Modifying My Own Personal Image of Hesiod

I don't remember which I got first, a few volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri I came across in a used-book store, or a copy of the 1990 third edition of Solmson, Merklebach and West's Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod. Both happened around 2003 to 2005. I'm very bad at recalling exactly when things happened.

It just occurs to me, just at this very moment, while writing this, that perhaps the reason I'm so fascinated by learning and memorizing historical dates is because I'm so bad at remembering dates in my own life. Maybe the obsession with historical dates is in part overcompensation for the weakness in recalling dates in my own life.

It's remarkable, how many insights I have while writing essays.

Onward. I do remember that finding the volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in that bookstore, was the first that I had ever heard of the city of Oxyrhynchus. Like so many others before and after me, I looked into the subject and became enthralled by the story of the largest single find, by far, of ancient Classical texts.

I know: most of the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus and edited so far have been of a quotidian nature, and that these glimpses into everyday life in the eastern Roman Empire from the 3rd century BC to the 6th century AD are the main attraction of the papyri for many historians. And for Biblical scholars, the Biblical, apocryphal and other early Christian papyri found at Oxyrhynchus are so important that, in some cases, they do not seem to realize, or in any case to particularly care, that these Christian papyri are only a small fraction of the entire find.

That's one of many pleasant aspects of the Oxyrhynchus find: it's so huge and varied that many different groups of scholars have each found their own field transformed.

For me, the most exciting Oxyrhynchus finds are the Classical texts, and especially the re-discoveries of missing Classical texts, and to me, right from the very first volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri which I ever saw, the most spectacular of these have seemed to be the many fragments of missing text of Hesiod's Catalogue of Women, which, before Oxyrhynchus, had been more of a rumor than an ancient text, a dubious attribution to Hesiod, and which, after Oxyrhynchus, occupies 79 pages in that 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. The reason why there was a third edition of the Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod by 1990, not to mention numerous revisions of other editions by Oxford and other publishers, was that more and more papyri kept coming to light, giving occasion to update not just the text of the Catalogue of Woman, but also of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, which had never been lost, but which, before the great finds of papyri beginning late in the 19th century, were known mostly from 15th-century manuscripts, and from no manuscript older than a solitary one from the 10th century. The Oxyrhyncus papyri of Hesiod, by contrast, are all 6th century or older, mostly 3rd century or older, and a few of them are BC.

Until very recently, I thought that Hesiod had flourished around 800 BC, because two different editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that of 1951 and also that of 1972, told me so. I came across the date of fl ca 700BC in other sources, but I assumed, for a long time, that they were mistaken and Britannica was correct. I finally figured out that Britannica was mistaken, and, as you can see if you consult the newest Britannica in paper or online, someone at Britannica finally noticed the error as well and fixed the typo.

For me, it was very disappointing to find out that Hesiod had flourished a century later than I had thought, and it required that I considerably revised my imagining of the earliest alphabetic Greek writing. And then I learned that the great unearthing of fragments of the Catalogue of Women, although doing away with the earlier controversy over whether or not the work had actually ever existed, had by no means convinced everyone that Hesiod had written it. More recently still, within just a few days, I've had to do some more mental revision, upon learning that the experts no longer all agree that Hesiod was a real person, any more real than Homer (assuming, as some but not all do, that there was no Homer).

Should I assume that still more Hesiodic papyri will be found and will shed more light on the Hesiodic Question and other questions? Over the course of my life I have tended to become more cautious about assuming anything. I will continue to try to catch up with the work of others, and wait and see what further evidence comes to light. On the other hand, it is very hard for me to believe that there will be no further finds of text of Hesiod -- or, if you prefer to emphasize your doubt of his existence, of "Hesiod."

An Epitome Of Livy: Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 668, Published In 1904

Beginning in 1897, a huge number of papyri were found in the ancient garbage dumps outside of where the city of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt had stood. Written on these papyri were passages from the Bible, apocryphal Gospels, Classical Greek literature both known to the modern world and hitherto lost, legal and official and business documents and private letters and other things. Over 5000 of these papyri have been published so far, but that's still just a tiny fraction of what was dug up. (Some sources give the total number of Oxyrhynchus papyri at 500,000, some 1 million, so for now I'm just going to stick with "only a tiny fraction have been published so far." I also can't tell you how many papyri, if any, have been excavated after the period between 1897 and 1903, although I want very much to be able to tell you. I'll keep researching.) Volume 1 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was published in 1898, and volume 82 was published in 2016, and there are many more volumes still to come.

