Look these guys up in your Funk & Wagnalls!

I can't stop grabbing books that others bypass. Like this :

The New Archeological Discoveries : and Their Bearing upon the New Testament and upon the Life and Times of the Primitive Church. By Camden M. Cobern, D.D., Litt.D. Third edition: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918.



The used bookstore valued it at $12.50. They know their business and I usually find their prices distressingly fair and realistic. From what I see of used copies on amazon, the price is about right. Mass-printed undergraduate or popular level archeology books this old don't seem to sell for much, I guess because more recent discoveries have made many old finds obsolete. But while original copies of its several editions are dirt cheap, an academic reprint company made it available last year. For big bucks.

The photos alone (all pix in this post come from it) were worth 12.50 to me!


Cobern covers a lot of other finds, but Oxyrhynchus is one of his book's major focuses. I'd never heard of it, nor of Grenfell and Hunt, who thought the place might be a worthwhile dig, while other archeologists passed it by. I decided Nag Hammadi, Qumran and the like must have eclipsed Grenfell-Hunt's then-revolutionary finds, and that Cobern's enthusiasm was kind of an endearing display of Academic Nerd joy from a more innocent era.

In that I did the find, and the author of this book, a great injustice.


This fragment of Matthew from the third century is now only one, and no longer the oldest, of several gospel fragments from the early centuries when Christianity was an outlaw religion. But in 1897 it was the first one, the only one, and to scholars of the topic it was a real "Where were you when __?" event. Cobern was one of many who were blown away by the find:

The writer was working in London University when the first sensational discovery was made of a leaf from a pocket Bible which had been carried by an Egyptian Christian of the third century. [...]

Only those who have come personally into close touch with supremely important discoveries can understand with what eagerness this discolored leaf was examined by every one interested in the authenticity of the New Testament writings. It had been written generations before the great council of Constantine.

Another Very Big Deal at the time was the finding of fragments of previously unknown "sayings of Jesus" gospels. Grenfell and Hunt found an 8-verse fragment in 1897, another in 1903, and other small non-canonical gospel fragments over the years. Here's one verse, from the 1897 find :

Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye make the sabbath a real sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.

Dr. Cobern loves the whole 8-verse passage, and explains what this verse meant theologically, which was to keep pure in heart and act, not to merely observe the seventh day. And he says:

When properly understood, this new "saying" seems an eternal word, a word for all time, and is in beautiful harmony with the teachings of Jesus recorded in the gospels.

They didn't know it for sure until years later, but this passage turned out to be -- uh-oh! -- the Gospel of Thomas! Banned and (a different, complete, copy) buried at Nag Hammadi, along with many Gnostic texts, where they were found in 1945.

Cobern likes it so much. The 1903 fragment was clearly from the Gospel of Thomas, and even then, some experts thought that the 1897 bit might be the same document. Cobern dutifully reports this, but you catch his tone. He's moved by the 1897 passage and really wants it to not be associated with that known-to-be-heretical Thomas thingy. However, he's a true scholar and doesn't close his eyes to the fact that it could be from Thomas.

At this point I still thought this delightful book about artifacts was pretty much an artifact itself. It was fun to visit a time when these discoveries were a glimpse of first light, when no Christian testaments earlier than Constantine's era had been seen, and when so little was previously known about life in those days, presented by a writer who manages to be both scholarly and emotionally engaged with it.

In search of more, the Wiki articles on Grenfell and Hunt are mere stubs, but an article on the site is pretty informative. Over on amazon, I used "search inside this book" and was kind of surprised to find only brief mentions, or none at all, of Grenfell, Hunt or Oxyrhynchus in Werner Keller's The Bible as History, Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities, or Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church. It's a spot-check only, but, still...

More scholarly books cover Oxyrhychus more often. I didn't expect to be familiar with them, especially at scholarly book prices. Others more affordable still were specialist publications and flew below my radar.

But the short shrift given to Oxyrhynchus and to Grenfell and Hunt by the popular literature seems odd. The academic books make it sound important. OK, OK, discoveries that are "revolutionary at the time" do get superseded, but Edison and the Wright Brothers are still famous.

Oxyrhynchus is actually very important. Even now. More googling turned up a great website, Oxyrhynchus Online.

The director of the publication project at Oxford clearly has access to some great personal materials on Grenfell and Hunt. I liked Grenfell's not-so-adventurous brother who wrote to him that he must be off to that "beastly" Egypt again.

It looks like the attention Oxyrhynchus got at first was for its Biblical texts. When later finds pushed them to the back burner, the site's fame died off, when, in fact, it yielded unique material about non-Biblical matters. They're still publishing Oxyrhynchus texts. According to wiki, the project is up to 71 volumes. They're still deciphering things they couldn't read before, thanks to new imaging technology. Some of its classical lit is still the one-and-only source: part of an unknown play by Euripides, and a biography of him; a play by Menander; unknown poems by Pindar and Sappho - one was published for the first time in 2005.

And the everyday life documents (wills, deeds, lawsuits, wedding invitations, horoscopes, and lots of personal letters) which make up the bulk of the papyrus, are loaded with light on real people and how they lived, loved, complained, prayed, begged, and sued.

A little boy named Theon writes to his father, who did not take him along on a trip :

It was a fine thing of you not to take me to the city! If you won't take me to Alexandria [next time] I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you.

But his father had better bring him back a lyre, or else!

If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now!

Another scholar of typical Victorian sensibilities finds Theon to be a rather impudent child, but Cobern delights in this letter too, and thinks the boy and his father had a wonderful relationship.

And I delight in Cobern. Maybe I've just caught his infectious enthusiasm for Grenfell and Hunt's finds, but it sure looks to me like a lot of it still stands. I think Grenfell and Hunt deserve a holiday. Or at least a postage stamp.