The First-Century Scribal Setting

Abstract

When scribes first began copying Christian works, the Greek scribal tradition in which they participated allowed for very little in the way of readers’ aids, such as spaces, punctuation, and paragraph or chapter divisions. Even a vocabulary for textual division hardly existed. Yet our earliest Christian manuscripts, particularly Scriptural ones, display various scribal techniques of articulating a text. Chapter 1 outlines the Greek, the Latin, and the Jewish traditions of textual articulation in the first century. It concludes, against often prevailing views, that (a), the same features that occur in early Christian manuscripts are slowly making their way into copies of Greek and Latin literary works at the same time, and (b), Christian practices of textual division owe much less to Greek ‘non-literary’ prototypes and much more to Jewish literary ones, and particularly to Jewish copies of Scriptural books, both in Hebrew and in Greek.