One of the biggest-selling of those 82 volumes is volume 4, published in 1904.



And by far the biggest reason for the interest in volume 4 are the first 2 papyri in the volume, P. Oxy 654 and 655, which Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, the Oxford archaeologists who discovered the Oxyrhynchus garbage dumps full of history-changing papyri and who edited volume 4, named "New Sayings of Jesus" and "fragment of a lost Gospel," respectively. In the 1940's a Coptic manuscript found at Nag Hammadi was discovered to have come from the same Greek text as these two papyri and P. Oxy 1, the first papyrus in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, volume 1, and now all of the text which has been discovered and put together is known collectively as the Gospel of Thomas.

And there truly is no shortage of web pages, websites, books, TV shows and other things devoted to the Gospel of Thomas.

But I came here today to talk about another papyrus in volume 4: P. Oxy 668, an epitome of Livy, books 37-45 and 48-55. This papyrus is transcribed and discussed on pages 90-116, as well as a part of it being shown in a photograph in Plate VI at the back of the volume.

Perhaps some of you are asking: what is an epitome of Livy, books 37-45 and 48-55, and why should I care about it? Livy is the common English name of the Roman historian Titus Livius, who lived from 59 BC to AD 17, and wrote a history of Rome from its mythical beginnings to the end of the reign of the Emperor Augustus in AD 14.

There has been quite a lot of discussion of and controversy over Livy's reliability and worth as an historian. There is general agreement that he wrote very well, that his works are tremendously enjoyable and exciting to read, whether they deliver a high degree of historical value or not. I personally tend to think somewhat more highly of Livy the historian than some others do. But it must be understood that the rules for writing history were much different in ancient Rome than they are today. Much of Livy is what we would refer to as historical fiction rather than history -- when, for example, Livy puts long speeches into the mouths of people when it is clear that, whatever they said, Livy had no word-for-word record of it. Still, I think it's very important to keep in mind that some of what is written and marketed in our modern age as historical fiction -- Lion Feuchtwanger and Gore Vidal come to mind -- contains more solid reliable information about history, and far fewer egregious historical errors, than much which claims to be nonfictional historical writing.

Livy's history, commonly referred to as ab urbe condita, contained 142 books. "Books" here means much the same as the books of the Bible: a piece of writing which would fit onto a scroll. However, only 35 of those 142 books are known to us today -- books 1-10 and 21-45 -- plus a few fragments and condensations. Altogether, the text of those 35 books and the other surviving scraps add up to a text about as long as that of the canonical Bible, Old plus New Testament, since it seems that all 142 books were similar in length, what we have appears to be about 1/4 of the original work.

An epitome is a short condensed version of a text. Books 48-55 in their complete form, covering topics having to do with the Roman Republic in the mid-2nd century BC, such as the third and final Punic War, topics about which we truly do not have an overabundance of information -- Ah say Ah Say, books 48-55 are at large today, which is the biggest reason why Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 668 is such a big deal. A condensation like this misses a lot of the grand writing style of the original, but still contains many priceless bits of information which can be compared with the few other known bits of historical writing about the time and place. But this great historical value is far from the only reason why this manuscript is important. The manuscript was made in the 3rd century, and any manuscript at all which is that old is of great value because of its age alone. And a 3rd-century Latin manuscript even more so than a Greek one, because, since discoveries at Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere, ancient Greek manuscripts are suddenly much less rare than they were 200 years ago. (In Classical Studies 200 years is sudden.) The great majority of the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus are written in Greek. It's always nice for those of us who specialize in Latin, although we too are mightily excited about all of the Greek manuscripts, when a Latin papyrus like this one is found among the Greek ones. Ancient Oxyrhynchus was in a time and place dominated by writing in Greek. It's just about inconceivable that a comparatively huge collection of ancient mostly-Latin manuscripts will ever be found in one place -- inconceivable even by me, and I daydream very recklessly, believe me. Besides Oxyrhynchus, some other, smaller collections of ancient manuscripts have been found in Egypt: for example, at the above-mentioned Nag Hammadi, and also at Fayum. What these Egyptian sites have in common is the Nile, which provided enough water to sustain cities, but was close enough to regions which were arid enough that papyri, and also some pieces of parchment, could be buried in the ground and left there for thousands of years without being rotted away by moisture, or eaten by little crawling things kept alive by the same moisture.

