When a Syllabus is not a Syllabus— Ancient Literacies Part One

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 11:08 pm by Ben Witherington

When a Syllabus is not a Syllabus— Ancient Literacies Part One 2015-03-13T23:08:41-04:00 Ben Witherington

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Latin word syllabus derives from the Greek word sillybos/ sillyboi. What it refers to in the first instance is the tag attached to a papyrus roll by which its contents is identified. One example of an actual tag from antiquity reads ‘Hermarchus, ‘Against Empedocles’ Book 9′. There was no
Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress system of labeling and cataloging rolls and codexes in antiquity, and so instead what was done was two fold: 1) a book list of rolls and codexes owned would be drawn up, often by topic and usually in (Greek) alphabetical order, and 2) a ‘sillybos’ would be attached to the roll so it could be distinguished from other ones, and readily found.

I am currently reading an excellent collection of essays entitled Ancient Literacies edited by William Johnson of Duke and Holt Parker of Cincinnati and it has many insights of direct relevance to NT studies. In this particular post I want to focus on the tags themselves. Libraries whether public or private could range from small to enormous collections of rolls. Obviously if one had only a few, tags might not be necessary. But this would rarely be the case when we are talking about a private library, and never when we are talking about great public libraries like the ones at Ephesos or Alexandria.

It was the theory of Martin Hengel, followed by Graham Stanton, that the tags applied to the Gospels ‘kata matthaion’ etc. were used once it became necessary to distinguish one Gospel from another. ‘According to Matthew’ of course implies there are others ‘according to someone else’. In fact it was Hengel’s argument that this sort of header would first be used when all four Gospels were put together in a single codex, probably sometime in the early second century A.D. The problem with this theory is that if they were in a codex, one would expect only an omnibus header like ‘euangellion’ since the codex would contains multiple Gospels. This in turn suggests that the header ‘kata matthaion’ was first applied to these Gospels in the first century when they still circulated as individual papyri rolls but at a time when there were various Gospels in play. Luke 1.1-4 suggests this was already the case when he wrote that Preface. Now we may debate when that was of course (in my view it has to have been sometime in the 70s or 80s if Luke used Mark and Q, which seems reasonably certain), but we need to not neglect the implications of these ‘titles’ created not in the second century, but rather in the first, before the first four Gospel codexes were produced.

The first point from a close study of the nature and function of ancient sillyboi is that the names applied to the documents were not random later guesses. They were names associated with the document as either author or compiler or editor of long standing. What is never the case is that the name appended to the document was that of a mere copier of the document, a scribe’s work. When one looks at the ancient books lists, there can be little doubt that authorship claims are being made— Plato wrote the Republic, and so on, and the syllaboi were produced by just copying what was on the book list onto the tag or vice versa.

The second point is that ancient collectors of rolls and scrolls tended to collect those that belonged in a certain group– for example a collection of medical treatises, or a collection of philosophical works, and so on. There is no reason to think early Christians would not have grouped things topically like this as well. When we look at the NT canon, this is pretty much exactly what we find— Gospels followed by Acts followed by letters, discourses, sermons, followed by an apocalypse. In other words genre or theme and topic were ordering principles. George W. Houston in his helpful article “Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and Libraries” remarks “ancient booklists were very probably organized first by literary genre (epic, say, or lyric) or, where literary genres did not apply, by subject (medicine, astronomy) and then alphabetically by author.” (p. 243).

The third point of interest is that the sillybos tended to be added to the end of a papyrus roll, because in antiquity as in modernity with VHS tapes, people were often lazy and did not rewind documents on rolls. When rolls were turned into codexes, then the identifier was more likely to be on the first page of a codex. It needs to be stress as well that the beginning and end of documents were most likely to deteriorate, and this is exactly what we find in the ancient book lists. Especially the exposed end to a document was likely to lose something over time (see probably Mark 16.8ff).

In our next post we will need to say some things about literacy, first of all, in the cultural context of Jesus. As a preview, I am going to question at some length two assumptions you often find in works by some NT scholars: 1) that Jesus and his immediate followers were illiterate peasants. In general we may be suspicious of such a claim since the Gospel evidence suggests otherwise, and indeed there was a good reason why observant Jewish males ought not to be illiterate— they had a sacred text by which they were supposed to live, which while they could hear it read by others, the text exhorted them to read it for themselves!; 2) that the only thing that counts towards estimating literacy levels is ‘literary texts’ or the lack there of. To the contrary, ostracons, graffiti, business documents, marriage contracts, census records and any and all sorts of literacy needs to be taken into account

Uncategorized

Previous Post

May 26, 2012

Men in Black with Aliens on their Backs

Next Post

May 28, 2012 Quintilian on Writing, Reading, Studying, Editing

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz