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Reviewed by:
  • God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts by Brent Nongbri
  • Mark Letteney
God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts Brent Nongbri New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 416. ISBN 978-0-300-21541-0

Correction:
The online version of this article has been updated to include edits that were mistakenly left out before going to print. The following three changes are requested:

1) page 550, right column, last paragraph, first line: “Nonbri” should read “Nongbri”
2) On page 550, left column, line 15 “(Princeton/ American Academy at Rome)” should read “(Princeton/American Academy in Rome)”
3) Page 551, right column, line 29 “within records in western museums and” should read “within records in museum and”

Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA's three Book Review Editors: Sabine Huebner (sabine.huebner@unibas.ch); Jason Moralee (moralee.jason@gmail.com); and Kristina Sessa (sessa.3@osu.edu).

Two problems, and one might even say annoyances, motivate Brent Nongbri's peerless God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts: paleography is preponderantly unreliable and the antiquities market is a black-box. Nongbri brings meticulous archival research coupled with a keen critical eye and an encyclopedic knowledge of Egyptian papyri to plead for transparency above all. We scholars must be clear with one another about the limits of our knowledge of the past and about the extent to which the indeterminacy of paleographic dating and the shadow of the antiquities market obscure our ability to know many of the things that we would rather be able to say. The strength of Nongbri's research is in his acute ability to find striking new data in ancient and well-worked evidence, and to point out deceptions in the scholarly discussion: first and foremost scholarly self-deception, and only subsequently, and occasionally, more insidious intrigues.

The first chapter provides an overview of the field of papyrology and codicology. This discussion will be beside the point for a number of readers who come to the book with significant papyrological experience, but it serves as a useful baseline for the book's intended audience: scholars who have perhaps glanced through Metzger's cursory Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, but who have not spent any time with standard introductory reading on papyrology beyond the insular discipline of New Testament studies. Nongbri's critical intervention begins in Chapter 2, "The Dating Game," where he systematically undermines common presumptions about the reliability of paleographic dating for literary manuscripts, exposing the field as a house of cards vulnerable to collapse at an even slightly shifting foundation. This tour de force demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, the motivating insight for the rest of Nongbri's analysis: "Paleographic comparison is by its very nature a subjective undertaking, and oftentimes, especially when early Christian manuscripts are concerned, paleographic dating can devolve into little more than an exercise in wishful thinking" (72).

The rest of Nongbri's book glides on the flight-path set by this opening act of scholarly deconstruction. But, all is not lost. The next four chapters, where Nongbri finally arrives at the "archaeology" promised in his title, weave intensive research on the acquisition history of the [End Page 550] most important papyrological collections with indefatigable attention to manuscripts as artifacts in and of themselves. These chapters are beautifully and compellingly written, and they demonstrate both the breadth of Nongbri's archival research and his particular penchant for telling a well-placed story: tales that are illustrative rather than aberrational. Tantalizing details throughout show that the book was written with persuasion in mind, and not to exhaust the store of information drudged up during Nongbri's investigations. Even seemingly trivial (if entertaining) details, such as the one about Rudolph Ibscher's ill-timed sneeze (310, note 67), offer readers insight into the very human networks of relation, commerce, and patronage that stand between discoveries and their scientific examiners, as well as the humanity of those examiners themselves whose noble intentions are often undermined by incomplete information and dubious methods.

Chapter 7 witnesses Nongbri at his best: re-narrating...

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