There is no Nile in the middle of a desert where the main written language was Latin, and that is why there could be no Latin Oxyrhynchus laying around waiting to be excavated, full of ancient Latin manuscripts. There could be huge discoveries of ancient Latin manuscripts, but because of climate, as several papyrologists finally managed very patiently to explain to me, those discoveries would have to be of some different nature.

The 6 Most Important Things In Western Civilization

In chronological order:

1. A garbage dump. The garbage dump outside of Oxyrhynchus, which was a city founded in Egypt after Alexander conquered the area in 332 BC and abandoned after the Arabs conquered it in AD 641. For the nearly 1000 years in between, people lived in Oxyrhynchus and threw garbage into big heaps outside of town. This garbage included papyrus with stuff written on it. Most ancient papyrus with stuff written on it has rotted away long ago, but some has survived because it was put into jars as in the cases of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, or into coffins with dead people, or, in the case of these garbage heaps at Oxyrhyncchus, because the climate just happened to be just exactly right. A huge amount of papyrus was recovered there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A little over 5000 pieces, a small fraction of the total, have been edited and published so far, including many copies of existing and previously-lost Classical Greek texts and a few very important for the study of Classical Latin.

2. Pope Gregory the Great. Important in a bad way: on his watch (he was Pope from 590 to 604) much of Classical literature went missing. In the case one Classical author after another, we have records of their being known, such as quotes or other mentions, up until the late 6th century. Did Gregory intentionally destroy all copies of Livy which came into his grasp? I can't prove that he did, but it doesn't matter. He was far and away the most powerful man of his time. He thought that the End was Near, that Hell was full with the souls of sinners and volcanoes were places were Hell was spilling over, and a lot of Classical literature, and competency in the Greek language, disappeared on his watch. Intent or incompetency, who cares? He's guilty, case closed.

3. Petrarch. Perhaps many of you know him as one of the three first great writers in Italian, along with Dante and Boccaccio, and that's fine and all, but nevermind that because Petrarch, in the 14th century, also started the Renaissance. Many people all along, all through the Dark and Middle Ages, had made heroic efforts to preserve the great literature of ancient Greece and Rome -- mention must be made of Cassadorius, who lived around the same time as Gregory and preserved much of the ancient literature Gregory destroyed either by intent or neglect -- but Petrarch is the greatest of them all. Many of the best manuscripts of ancient Latin literature we have today are copies made by Petrarch.

4. The 19th century. There actually seems to have been an increase, in the 19th century , of the number of people who studied the Classics. Many a 19th-century author writing in a vernacular quoted copiously from the Latin Classics, and didn't bother to translate, assuming that his audience was fluent. A few even assumed the same with Greek.

The recovery of texts in palimpsest, begun in the late 18th century, really got rolling in the 19th, with Cardinal Angelo Mai, librarian of the Vatican, leading the way.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Oxford Classical Texts, begun late in the 19th century. I wonder how many of my non-German readers realize that the Teubner series, begun in the mid-19th century, is what the Oxford Classical Texts want to be when they grow up. The Oxford series is a wonderful thing, but it was begun in conscious imitation of Teubner, and Teubner continues to be the standard, with the largest numbers of titles in print, in volumes of the highest standards of construction.

They really are nice, you should check them out.

5. The Internet. Do you remember how, in the late 20th century, so many people predicted that technology would accelerate the dying-out of the more obscure languages? It has done the opposite. Remember how, in the early days of the Internet, it was predicted that languages not written in Latin letters, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, would be pushed out by technology? They learned how to format those languages, though, didn't they? No change of browser required any longer.

In the case of the Classics, there are wonderful online resources such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the Rheinisches Museum and What's New in Papyrology, to name just a few.

6. The relentless onward march of technology. Like multi-spectral imaging, with which texts on papyri and parchment which had been considered unreadable because of wear and tear, dirt or overwriting suddenly come forth into clear view.

