Looking at an Ancient Apologetic Text
How did the works of early apologists actually look when they were first written and copied?
Right now, I am in the manuscript room at the British Library in London, examining one of the earliest fragments of the Apologia of Aristides of Athens. This Greek manuscript (Papyrus 2486 / P. Lond. Lit 223) is from the third or fourth century, a century or two after the time of Aristides. Although handwriting styles certainly did change over time—that is, after all, one of the key ways that dates are assigned to many manuscripts!—the words in this text probably don’t look radically different from the words that Aristides or a scribe originally wrote in the second century.
Even if you don’t know Greek, there are at least a couple of features in the text that you can notice and appreciate—so let’s take a look at those together!
A Look at Ancient Christian Abbreviations
First off, the fragment includes nomina sacra, abbreviations of sacred names and titles.
In the picture below, can you see KC O ΘC near the center, with lines drawn on top of the KC and the ΘC?
KC abbreviates “KYPIOC” (kyrios) the Greek word for “Lord”; ΘC stands for “ΘEOC” (theos) which means “God.” Christians didn’t invent abbreviations of this sort, but this particular pattern of nomina sacra is characteristically Christian.
These words in the Greek text of Apologia 15 are part of a clause that may be literally translated “honestly and justly living even as Lord the God to-them commanded.”
A Manuscript Written on River Reeds
Something else you might find interesting is the material on which the words are written. These words were written on papyrus. Papyrus is a reed that grows in marshy areas (Job 8:11); each plant is about fifteen feet tall and as thick as your wrist.
In ancient times, the tissue inside the papyrus plant (the “pith”) was separated from the stiffer outer part of the reed and formed into a writing material.
“Paper is made from papyrus,” the Roman philosopher Pliny explained, “by using needlepoints to separate it into thin strips, as wide as possible” (see Natural History 16.68–89). These strips of pith were cut to the desired length and stacked into two layers, with one layer laid perpendicular to the other. The layers were then pressed together, dried, and rubbed smooth.
Can you see the two layers of papyrus pith—each one perpendicular to the other—in the photograph below, where I’ve held the fragment up to the light?
All in all, this fragment doesn’t look that different from many biblical manuscripts. In fact, a copy of the Song of Solomon appeared in the same codex as this fragment from the apologist Aristides. Since this is the only page that survives from the codex, portions of Song of Solomon are directly across the page from the words of Aristides, though of course there were other pages in between these two texts in the original manuscript.