Antiquity

Antiquity: 

The oldest known physical witness to any part of the biblical text dates between the second century BCE and the first century CE. Re-discovered in the mid 1940's in the Qumran Caves by the Dead Sea in the Judaean Desert, many of these texts were originally written on parchment and glued together in long sheets that formed scrolls. Today, despite archeologists and Bedouin having found over 900 'Bible' related textual fragments--including portions of all of the 'books' now found in the Hebrew Bible, except Esther--much of this evidence is fragmentary in nature and does not align precisely with what is now found within the Hebrew Bible. Instead, as scholars such as Eva Mroczek have argued, the physical forms of 'bible' found among the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the scriptural imagination in Jewish antiquity was more fluid than fixed.  

While both ancient Jews and early Christians initially utilized scrolls in their scriptural production, once the technology to create codices became available, by the second century CE the codex started to gain popularity among Christians and, by the fifth century CE, it completely overtook the scroll in Christian communities as the principal means of writing sacred texts. Many of the earliest dating fragments of papyrus codices related to the New Testament were found Egypt in the mid-twentieth century. 

As a part of the class, students create their own single-quire codices. Later, they take a field trip to the University of Michigan's Papyrology Collection to view portions of one of the earliest dating bible-related papyrus codices, the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, officially known as Papyrus 46 (P46). P46 likely dates to the early third-century CE. Discovered in Egypt in the mid twentieth century, P46 contains portions of the letters of the apostle Paul.  

For more information about (and images of) the 'Bible-related' items that students view during their a class visit to the University of Michigan's Papyrology Collection, click on the links below.