The Library At Ancient Alexandria

I like that movie with Rachel Weisz, I like it a lot,



but it's not a strictly historical documentation, it's a work of imagination. There is no evidence that Hypatia was interested in the theory of heliocentrism. She certainly could have been. But we don't have any evidence of it.

We know for sure, though, that the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia did not happen in the same big riot. In AD 391 the Coptic Pope Theophilus (who was not one of the Roman Catholic Popes, the title "Pope" was used separately by Copts) ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, a pagan temple in Alexandria which may or may not have still contained a part of the great library's collection of manuscripts. No contemporary accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention the library. Hypatia was killed in 415 or 416, and contrary not only to Agora but also to many other films, novels, paintings and pseudo-historical books, she was likely around 60 years old at the time.

The Library might have been gone long before Hypatia was born. It might have been destroyed once, or badly damaged and then restored several times. Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Orosius all claim that Julius Caesar destroyed the library in 48 BC when he was besieging Alexandria and set fires to his own ships and the fire spread first to the docks and then further into the city.

The next major candidate, chronologically, for the destruction of the library is the war in the 270's when the Emperor Aurelian suppressed a revolt led by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. In the course of this war parts of the city which may have contained the library were badly damaged.

Then comes AD 391 and the closing of the Serapeum.

Then there was the Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 642. Several Muslim accounts of that conquest state that the great library was still there when the Muslims arrived, and was destroyed by them. However, the earliest of these accounts was written more than 500 years after the fact.

I think I can sum this up very nicely for you: anyone who says that they know when and how the library at Alexandria was destroyed, is wrong.

I might as well add: anyone who says that they know how big that library was, and how great the culture loss was when it was destroyed, is wrong also. Yes, it's quite reasonable to envision it as a very great and very regrettable loss. But there have been a very great number of losses of ancient Classical literature, occurring over many centuries, from Ireland to India. The cultural loss at Alexandria is just a small part of the overall loss.

But chin up, because some of that stuff is being re-discovered! Most spectacularly in the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus.

"We could not find oxyrhynchus egypt"

"Make sure your search is spelled correctly. Try adding a city, state, or zip code.

"Add oxyrhynchus egypt to Google Maps.

"More Google search results for oxyrhynchus egypt

"Oxyrhynchus (/ɒksɪˈrɪŋkəs/; Greek: Ὀξύρρυγχος Oxýrrhynkhos; "sharp-nosed"; ancient Egyptian Pr-Medjed; Coptic Pemdje; modern Egyptian Arabic el-Bahnasa."

Google Map search result for el-Bahnasa, egypt.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

FIRST AND FOREMOST: MANY PEOPLE SEEM TO BE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT ONLY BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS HAVE BEEN FOUND AT OXYRHYNCHUS. NO. ONE MILLION I SAID ONE MILLION PAPYRI HAVE BEEN FOUND AT OXYRHYNCHUS, AND 5257 HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED SO FAR, OF WHICH ONLY A SMALL FRACTION HAVE BEEN BIBLICAL. THE FINDS, COPIES MADE FROM THE 3RD CENTURY BC TO THE 7TH CENTURY AD, INCLUDE, BESIDES PERSONAL LETTERS, LEGAL DOCUMENTS, SHOPPING LISTS AND OTHER MUNDANE THINGS, HOMER, HESIOD AND MANY OTHER ANCIENT GREEK AUTHORS, LATIN AUTHORS SUCH AS LIVY, VERGIL AND SALLUST, AS WELL AS SOME COPTIC AND ARABIC TEXTS, AND JUST A VERY FEW IN HEBREW, ARAMAIC, SYRIAC AND PAHLAVI. MANY OF THE CLASSICAL GREEK AND LATIN TEXTS FOUND HERE HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN LOST. OXYRHYNCHUS HAS TURNED THE STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE UPSIDE-DOWN IN A VERY, VERY GOOD WAY, AND IT'S ALSO BEEN QUITE NICE, ALTHOUGH IN A MUCH LESS SPECTACULAR WAY, FOR SCHOLARS OF LATIN AND COPTIC AND ARABIC.

SPIEGEL (the German news magazine), yr Datasierung or whatever you call it, the way you make the content of yr back issues available for Internet searches -- it sux!!

