God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts

In this bold and groundbreaking book, Brent Nongbri provides an up-to-date introduction to the major collections of early Christian manuscripts and demonstrates that much of what we thought we knew about these books and fragments is mistaken. While biblical scholars have expended much effort in their study of the texts contained within the earliest Christian manuscripts, there has been a surprising lack of interest in thinking about these books as material objects with individual, unique histories. We have too often ignored the ways that the antiquities market obscures our knowledge of the origins of these manuscripts.
 
Through painstaking archival research and detailed studies of the most important collections of early Christian manuscripts, Nongbri vividly shows that the earliest Christian books are more than just carriers of texts or samples of handwriting. They are three-dimensional archaeological artifacts with fascinating stories to tell, if we’re willing to listen.

• Gospels before the Book
• When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation
• To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story
• The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity
• The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis
• The Art of Bible Translation
• How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?: A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library)
• A Student's Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its History, Methods and Results
• Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept
• The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers