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Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice. By Alan Mugridge. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 362. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016, xx + 558 pp., €159.00.
Copying Early Christian Texts is the published version of Alan Mugridge's 2010 Ph.D. thesis from the University of New England (New South Wales). According to Mugridge, the research tests the common assumption "that most Christian texts were produced 'in house' by Christian copyists who were mostly unskilled" (p. vii). Mugridge has compiled and processed mountains of papyrological data to discover whether this assumption is true, resulting in a work that is highly technical but supremely informative.
The foundation of Mugridge's analysis consists of 548 manuscripts, or more specifically, 548 catalogue entries of manuscripts. These 548 entries are divided into two data sets, each of which is subdivided into groups. Of the "Christian papyri," there are: OT texts (Group A); NT texts (B); "apocryphal" texts (C); patristic texts (D); hagiographic texts (E); liturgical hymns, prayers, etc. (F); Gnostic and Manichaean texts (I); and unidentified Christian texts (J). For comparison, Mugridge also includes in his study five groups of "non-Christian papyri": amulets (Group G); magical texts (H); Jewish OT texts (K1); other Jewish texts (K2); and school texts (L). Mugridge frequently refers to collections of manuscripts by their group designation. Some individual manuscripts have multiple entries. Codex Sinaiticus, for example, is 12 in Group A (OT texts), 150 in Group B (NT texts), and because it contains the Epistle of Barnabas and Shepherd of Hermas, 302 in Group D (patristic texts).
Mugridge uses three criteria to classify the scribal hand of each manuscript. These are "irregularity in letter shape, size and placement," whether a scribe can write in a straight line horizontally, and whether or not a scribe used a more formal "book hand' as opposed to a less formal documentary hand (p. 21). Depending on the degree to which the scribe succeeds or fails with respect to these criteria, Mugridge places the manuscript in one of three categories: Category 1 (and 1-), a professional, calligraphic hand; Category 2 (and 2-, 2+), a professional hand that is "'secretarial' or 'plain'"; and Category 3 (and 3+), "non-professional, the hand of an occasional writer, not a trained scribe" (p....