I was searching and searching for Ernst Jandl's reaction to winning a literary prize. I think it was the Buechner-Preis, just about the most prestigious and hoity-toity of all German literary prizes. Jandl won that prize about 20 years ago, and since then public opinion has caught up with him a bit. And he's died, which of course is the single best thing any artist can do for the commercial success and critical esteem of his work, but 20 years ago some people were upset that this guy who wrote poems like

lichtung

manche meinen
lechts und rinks
kann man nicht velwechsern
werch ein illtum!

which, take my word for it, is really funny and also a brilliant poem -- people were upset that this weirdo Jewish guy had gotten the Buechner-Preis. (Although they didn't complain publicly a whole lot about the part about him being a Jew.)

And I was searching for that damn SPIEGEL-story announcing Jandl winning some prize, I think it was the Buechner-Preis, wherin it said that his first words upon hearing that he'd won were something like "Ich bin ganz bestuerzt." ("I'm shocked.") or "Ich bin entsetzt." ("I'm apalled.") Whatever is was, it, too, was brilliant, the most brilliant reaction I've heard yet to a person's winning a prestigious award.



And the reason I bring that up is that I would be both shocked and appalled if anyone considered me to be a reliable source of information. Specifically, I worry that I may have given some misinformation about the Oxyrhynchus papyri on this blog.

I corrected one such mistake today: I had written that over 100 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published so far. In fact, volume LXXX was published last year. I think there may be other errors which I didn't find, because years ago I often did a really terrible job of labeling my blog posts. For example, I'm pretty sure I've told people that over 10,000 Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published. In fact, volume LXXX brings the grand total to 5257. Out of about 1,000,000 papyri found at Oxyrhynchus. Some good news is that the publishers have radically reduced the prices of many of those 80 volumes. By how much? By this much: the most recent volumes are selling on Amazon for $170 a pop, but volumes as recent as Volume LXXII, from 2008, are going for $20, brand-ass new.



There are better sources of information about papyri than I. There are the aforementioned 80 volumes containing the texts of the papyri, translations, commentary and photos. Iss a Ding!

GW Schwendner of Wichita State University publishes a stupendous blog called What's New in Papyrology. The blog contains so much information about the current haps in the field, and it's updated so often, that the main problem is just wading through the enormous amount of information. A good problem to have.

The University of Heidelberg has a very impressive papyrology website.

Oxford University is the one that owns the great majority of those 1,000,000 Oxyrhynchus papyri and the one which has published the aforementioned very fine 80 volumes of 5257 papyri since 1898. And don't worry, they've found some ways to speed up the process of editing and publishing those papyri, so that, although much yet remains to be done and publishing everything will take quite a while, it isn't expected to take 15,229 years. They're doing lots of good work on these papyri and are to be highly commended.

They are not to be commended on their Oxyrhynchus papyrii website. It contains a lot of information, including, for example, images of many, perhaps all (the website sucks so hard that it's difficult to be sure) of the 5257 papyri which have been published so far. But that wealth of information is presented very poorly, and the site seems to be updated only every 5 years or so, by a moron. (It needed to be said.)

And to return to my shortcomings: I have a very bad feeling that "papyri" may be misspelled many, many times on this blog, with 2 i's on the end instead of 1: "papyrii" instead of "papyri." I am appalled.

"Bible Hunters" With Dr Jeffrey Rose

I'd rather be writing about a TV series having to do with the manuscripts of Livy, but, of course, there are no such TV series. I suppose I will have to make that series myself. So spread the word about me and talk me up so that I can win that Nobel Prize and have the clout to host TV series on previously-obscure topics which deserve broader audiences, k thnx.

This series is okay, not nearly as dumb as some other TV shows covering the same ground, namely, the discovery of early (6th century and older) manuscripts of the Bible, and of manuscripts of New Testament apocrypha. The host and narrator, Dr Jeffrey Rose, is an archaeologist, and his approach is to follow in the footsteps of some of the 19th and 20th century scholars who made major discoveries of manuscripts -- on one occasion going so far to pay homage to his predecessors and re-create their experience as to ride on a camel with Bedouin guides from Cairo to St Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mt Sinai, where the famous 4th century Codex Sinaiticus was found by the scholar Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844, and where many other significant Biblical manuscripts have been found since. Besides the camel ride, Dr Rose's journey's to various Egyptian locations are mostly portrayed by shots of him riding various motorcycles. Larry Hurtado has written 2 excellent blog posts about this series, and in his post on Part 1 he asks the very good question:

Quite why the presenter was filmed motorcycling around places in Egypt, I can’t say. Couldn’t he have simply ridden in the car with the camera-guy . . . who was filming him riding a motorcycle??

