This is a deeply researched, well-written, and highly informative book—a must-read for anyone with an interest in early Christian manuscripts. It will serve as a cold shower for text-critics, papyrologists, paleographers, and codicologists and should be of interest even to historians of early Christian literature. Nongbri provides a critical review and evaluation of the discoveries of early Christian papyri in Egypt from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. He does so with admirable skill, displaying a close acquaintance with the manuscripts themselves, a remarkable range of bibliographical research, and carefully formed judgments.

The study begins with a discussion of the construction and inscription of the codex as the characteristic form of the early Christian book (chapter 1), a consideration of the difficulty of dating ancient manuscripts by paleography (chapter 2), and an overview of archaeological manuscript finds in Egypt and their various sites (chapter 3). Having laid this groundwork, Nongbri proceeds to discuss specific manuscript finds. In the central chapters, he reviews in careful detail three principal corpora of early Christian manuscripts: the Chester Beatty papyri (chapter 4), the Bodmer papyri (chapter 5), and the Christian papyri from Oxyrhynchus (chapter 6). For each he discusses available information about the discovery, the problem of provenance, the contents of the find, and the papyri themselves. A concluding chapter (chapter 7) comprises a systematic dismantling of recent claims that several papyri (numbers 4, 64, and 67) are the remains of a second-century codex of the four Gospels.

With this study, Nongbri demonstrates how disconcertingly slight and tenuous our knowledge about early Christian manuscripts is. The limitations on our evaluation of them begin with their discovery, which was usually haphazard and poorly documented. Absent the care, control, and correlative data that belong to modern scientific archaeological methods, the provenance and context of the manuscripts are usually very uncertain. The specific sites of the discoveries—whether graves, caves, buildings, trash heaps, or monastic dwellings—are often unknown and sometimes are altogether fabricated. These problems are compounded by the Egyptian antiquities market, in which dealers rarely receive or maintain a find intact and are anxious to separate or combine and to represent materials in ways that will command the highest prices. Dispersals of finds to various holders make it difficult to determine what items originally belonged together. Once available for scholarly evaluation, manuscripts are often subject to mischaracterizations and predispositions toward early dating.

Nongbri provides a sobering assessment of paleographical dating. If paleography is sometimes described as an art rather than a science, it is correspondingly inexact. Hence, if paleography “when practiced in a disciplined manner involving close comparison with securely dated examples of handwriting, can establish a range of possible dates for an undated literary manuscript, it can never be conclusive. Paleographic comparison is by its very nature a subjective undertaking, and oftentimes, especially when early Christian manuscripts are concerned, paleographic dating can devolve into little more than an exercise in wishful thinking” (72). Radiocarbon dating provides harder data but only in ranges of years and probabilities. Also, most institutional holders will not submit manuscripts to radiocarbon dating, whether because of non-destruction policies (small bits of material would be lost) or for fear of finding that the manuscript in question was not as early or as valuable as previously surmised.

In all, Nongbri calls for far greater care in the evaluation of early Christian manuscripts and far greater restraint in the claims made about them and on the basis of them. His detailed stocktaking of manuscript discoveries, of the many problems attendant on them, and of the numerous resulting uncertainties provides ample reason for the more scrupulous approach to these materials that he recommends.