Brent Nongbri Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Were Cut and Paste Jobs Common in Antiquity? Guest Post by Brent Nongbri

I have been talking about 2 Corinthians and Philippians, both of which may well represent instances in which earlier letters were cut and pasted together. A number of readers of the blog have asked me if this kind of thing was ever/often done in the ancient world. As it turns out, one of the blog members is an established New Testament scholar, Brent Nongbri (PhD from Yale; visiting associate professor at Aarhus University), who is interested in this kind of question. (He's also the author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts.) Unsolicited, he sent me the following note: asking and then answering the question, with a link to a fuller study. These are his words: *********************************************************************************** “Do we know whether or not this kind of editing was a common practice during the first three centuries?” I had this very question a few years ago, specifically regarding 2 Corinthians. I’ve read a lot of ancient letters, and I had never really seen like [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-26T13:41:22-04:00January 9th, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

Guest Post – Brent Nongbri on Manuscript Discoveries

Today we have a guest post – another one from Brent Nongbri, who, if you remember, did his PhD in New Testament at Yale and is currently an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Fellow in the Department of Ancient History at MacQuarie University in Sydney Australia. He is one of the leading researchers on ancient manuscripts in the world, and among his other many fine virtues, is a member of the blog. He's also the author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. You may recall that I raised the question a week or ten days ago about why archaeologists don’t set out to find manuscripts any more, the way Grenfell and Hunt did in the late 1890s, leading to the spectacular discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a trash heap outside of the city of Oxyrhynchus, a discovery that was so massive that scholars are still publishing the uncovered papyri today. Brent has the answer. Here’s what he has to say. [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-26T13:41:03-04:00June 28th, 2015|Public Forum|

GUEST POST! Dr. Brent Nongbri on How We Date Manuscripts

One of the people we are lucky to have as a member of the blog is Dr. Brent Nongbri, who did his Ph.D. at Yale in 2008 and who is now a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University (see here). Among other things, Brent is one of the most knowledgeable and productive scholars working in the field of paleography – the discipline that deals with the dating of ancient manuscripts. He has been following this discussion of a possible first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, and to my great appreciation has agreed to do a GUEST POST for us all, on an area many of us are very interested in. How would we know the first-century manuscript if we saw one??? Here is his succinct and lucid summary of how scholars date ancient manuscripts, from a leading authority, in his own words. Many thanks, Brent! Brent Nongbri - How We Date Manuscripts Brent Nongbri’s most popular books are Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-07T20:20:09-04:00February 1st, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

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Were Cut and Paste Jobs Common in Antiquity? Guest Post by Brent Nongbri

Guest Post – Brent Nongbri on Manuscript Discoveries

GUEST POST! Dr. Brent Nongbri on How We Date Manuscripts