I can only hope that it was, as Dr Hurtado surmises, a guy in a car, if not an entire film crew in a van, and not something dangerous like a cameraman filming from the back seat of a 2nd motorcycle, or something even more dangerous, like a cameraman riding a motorcycle solo and filming at the same time. Most likely, of course, it was a cameraman in a car or a whole crew in a van.

And who filmed Dr Rose and his Bedouin guides on their camels -- a lone cameraman on a camel? I'm picturing something much more like a van with a film crew and a well-stocked fridge, just in case Dr Rose -- or the Bedouins, for that matter -- preferred a sandwich or a TV dinner to the bread which the Bedouins cooked on hot rocks and which Rose exclaimed was delicious and "cooked to perfection!" I know that I'm old and out of touch and that technological development keeps racing along, but the images and sound on the road trips were impressive. If a lone camera did that, then I want a camera like that.

Why so many documentaries continue to cling to the practice of presenting the illusion of the intrepid host exploring the world all alone, and cut out any interaction with the camera person and/or crew, I don't know. They should stop. It's as corny as laugh tracks on sitcoms. Wake up and smell the 21st century, documentarians: we're on to you!

Other than that run-of-the-mill technical documentary stuff, "Bible Hunters" is refreshingly free of the huge wince-inducing historical and technical errors of which the typical shows on these texts from the so-called "History Channel" are jam-packed, and of which even most shows from PBS or the BBC or the Smithsonian Channel have a few. ("Bible Hunters" first appeared on the BBC a few years ago, and now it's appearing in the US on the Smithsonian Channel -- in the same form in which it appeared on the BBC, with nothing cut out or added? Good question. I have no idea.)

[PS, 6 June 2016: There is one fairly serious error repeatedly committed by Rose on this show: he often says "text" when he should be saying "manuscript." A text is a series of words, whatever form they are recorded in. For example, "Mary had a little lamb" is exactly the same text whether it is spoken aloud, written on paper or carved into stone. Dr Rose refers to people discovering texts when they discovered manuscripts. If it's a manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew, then the text is already known. A discovery of a text occurs when some previously-unknown collection of words is discovered. And the date of the text is when it was first composed, which, in the case of Biblical and apocryphal texts, has always been different than the date of the manuscript. So for example Rose makes the mistake of referring to "a six-century text" when he should have said " six-century manuscript of a second-century text," if the manuscript is a copy of something first written in the 2nd century. Other than "text' and "manuscript, I didn't notice any technical errors in the show.]

In his post on Part 2 of the series (as it appeared on the BBC), Dr Hurtado says:

I have to say that I found it strange that some really crucial (arguably more important) manuscripts finds were totally ignored.

I agree that it's arguable that Rose left some of the most important manuscripts out of the program. But the series is only a few hours long, and with a series like that, choices have to be made about which finds to include and how long to dwell upon each one. Clearly, Rose loves Egypt. "Bible Hunters" confines itself to Biblical manuscript discoveries made in Egypt (which are huge in the scheme of all such discoveries, to be fair to Rose). If you're curious about the important manuscripts which were left out by the show, by all means follow the link to Dr Hurtado's blog, he gives you a very good overview.

And of course, once again -- if you're into non-Christian ancient literature, you're left totally out in the cold by this series, just as you're left out in the cold by every other series on the great finds of Biblical manuscripts. Dr Rose's show covers Oxyrhynchus, both by commenting on Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt and the huge amount of papyrus fragments they found there,



and also with footage of Rose interviewing Dr Dirk Obbink, the current head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Project, and Obbink showing Rose around the still-active Oxyrhynchus dig sites -- but the show doesn't contain as much as a half-dozen words about the non-Biblical texts found at Oxyrhychus, which have turned the world of Classical Greek studies upside down, and also had a not inconsiderable impact on the world of Classical Latin, and also included priceless treasures for those interested in everyday life in Ptolomaic and Roman Egypt: personal letters, legal documents, shopping lists and so forth -- things which had been almost entirely lacking from the sources available to historians before Grenfell and Hunt thought to look through the ancient trash heaps at Oxyrhynchus. Rose shows the libraries of Egyptian monasteries, but doesn't mention any of the Classical texts in those libraries -- and most of the Classical Greek and Latin literature we have today comes from manuscripts made in Christian monasteries.

