Early Christian Books in Egypt by Roger S. Bagnall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 159 Early Christian Books in Egypt. By Roger S. Bagnall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN:978-0-691-14026-1. Pp. xiii + 109. $29.95. When I took my MA exams in Comparative Literature & Classics, as I was translating a text from Greek, now long-forgotten, my professor came into the room and asked how I was doing. I told him, "Fine;' except for one troublesome line, and pointed at it. He said, "Have you looked in the sewer?" I had no idea what he meant until he pointed to the apparatus criticus at the bottom of the page. Ah, I was caught in a skirmish in the internecine conflict between the department's textual critics and its literary types, a war that, sadly, devoured mostly graduate students. Early Christian Books in Egypt, however, shows how false the dichotomy is between seemingly humble subjects like ancient books and papyrus fragments and grand and lofty-and capitalized-subjects like Early Egyptian Christianity or Roman Egypt. Without the former, the latter can get detached and float into the ether like brightly-colored balloons. My notes for reviewing this slim volume seem to have ended up as long as the book itself. That of course is hyperbole, but it does make the point that in relatively few pages Roger Bagnall packs quite a scholarly punch. The book's four chapters correspond to four lectures that Bagnall "was privileged to deliver at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes" in May 2006: "The Dating of the Earliest Christian Books in Egypt" (I), "Two Case Studies" (II), "The Economics of Book Production" (III) and "The Spread of the Codex" (IV). The volume's title suggests that the book will be accessible to both scholars and general readers with an interest in books, early Christianity, and / or Late Antique Egypt, and by and large it is. There are occasional for-specialists-only passages that seem to have more numbers than letters on the page, and some scholarly fisticuffs do occur: one scholar's argument, Bagnall concludes, "is a kind of burlesque of a normal scholarly presentation, just as his book is a parody of a work of academic popularization" (48). Ouch. The number of interesting, fascinating, and even provocative discussions, however, more than makes up for them. Because of this, I will get two criticisms out of the way first. In the larger scope of the volume, they may be quibbles anyway. In the Preface, Bagnall advises the reader that he has "chosen to preserve the character of the lectures by keeping the bibliographic apparatus to a minimum" (xii), In his discussion of Chester Beatty Papyrus VII, which has "probably the earliest text that might be called truly Coptic;' Bagnall cites the great Coptologist Walter Crum, whose words on this codex "should cause even the boldest of us to tremble" (66). In the world of scholarship, that frisson is as tantalizing as a captivating movie trailer; I want to see that movie. Bagnall then details three "crucial observations by Crum" -but unfortunately he does not footnote this discussion nor is Crum listed in the bibliography. 160 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE A more important problem is that the author succumbs, briefly, to the Humanities' science envy. Bagnall speaks of "the scientific community" which, in context, means scholars of paleography (49). But paleography is not science in the sense of repeatable and reproducible experimentation. And that's OK. Later, he states that the "so-called Theban magical library" offers something "like a controlled experiment" (83). The simile here does nuance Bagnall's scientificsounding statement, but in light of his previous assumption that paleography is science, there is still unease. This is unfortunate, because Bagnall's own thoughtful, diligently researched, and carefully argued presentation is not-thank goodnessscientific ; it is humanistic scholarship at its best, utilizing and synthesizing a wide number of disciplines, lucidly written. Bagnall displays his holistic approach at the outset; he's written this book, he says,because of his "unease with what I see as the excessivelyself-enclosed character and absence of self-awareness of much" paleographic scholarship. Because of this hermeticism, Bagnall says, some of its practitioners have reached conclusions that he believes...