Category Archives: Manuscripts

Blogger Spotlight: Liv Ingeborg Lied on 4 Ezra

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Blogger Spotlight is a feature on the Women Biblical Scholars site that highlights women scholars who have their own blogs. One of their posts is selected for republication here to draw awareness to their blog. Today’s Blogger Spotlight is on Dr. Liv Ingeborg Lied, professor of religious studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology. Check out her blog, Religion – Manuscripts -Media Culture , for more of her writing.

Two Forgotten Sources of 4 Ezra

By Liv Ingeborg Lied

In the last few years, I have mentioned on two occasions manuscript witnesses to 4 Ezra that have apparently been left out of scholarly discussions focusing on this writing. In this post, I propose two possible reasons for this omission, and discuss why these manuscript sources to 4 Ezra deserve our attention. My interest here is not the decisions made by individual scholars, but rather the assessment schemes embedded in philological paradigms and the structuring effects of disciplinary borders to research practices.

My first example, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) Supplément turc 983, f 113/126, containing Syriac 4 Ezra 8:33-41a/8:41c-47, was discussed in the post “Recycling 4 Ezra” (12 February 2014) (here). As noted in that post, this single parchment leaf was published in 1993 by Bernard Outtier in the article, “Un fragment syriaque inédit de IV Esdras”. The leaf has been dated paleographically to the sixth century (Outtier) and also to the eighth to ninth centuries, by Franҫoise Briquel Chatonnet (“Manuscrits syriaque de la Bibliothèque nationale de France” […], 185). As I mentioned in the 2014 post, the fragment has played no role in the scholarly discussion of 4 Ezra.  More→

Do You Know Where That Papyri Came From? Dr. Mazza on The Problem of Unknown Provenance

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In the brief video below, Dr. Roberta Mazza addresses whether or not scholars should publish materials that don’t have reliable acquisition data, including papyri of apparent biblical texts. She raises important questions such as:

What do we mean through the term ‘provenance’? What kind of information scholars need to access when collections or collectors ask them to publish an ancient manuscript or piece of art? Should we be guided by the law or ethic when making decisions? What should academics do in case they discover that a papyrus fragment or a Greek vase has a doubtful acquisition history? If we don’t publish, where such material will end up?

Dr. Mazza is lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester, as well as a Research Fellow of the John Rylands Research Institute and honorary academic curator of the Graeco-Roman Egypt collection of the Manchester Museum. She blogs at Faces and Voices.