Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 68:1 (NA 2017)
Article: Studies In P.Beatty III (P47) The Codex, Its Scribe, And Its Text
Author: Peter Malik

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Studies In P.Beatty III (P47)
The Codex, Its Scribe, And Its Text1

Peter Malik

([email protected])

The importance of papyri in NT textual criticism, if properly understood, is difficult to overestimate. Despite their state of preservation, they allowed the critics to move beyond the fourth-century ‘barrier’ of the Constantinian period, in which the earliest ‘Great majuscules’ were produced. The early papyri thus provided a venue for revisiting previous theories concerning transmission history and even some of the ‘canons’ of textual criticism. And perhaps of equal significance is the fact that the early papyri have provided the historians with valuable evidence of early Christian material culture and worship. Although to varying degrees this applies to all the papyri from the pre-Constantinian time, it is particularly true of those from Chester Beatty (P^45–47) and Bodmer (P^{66, 72, 75}) collections.

Of the six aforementioned papyri, the one that has received the least attention is P.Beatty III (P⁴⁷; LDAB 2778), the manuscript of Revelation. Even though the scope, content, and state of preservation of this manuscript are nowhere near manuscripts such as P⁶⁶, it seems hard to believe that such an extensive witness to one of the most sparsely-attested NT books would have nothing further to offer on closer scrutiny. Surprised by this void in our knowledge, I decided to subject P⁴⁷ to extensive analysis, which then served as the basis for my doctoral thesis.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of monographs on NT manuscripts, partly due to the growing interest in early Christian material culture. Such extensive studies are a suitable venue for what may be called ‘integrative’ analysis, an approach that takes into account the manuscript’s physical, textual, as well as scribal aspects, so

TynBull 68:1 (2017) p. 158

that different pieces of evidence inform one another in the process. This methodological approach is based on the recognition that manuscripts are not only uninvolved tradents of textual material but complex amalgamations of physicality (manuscript), human involvement (scribal behaviour), and transmitted content (text). My dissertation fits squarely with this trend, but with one notable difference: whereas the previous studies dealt with much more substantial codices and so had to be based on samples of data, the more limited extent of P⁴⁷ facilitates a more exhaustive manner of analysis as well as a wider selection of aspects to be considered alongside each other.

Given the approach outlined above, I decided t...