And this show says almost exactly squat about all of the Old Testament manuscripts in all of the places Rose goes. Again, that's pretty typical about TV shows about ancient manuscripts: it's pretty much all about Jeebus.

A Spy in the House of Hate

Anaïs Nin referred to herself as a spy in the house of love: she was caught up in a sexual revolution, but far from being its advocate, she found it all a bit silly.

I'm interested in archaeology, and so I find myself getting caught up in arguments between Jews, Muslims and many others who take one side or the other and draw political conclusions from archaeological finds, supporting contemporary hatreds with their interpretations of artifacts thousands of years old. Which I find more than a little bit silly. I'd like to just study the artifacts and learn. I wonder how many of the people weighing in on Tel Dan or Qumran or Khirbet Qeiyafa would have one thing to say about them if they didn't have any opinions about Middle Eastern politics today.

Romans stole huge chunks of Greek mythology, but as far as I know Italians and Greeks are not fighting over that today, nor are hateful blockheads the world over, purporting to support one side or the other, hurling political invective at each other mixed with superficial knowledge of finds at Paestum or Troy. Would that be different if Graeco-Roman religion were as alive today the world over as the Abrahamic religions? More to the point, of course, would a nice bookish fellow such as myself be able to discuss Tel Dan or Khirbet Qeiyafa without being interrupted by haters if the Abrahamic religions were as dead as the cults of Olympus? I just want to understand what happened thousands of years ago when I examine such things, not contribute to madness which is seething today.

Anyway, the nuts are doing a fine job of ruining a discussion of Khirbet Qeiyafa for me today. They don't eff things up when the topic is Oxyrhynchus. On the other hand, out here so far from academia where I live, the topic very rarely is Oxyrhynchus. I generally just study the papyri on my own. I hope it doesn't stay that way.

Proof

The atheist community has grown much more visible and audible in the past few years. I don't know whether it would be accurate to say that it has actually grown considerably. Over and over one hears from people who had been atheist for a long time, but never spoke up about it, and felt alone. Then came Richard Dawkins.I know that it's customary to mention a couple of other famous authors along with Dawkins, but I don't feel like it. I think those other guys are a bit silly, especially the younger one with his warmed-over Utilitarianismand his spirituality, and I also think that the other guys are basically riding in Dawkins' wake, that Dawkins is still the only "new" atheist who is both an intellectual heavyweight, and popular. [PS, 29. November 2015: Unfortunately, I had not read any of Dawkins' atheistic writing before I wrote this, and I simply assumed, based on having read some of his work on biology, that his writing on religion would be just as good. In the meantime I've read some of his writing on religion, and there's nothing remotely heavyweight about any of it. Sorry.]

As with any group with mass visibility, there are some dopes among the suddenly-visible large mass of atheists. These include a few popular authors and many simple-minded people repeating memes such as that the Old Testament was written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds [PS, 13. December 2016: When I first posted this, in 2010, I didn't realize that it was Dawkins himself who had started the "Bronze Age Goat herders" meme. (I don't know whether Dawkins has ever actually asserted that the Bible was written by illiterates.)], (This meme is morphing from Broze Age to Neolithic and even Paeleolithic.) and, for example, the certainty that Jesus never existed. That last meme even has a couple of very popular websites all to itself.

