not quite there yet. 
2. The second inaccuracy is the type of papyrus. At the time that I made this, I didn’t know much about papyrus, only that it was available at my local art supply stores and that it was cheap enough to buy moderate quantities and experiment with it. Without getting into too much detail, the art of making papyrus paper was actually lost hundreds of years ago and only revived last century. Click here for a link to the story. As a result, the quality of papyrus that has managed to make its way to the United States is limited. There are 4 types, and they are all the same. It is rare to find a sheet of papyrus that looks the same as the ancient manuscripts.
3. The third one was the type of pen. I used a bamboo pen because it was the best I could come up with. I didn’t have a feather pen (they don’t sell them in stores here) and I was pretty sure the ancient scribes didn’t use brushes to write on papyrus. It wasn’t until later that I realized how close I really was, though.

I was surprised at how easy it was to produce this piece. I ended up with a pretty nice piece of art. It didn’t take too long and it wasn’t cost-prohibitive. I really liked the idea, but at the time, I was kind of focusing on Egyptian, so I shelved it for the time being. I knew that it was a project that would make a nice gift sometime down the road.