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This chapter focuses on how the stories of Eve, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and other more minor New Testament female characters came to be rewritten in the process of copying. Storytelling is an important feature of early Christianity and stories about women became vehicles for transmitting nascent Christian ideology and ethics; likewise, the textual modification of these stories suggests that debates about women and their roles in the early churches made their way into the very processes of textual reproduction.

The focus of this chapter is the figure of Thecla, a female character who has seen significant scholarly attention in recent years. How does the textual transmission of the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla come to rewrite and refashion the figure of Thecla? And how does Thecla come to be associated with books in literature and art? These questions are at the forefront of the chapter.

As scholars explore the state of the early New Testament text, the inductive study of the extant manuscripts we possess is the natural place to begin. However, there are also other lines of potentially fruitful inquiry. One area that has been largely overlooked is the attitude toward that text that is actually expressed by Christians in the earliest literary sources, i.e. statements about how they viewed their sacred writings, how they understood the transmission and preservation of these texts, and how they would have responded to changes or alterations in the text. It is important that we consider such historical testimony not only because it often antedates the papyri and even many patristic citations, but because it establishes a critical historical context for our overall understanding of textual transmission in the earliest stages of Christianity.

This introductory chapter discusses briefly the history of the study of Egyptian literature, highlighting how broader developments in the theory of literature have come to be applied within Egyptology, and outlining the significant interpretative issues that still remain. This is particularly acute when studying a civilisation such as Ancient Egypt, with an only fragmentarily preserved literate culture, and no continuous tradition of reception to condition modern engagement with the ancient texts. The chapter reviews the approaches taken by contributors to the volume, and evaluates how they relate to recent developments in the application of theoretically informed approaches to Egyptian texts. The range of topics covered demonstrates the vitality and diversity of current Egyptological engagement with Ancient Egyptian texts.

The chapter deals with questions of the textual transmission of the Book of Revelation. It describes traces of the text’s problematic route into the canon of the New Testament, and gives an overview of its textual situation. After an introduction to J. Schmid’s assessment of the textual history of Revelation, it discusses the problem of quotations of Revelation by early Christian authors and, finally, describes some of the oldest witnesses to the text of Revelation. Finally, it raises several questions regarding Schmid’s theory of Revelation’s textual history.

This chapter discusses aspects of Egyptian ‘fine literature’ (belles-lettres), and combines general literary and cultural-scientific theoretical considerations with specific case studies from both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian literature. It addresses questions of form and function, producers and recipients, as well as discussing the search for empirical readers. Also discussed are the question of original manuscripts and the potential significance of writing errors.

This chapter surveys linguistic regularities in Beowulf in order to gauge the extent to which the poem’s text might have been altered during its transmission. For the literary critics and cultural historians who constitute the majority of scholars interested in Beowulf, no question pertaining to textual transmission is more consequential than that of the poem’s unity. The same metrical features that establish Beowulf as an archaic composition also provide firm indications that the poem is a unitary composition transmitted with minimal scribal interference. In addition, direct examination of the linguistic evidence is the most reliable method for determining the relative probability of competing hypotheses concerning the unity of Beowulf.

Religious Women showed how the books produced by the scriptoria of Karlburg and Kitzingen reflected the feminist consciousness of both communities by defending consecrated women’s integration into intellectual, cultural, political, and religious life. This chapter argues that there existed a textual transmission network that wove together women’s communities and facilitated their acquisition of favorable writings. It also addresses the varied roles played by men both as supporters and opponents of feminist aspirations. The chapter includes an analysis of Würzburg Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.q. 26, an eighth-century codex from the Kitzingen library collection containing a sophisticated “Veri Amoris” libellus whose scribe-author benefited from a feminist transmission network. She forged together an abridged cento of Apponius’s commentary on the Song of Songs, Jerome’s vita Malchi, Jerome’s letter to Heliodorus, the transitus of John the Evangelist by Pseudo-Mellitus, and a vita of Euphrosyna, a female transvestite saint. This booklet used holy syneisactic couples to embody the “true love” recommended by Jerome and celebrated in the Song of Songs, and thus to justify a gender-integrated approach to the ecclesiastical sphere.

Prior to the great fourth-century uncials, seven manuscripts of Acts survive: six papyri and one parchment fragment. All are fragmentary and only cover a small amount of the text: hence any discussion of their text form must be hedged with caution. Each text is here examined in detail. The fragments show some variety: at least one (P³⁸) shows strong affinities with a ‘Western’ form of the text (although in an apparently fairly ‘free’ form), whilst the parchment fragment 0189 shows very close agreement with the text of B. There seems little evidence at this stage to correct the detailed wording of the text, perhaps reflecting an early period in the canonization process when the sense, rather than the detailed wording, was the most important factor.

In the quest for the form of the NT text in the second century, some scholars have appealed to the corpus of writings we call the Apostolic Fathers. However, the loose citation techniques of the Apostolic Fathers, combined with the fact that we have no extant manuscripts of these writings from the second century, suggests they provide no conclusive evidence of the state of the NT text during this critical time period. For this reason, the writings of the Apostolic Fathers get us no closer to reconstructing that text than the actual extant manuscripts of the third and fourth centuries. In fact, the complications surrounding NT citations in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers may confuse, rather than clarify this endeavour.

This chapter examines the complicated textual tradition and transmission of the History, focusing on the two main versions in which the text has survived, the b(revior) and the a(uctior), and describing their differences on the level of style, content, and purpose through a selection of representative examples. It also investigates the transmission of the History, its potential audience, and its use by later writers.

This chapter is an analysis of all the distinctive readings in the seven Catholic Letters found in extant witnesses dating from before the mid-fourth century. The readings of eight papyri and one majuscule are itemized and discussed seriatim with particular attention paid to the Editio critica maior.

This chapter introduces the method of revision through introduction. In the process of recasting their received material, ancient Near Eastern scribes often added new content to the front. This is attested in hard evidence from Mesopotamia and in inconsistencies that are present in the final form of many biblical texts. These additions, even the most transformative ones, did not require the rest of the work to be rewritten in line with the new contribution. Rather, the introduction itself could carry the burden of transforming the reception of the older work. This chapter provides surveys of the transmission of both Mesopotamian and Hebrew/biblical literature, and highlights key studies on revision within Assyriology and biblical studies. It closes with some remarks about the terms, aims, and methodologies that are used throughout the book.

The paucity of manuscripts, alongside the relative absence of information about the text of Mark in the early period, is something that distinguishes the text of Mark from that of the other three canonical gospels. The only pre-fourth century manuscript of Mark is P45. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that our fourth-century witnesses represent copies of a well preserved early text of Mark, and that the more free forms of the text (such as P45) could be derived from such a text.

This chapter explores the other literary works to which Revelation is juxtaposed in the codices that preserve it, focusing both on the macro-structural composition of these artefacts and the way that the different sub-corpora are treated in terms of their consistency, discontinuity, and paratextual emphasis. It analyses the larger bibliographic composition of the manuscripts that preserve copies of the book of Revelation, identifying two concurrent streams of Revelation’s transmission—the canonical and the eclectic. The internal variety within each of these streams is a reality that undermines conceptions of Revelation’s place as the ‘last book of the New Testament canon’ supported by the famous fourth and fifth century pandect manuscripts. Revelation’s transmission is defined in large part by the many non-biblical works transmitted alongside it.