People on all sides -- not all of them, just the dumb ones, but Lord there are a lot of dumb ones on all sides -- seem to come to conclusions about ancient history based on metaphysical preconceptions. They believe in God, they were raised Christian, and so they believe that Jesus existed. Or they don't believe in God, they were raised atheist, or, very often, they had unhappy Christian childhoods, and so they believe Jesus never existed. Each side repeats its talking points ad nauseum and does not investigate the matter, and also does not examine the soundness of its talking points. I often quarrel with the other atheists just because I feel a sort of duty to try to clean up our side of the street. What's the point of rejecting all that traditional religious dogma only to embrace a whole cartload of equally-unsound, equally-unexamined atheist myth? "If Jesus existed, why didn't any ancient authors write about him?" Well, Sparky, some ancient authors did write about him. The writings of some of them are referred to as the New Testament, those of some others are called New Testament apochrypha. "Okay, but they were all believers. Why don't we have any eyewitness accounts of him from non-Christian authors?" Do you think there were several daily newspapers in Jerusalem back then, and that every day's news is preserved on microfilm? so that we can go through all the records of the crucifixions and palm-frond-covered donkey parades? There was next to no non-Christian historical record of Pontius Pilate, the governor of the whole province, until an inscription was unearthed a few decades ago which makes it seem like that, yeah, Pilate did exist. That's the governor of the whole province. If you think that it's somehow suspicious that there's no surviving official record of the arrest, trial or execution of a convicted traitor who had all of twelve, count 'em twelve followers, you don't know much about the state of our knowledge of things in Judea 2,000 years ago.

"Well, the existence or non-existence of Jesus can never be proven anyway, so why bother to even look into such ancient matters?" Let me take the second part first. Why? Because milk has no bones. That's why. And as to the first part, to assert that it could never be proven that a Jesus of Nazareth was a wandering preacher who was executed for treason on Pilate's orders reveals ignorance of how much our knowledge of the ancient world around the Mediterranean, and east of there, is increasing. I mentioned that inscription they found a few decades ago mentioning Pilate. One example of a huge amount of finds since the late 19th century which continue to expand our knowledge. There are the Dead Sea Scrolls.There is the Nag Hammadi library.There are the Oxyrhynchus Papyri,about 100 volumes of them published so far and still going. [CORRECTION, 18. July 2015: 80 volumes and counting, as of 2014, containing 5253 papyri] Not to mention Menander,the ancient Greek author of comic plays, of whose work before the 20th century we possessed only fragments, brief quotations in the work of other authors, and now, BOOM! chaka-laka-laka we've got several nearly-complete plays. Just a few of the highlights from the list of manymany ancient things archaeologists keep digging up and deciphering between Morocco and Afghanistan. It's not impossible that proof of Jesus' existence could be found. Yes, many phony non-proofs have been foisted, the most recent being the notorious "James ossuary" publicized by that awful man who's not really an archaeologist but makes a jackass of himself on TV. But the fakes are no indication that real proof could never be found.

What would be real proof? Well, for example, a letter by Pilate to a friend could do the trick. "I had a strange day today. The Sanhedrin brought me a man, Jesus, from Nazareth, a village to the north of here in Herod's territory, who seemed as harmless as a newborn puppy, but they insisted that he was very dangerous. I spoke to him personally because I gathered that, although from a family of commoners, he was fluent in several languages, an unusual combination in these parts. I greeted him in my rusty Aramaic, he responded in very polished Greek and Latin and offered to converse with me in whatever language I wished. And so we conversed in Greek. As gentle as a lamb, and he spoke no overt treason, just religious tales of symbolic dreams and a world other than the Earth. I was charmed by him and gave him several opportunities to contest the charges against him, of blasphemy against his own people and treason against ours, and yet he refused to say the few words which would have released him from suspicion. I truly think he wanted to be executed, the poor strange fool. To be some sort of sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. I gave him one more chance: one of the local people's holy days is approaching. Four criminals, including this Jesus, were awaiting execution. I called for the city's people to gather before the prison, had the four condemned men led before them and said that in honor of the upcoming holy day, one of these men, whomever they chose, would be pardoned and freed. The rabble chose a murderer and screamed for the blood of this Jesus. Strange. And so Jesus was nailed to a cross. I gather he's dead already, after just a few hours. Usually men last a day or longer on the cross. A strange and melancholy day."

I have no doubt that some such letters have already been faked. That doesn't mean that a real one will never be found. And of course it wouldn't have to include all the details of my imaginary letter. One fraction of all of that would suffice to turn ancient history all topsy-turvy, if found in a letter proven to be genuine.

And to me such a thing would be great, not because I tie metaphysical preconceptions to ideas of history, but because I don't. And also because the Jesus-never-existed crowd really annoys me. Such a find would please me greatly out of sheer spite for them. My esprit de corps with other atheists does not outweigh my dislike of stupidity. On the contrary, my atheism is but a subset of my disdain for stupidity. My atheism isn't so fragile that such a thing as a genuine letter from Pilate confirming Jesus' existence would ruffle it in the least.